CRYENGINE 5.6 is available now from the official website and the CRYENGINE Launcher. This major new release includes over 1,000 changes to the engine, and its development has been shaped by the invaluable feedback from the CRYENGINE community.
CRYENGINE 5.6 includes new features, enhancements, and improvements across the engine, giving developers more power and making game creation quicker and easier.
Crytek has released a CRYENGINE 5.6 technology video to mark the launch, showcasing just some of the new features in the engine.
Highlights in CRYENGINE 5.6 include:
- In-Editor Project Management: The Sandbox Editor now controls project creation and management, making getting started with a new CRYENGINE project faster and giving developers more flexibility with this new streamlined and improved workflow.
- Micro-facet Multi-Layer Materials: This new feature advances the visual reproduction of metals and gives more artistic control over the creation of a range of materials. By describing materials as a stack of layers of varying thickness, each with different optical properties, users can, for instance, model a wet surface by defining a slightly absorptive layer on top, and spatially or temporally varying the thickness of that layer.
- Area Lights: Area lights deliver a better representation of how light behaves than traditional punctual light sources. CRYENGINE’s new implementation makes use of pre-computed textures, which will calculate and model area lights far more accurately. It also allows for more flexibility when defining different kinds of light shapes.
- Tessellated Particle Ribbons: The Render Ribbons feature has a new option called Tessellated. This enables the graphics card’s tessellation stage to smooth the joints in ribbon particles by generating new polygons in a curved shape which is also adaptive to distance. This feature benefits ribbon effects, including trails from flying objects and organic objects like worms or vines.
- Inter-Entity Constraint Points Storage: This feature is designed to create gears but also has other functions. It allows users to manually specify which entity will ‘own’ the constraint point, and since each constrained entity can have its own constraint point in place, it’s possible to create objects like belts with this feature.
- Pressurized Closed Buoyant Cloth: Closed cloth shapes can now have internal pressure based on the current shape volume in this extension to the existing cloth entity.
- Skinned Ropes and Ropes Built from CGF Meshes: Ropes can now use bones and skinning and can be built from custom .cgf meshes, repeated several times. This enables a chain ‘rope’ to be created from a single link and allows for the rapid creation of vines or complex cables that fit naturally in the environment.
- Full-Body Ragdoll IK: Ragdoll IK is a physics-aware, energy-based, full-body IK, which tries to satisfy constraints imposed on the physics skeleton with minimum effort energy-wise. The effect is similar to applying physics impulses to characters, except the results are computed instantly, without the physics thread running.
- CRIWARE ADX2 Implementation: CRYENGINE is audio middleware agnostic and now supports CRIWARE ADX2, a comprehensive and easy-to-use audio system. Discover more about CRIWARE ADX2 over here.
- Behavior Tree UI: The new Behavior Tree UI is a GUI interface which enables users to quickly create complex behavior trees for AI, bringing NPCs and enemies to life. This tool was developed by the Hunt: Showdown team, bringing yet more production-proven technology to the engine.
- Real-time ACE Editing Feedback: Users can now preview a middleware event in the right pane of the Audio Controls Editor without the need to connect it to a corresponding trigger first, improving CRYENGINE’s audio pipeline with instant feedback.