CRYENGINE 3.8.4 is here and we’re bringing all the updates we teased last week (Visual Studio 2013 and 2015, Height Map AO, Rendering Performance Profiler), improvements to Designer Tool, UV Mapping Editor and Character Tool and many more tweaks.

Character Tool

It’s now easier to specify and create animation events when setting up characters. We also added and improved a lot of tooltips and warnings, mostly related to the properties within chrparams. Users previously had to create text files by hand, but we added the ability to create new animation events files from within the properties panel of chrparams files, when no animation events file is specified.

Height Map based Ambient Occlusion

CRYENGINE 3.8.4 will provide an extremely efficient yet approximate large scale ambient occlusion solution for outdoor environments. In combination with Screen Space Directional Occlusion (SSDO), Height Map Ambient Occlusion (or short Height Map AO) provides additional shading cues to the eye, yielding enhanced scene depth perception.

Volumetric Fog: Sun Radial Scattering

Voxel-based Volumetric Fog has only one fog color and anisotropic factor, so it's difficult to control the balance of halos around the sun and overall scattering. This new feature enables artists to produce halos around the sun by using Voxel-based Volumetric Fog. As of 3.8.4, the Fog has Radial color, Radial lobe and Radial size parameters.

Rendering Performance Profiler

The new unified rendering pipeline profiler gives an overview of where the main performance bottlenecks are and shows the GPU times of the most important rendering passes. It combines the information from several of our previous profilers and presents it in a clearer interface.

Visual Studio 2013 and 2015

We now partially support VS2013 and VS2015, but for this release some plugins or features may not be available because third party dependencies may not have made libraries available that are compatible with these Visual studio versions. Anybody who wants to test this experimental feature in the upcoming update will need to actively enable it by following these instructions.

Designer Tool and UV Mapping Editor

Extrude is one of the most frequently used features in Designer Tool, but it only allows one polygon to be extruded in a direction normal to itself. To overcome this limitation, Extrude Multiple has been added to support extruding multiple polygons in individual normal directions, an average direction or an x/y/z direction.

The UV Mapping Editor also has two new features that significantly simplify edge sewing (SmartSew) and border selection (Loop Selection).

Last but not least, here is a short sample of the new things we’ve implemented for 3.8.4.

• New: Dynamic distance shadows.
• New: Supersampling support in game launcher.
• New: Temporal AA is working with dual stereo rendering and VR now.
• New: Improved vegetation shading, addressing issues with shading discontinuities and overly strong specular on foliage planes.
• New: Added Flow Node inputs to FogVolume for easily setting values of the entity.
• New: Updated WAF support for VS2013 and VS2015.
• New: Exposed CVar for game to specify cursor (r_MouseCursorTexture).
• New: Added technical documentation on Time in CryAnimation.
• New: Reload Actionmaps during editor runtime.
• New: Added release configuration support.

Thanks for reading!