With the overall complexity involved in creating games becoming exceedingly difficult and expensive with every successive console generation, many game developers have turned to middleware engines, such as the CryENGINE, that offer a complete pipeline for the game development process. CryENGINE is a perfect fit for most developers as it allows users to create their content quickly and easily and thus, allow games to meet and exceed current generation quality standards and still be created by fewer and fewer people.
As CryENGINE 3 is globally recognized as one of the world's most powerful real-time middleware development platforms, with this book we will deliver the best of what the engine has to offer. Through the use of CryENGINE's intuitive and powerful toolset, named Sandbox, designers, artists, animators, and even programmers will be treated to real-time creation and iteration tools for bringing their visions to life.
Chapter 1, Getting Started, helps you set up the entire CryENGINE 3 Software Development Kit, which can be a difficult task. This chapter will guide you through the stages in setting up the required folder structure and how to set up your layout for the Sandbox Editor.
Chapter 2, Sandbox Basics, helps you to learn the basic and most commonly used features provided by Sandbox.
Chapter 3, Basic Level Layout, helps you create your first Level Layout within the Sandbox Editor and learn some of the more advanced techniques used by designers for object placement and manipulation.
Chapter 4, Environment Creation, utilizes the CryENGINE 3 rendering tools to create photorealistic environments.
Chapter 5, Basic Artificial Intelligence, helps you learn the basics of how to the use AI to navigate in your levels.
Chapter 6, Asset Creation, helps you learn the pipeline of asset creation and export your 3D models to the CryENGINE format.
Chapter 7, Characters and Animation, describes how to create new characters to be used in the engine along with your own custom animations.
Chapter 8, Creating Vehicles, describes how to create a new vehicle from scratch and set up the entity code required so your players can drive.
Chapter 9, Game Logic, helps you to get started with the highly versatile Flow Graph Editor and create many useful scripts used in the level.
Chapter 10, Track View and Cut-Scenes, helps you to learn how to create your own cinematic cut-scenes within CryENGINE.
Chapter 11, Fun Physics, describes how to set up some enjoyable physics contraptions using CryENGINE 3's physics system.
Chapter 12, Profiling and Improving Performance, helps you to learn the tools behind profiling your levels and discover the best methods for improving performance.
The Software Development Kit version of the CryENGINE is used for all examples in this book, thus, the reader should have a version of the development kit to be able to follow the recipes contained in this book.
This book is written with the casual and professional developer in mind. With that said, it is important that the readers have some fundamental knowledge of some Digital Content Creation Tools, such as Photoshop and 3d Studio Max. Though not a fundamental requirement, having some basic knowledge of real-time graphics software and, consequently, the terminology used will make the goal of these recipes more clear.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "The level must also be inside of your Build folder."
A block of code is set as follows:
<DamageMultipliers> <DamageMultiplier damageType="bullet" multiplier="0.125"/> <DamageMultiplier damageType="collision" multiplier="1"/> </DamageMultipliers>
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
<DamageMultipliers>
<DamageMultiplier damageType="bullet" multiplier="0.125"/>
<DamageMultiplier damageType="collision" multiplier="1"/>
</DamageMultipliers>New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "To open an existing level, we need to access the File menu."
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