In today’s Marketplace Spotlight we speak to Christian Söllner from WastedStudios about their Simple Boid System Plugin which is available to download for free from the CRYENGINE Marketplace, right now.

Hi Christian! Thanks for joining us. This is a great plugin, can you describe it for users who might not be aware of what it can do?

Our plugin simulates the flocking behavior of birds to achieve realistic looking movement during their flight. Thanks to the plugin system CRYENGINE provides, it’s possible to simply drag and drop the binaries in any project running the latest supported version of CRYENGINE (currently 5.4) to use the features for your own project. The video below shows you how to get it up and running in your own project and how the boid system looks when it is implemented.

Why did you decide to make this plugin?

We had to implement a boid system for a project we were working on and we believe in the concept of a marketplace for plugins, so we had the perfect opportunity. The plugin system enables developers to provide a binary file which can enhance any project where it is implemented, right out of the box. Additionally, the plugin can be maintained as a standalone project. Therefore the work which has to be done to update the plugin in several projects takes a lot less effort. This is a huge advantage when you have to work on several projects and don’t want to port the code from one project to another.

Plugins in general benefit from their ease of use. CRYENGINE’s GameSDK offers the possibility of a built-in boid system which is very powerful and has a lot of features. However, we wanted to give the community an alternative with a more lightweight solution, which is simple to implement.

How long have you guys been working with CRYENGINE?

We started working with CRYENGINE back in 2014. We undertook a lot of research and feasibility studies from then until CRYENGINE 5.0 was released. With the release of 5.0 we started committing our projects to CRYENGINE and began porting the prototype of our current main game project to CRYENGINE. We also started to work on two virtual reality applications alongside our prototype. From 5.0 on we started porting all projects to the latest version on release and intensively made use of each engine version.

Will we see more plugins from you?

We definitely want to continue developing plugins with a focus on enhancing the user experience while using CRYENGINE’s sandbox. We are aiming for several plugin releases. This includes, for example, enhancements for already existing engine features. For instance, a plugin which handles the AI’s behavior tree in a dedicated window inside the CRYENGINE’s sandbox, instead of hardcoding the content of the behavior trees in an .xml file using an external file editor. But we are also trying to implement some of our own stuff which we hope just makes your life easier as a developer.

Thanks Christian!

You can find out more about WastedStudios by visiting their website and check out the free plugin download here. Check out the plugin, and if you decide to implement it in your project, we’d love to see your work. Get in touch on the forums, Facebook, and Twitter.

- Your CRYENGINE Team