Book Image

CryENGINE 3 Cookbook

By : Dan Tracy, Sean P Tracy (USD)
Book Image

CryENGINE 3 Cookbook

By: Dan Tracy, Sean P Tracy (USD)

Overview of this book

With every successive console generation, the cost, time, and complexity of developing games has grown. Meet CryENGINE3, a middleware engine that is the perfect fit for most developers allowing users to exceed current generation quality standards while using less people and time than ever thought possible.The CryENGINE3 CookBook is packed full of recipes for junior and senior developers alike. It covers everything from creating photo realistic architectural visualizations to implementing advanced physics such as ragdoll and tornado effects. Topics covered include the sandbox, level layout, environment creation, AI, character creation, creating vehicles, and game logic. Every recipe is designed to add AAA quality to your games. The CryENGINE3 SDK has many tools immediately available to developers of all disciplines. For designers the book has recipes for building up your own levels and populating your levels with intelligent AI and photo realistic assets. For artists we have recipes for practical workflow tools and techniques used when working with the advanced CryENGINE shaders and materials. For animators we have recipes that will bring your creations to life using skinned characters and advanced animation systems like locomotion groups. Finally for programmers we have recipes that show how to employ the core mechanics behind entities such as vehicles and weapons while also utilizing the strengths of the physics engine to create a unique and exciting game.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
CryENGINE 3 Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Opening a level in the CryENGINE 3 Sandbox


As most people involved in the game's development process should be familiar with opening levels, this section will take you through the relatively straightforward task of opening a level within the CryENGINE 3 Sandbox editing tool.

Getting ready

Having already located the Editor.exe in either your bin32 or bin64 folders, it will now be started in this section.

Note

If a level is not already loaded, the editor's subsystems can still access assets and resources from your game. Keep this in mind as some tasks don't require the loading of a level.

How to do it...

Let's get to opening a level:

  1. Launch the Editor.exe located in either the Bin32 or Bin64 folder. You will be presented with an interface, as shown in the following screenshot:

  2. As there are already example levels installed with the SDK, we can open them.

  3. To open an existing level, we need to access the File menu.

  4. The File menu includes commands related to the handling of level files such as opening, saving, showing log files, and a list of recently-loaded levels.

  5. As we want to open a pre-existing level, choose the Open option.

  6. You will then be presented with a browser window defaulting to the CryENGINE3/game/levels folder.

  7. Browse to Forest and open the folder.

  8. Within the folder there is a Forest.cry file that contains raw level data for editing.

  9. Open the Forest.cry file.

The editor will now start to load this level for you to start exploring!

How it works...

The editor reads the .cry files and can also access the subfolder layers within the level folder.

As the level loads, it reads the information present in the .cry file.

There's more...

You may want to know what the .cry file is composed of or even how to apply console command changes to individual levels.

What is a .cry file?

A .cry file is the principle level editing format for all levels built in the CryENGINE. It is actually an archive comprised of binary and XML data that is used only by the editor. You can open .cry files in the editor, or you can open them with an appropriate archiving program such as WinRAR.

Using a level.cfg

Similar to the system.cfg, the level.cfg is a file that is executed upon the loading of a level. The level.cfg can simply be stored in the level's directory. You may add console variables or level-specific configurations to this file.

See also

  • Having launched the Sandbox, you can continue to the Navigating a level with the Sandbox Camera recipe in this chapter

  • To get right to modifying a level, go to the Selecting and Browsing level objects recipe later in this chapter