CRYENGINE 3.8.1 took the spotlight as our big update of the year so far, but today we bring you a few fixes and improvements for a smoother development process, and even more eye candy.

New Depth-of-Field

We feature an all-new DOF solution that fixes many of the edge bleeding artifacts of the previous implementation, while being more bandwidth-friendly and thus efficient at the same time. Also, our motion blur implementation uses a more sophisticated sample weighting scheme now which improves the quality of silhouettes at better performance. The motion blur amount is controlled now using real-world shutter speed settings!

Old DOF implementation (note the ghosting/silhouette around the characters)

New DOF implementation

Volumetric Fog

We’re bringing more improvements to the voxel-based volumetric fog we introduced in 3.8.1. Voxel-based Volumetric Fog uses volume textures as a view-frustum-shaped voxel buffer to store the incoming light and properties of participating media. You will see a noticeable upgrade in the overall visual quality; particularly, flicker and ghosting artifacts were greatly reduced. Furthermore, optimizing and changing the process of the volumetric fog also contributed the improvements.

New feature: Octree

Octrees are a fairly well known search-optimized structure to store arbitrary data as long as it’s organized in a 3D space. These are used in a wide range of cases (most typically for rendering or physics simulation purposes) and we now provide you with a C++ template to implement your own octrees in a consistent and convenient way.

Procedural Vegetation Import Fix

The previous export/import of procedural vegetation was working properly in the Editor but didn’t apply the correct vegetation objects in the launcher. Now the correct vegetation objects are applied accurately on each layer when exporting to the game.

We also refactored the Visual Studio auto-detection in WAF, allowing solutions to be generated for Visual Studio 2013 and 2015. Thanks to our community member ‘sunnlok’ for his support with this in 3.8.1!

Last but not least, here’s a small sample of fixes we’ve implemented that are a direct response to your feedback on the forums, so thank you very much for that and keep them coming!

Fixed: Fixed non-HDR skyboxes when reverse depth is enabled.

Fixed: (Designer Tool) Not displaying cursor in "Done" status in Cylinder and Cone tools.

Fixed: (Designer Tool) Missing some polygons in a designer object from 3.5.8 when loading the designer object in 3.8.1.

Fixed: (Designer Tool) ResetXForm tool which didn't work on multiple selected objects.

Fixed: Procedural vegetation objects are no longer spawned on wrong layers.

Thanks for reading!

All the best,

The CRYENGINE team