Today's release of CRYENGINE 5.1 comes with many improvements and fixes for a more efficient workflow. 

GitHub for CRYENGINE source code access

Git is a very widely used version control system that allows users to instantaneously access any revision of a file that has ever existed in their repository. This makes comparing revisions of a file and tracking changes over time very convenient, particularly as each time a set of changes is committed to the repository, a description of the change can be added. EDIT: We are finishing up the last details and users will get access to Git very soon.

Sandbox improvements

For the first iteration of the new Sandbox, we have been gathering feedback from our users to shape the editor and prioritize fixes. Here are some of the main improvements we’re working on for 5.1 and future releases:

Camera Speed Changes

The workflow for setting viewport camera speed has been improved in various small ways:

• The old buttons to quickly set the camera speed are back next to the camera menu - allows to set slow/medium/fast speed. They are the three S/M/F buttons near the camera menu. They stand for slow, medium and fast speed.
• Using the mouse wheel to change the speed of the camera while moving will spawn an interactive slider that displays the current camera speed. The slider will stay there for a few seconds, so users will be able to tweak it after using the mouse wheel.
• The speed range has been increased, allowing up to ten times greater speed.

Main Menu Search

We want to make navigation as easy as possible for new users. We’re enabling the user to filter all the items in the main menu down to a small amount of actions that he might be interested in executing. In the future we will be adding more functionality to access other systems and make this a “universal search bar”.

Designer Tool Workflow

Various changes and refactoring have been done to Designer’s code to ensure more stability and consistency. Shape creation for Designer objects has been changed to resemble the old workflow a bit more.

• There is a new "Shapes" panel in the Designer Tool that allows users to draw a shape always, even when no Designer Object is selected in the scene - the buttons will always be active so it's no longer necessary to create a Designer object before drawing a shape in the editor.
• Drawing a new shape will always add the shape geometry to the current object
• To draw a shape and separate its geometry into a new object, hold shift while drawing.

Migrating from CRYENGINE 5.0 to CRYENGINE 5.1

If you migrated your project to CRYENGINE 5.0 you will have noticed a lot of new features at your disposal such as DX12, C# and a brand new Sandbox UI. In this release we’ve finalized code formatting rules and categorized CryCommon files.

Re-structured CryCommons Headers

We’ve changed the physical file layout of all CryCommon files and regrouped them into more intuitive categories.

To help you convert your source files to match the new CryCommon file layout we’ve added a tool to the WAF GUI to ease the process; with just one click you can kick off the conversion on your game folder.

 Rather than hand editing every single file, WAF provides a quick solution to convert your project files to the new layout. We have a super handy guide here.

Visual Studio 2012/2013 Deprecated

With the next upcoming major release of CRYENGINE, we will deprecate support for Visual Studio 2012/2013 and their MSVC compiler toolchain.

Xbox One XDK update

We also upgraded to the March 2016 XDK, which will give users XDK updates provided by Microsoft such as DX12 functionality and Visual Studio 2015 compiler.

GPU Fluid Dynamics for Particles

The fluid dynamics feature is still an experimental feature in the general framework of our new particle system, which is incredibly flexible. The particle system supports modifiers for all properties that are available in the different particle component features. Fluid simulations for GPU particles create very aesthetically appealing interactive animations in real-time scenarios. Some use cases include smoke, explosions, magical effects, water, fog, blood and more.

Emissive Light for Voxel-based Volumetric Fog

This change adds the emissive light feature to voxel-based volumetric fog and corrects sunlight intensity. We discovered that sunlight intensity doesn't match the emissive light intensity when they have the same luminance unit. Brightness of fog volumes has to be specified on a per-entity-basis. For an additional effect HDRDynamic parameters can be adjusted however since those parameters are multiplied by the incoming light they require light sources to be present.

We added two parameters to the FogVolume entity, which enables fog to emit its own light:

• EmissionColor: Specifies the color to be multiplied by EmissionIntensity.
• EmissionIntensity: Specifies how much luminance (kcd/m2) the fog emits.

And the CVar ‘r_VolumetricFogSunLightCorrection’ to enable the correction of sunlight luminance; Volumetric fog gets brighter but remains consistent with other light sources.

Full release notes here.

Thanks for reading!

The CRYENGINE team.