Not every new computer game needs to start from scratch. A technique that's becoming increasingly common for most developers is to reuse existing game engines. This is where the CryENGINE 3 SDK comes in. The CryENGINE 3 SDK is a game engine which drives the visual actions taking place on the screen. Within this engine are the rules that dictate the way the game world works, and how objects and characters should behave within it. Due to the fact that creating the underlying code for the variety of systems within a game engine is usually very expensive and time consuming, the starting point of working with a game engine thus makes excellent financial sense for most developers. Throughout this book, and for all intents and purposes, we will be referring to the CryENGINE 3 SDK as the engine.

The CryENGINE has been developed over the past 10 years by the award winning independent developer, Crytek. Crytek has made major iterations to the original CryENGINE over a number of years and is currently on the third iteration, which is why we refer to this version of CryENGINE as the CryENGINE 3.

Arguably, the most prominent tool provided by a game engine is the level, or World Editor. The editor used with CryENGINE is known as the CryENGINE Sandbox, and it contains a whole suite of tools and sub-editors for developing games.

You can think of the CryENGINE Sandbox as a game compositing tool that acts similarly to any digital video compositing software such as Sony Vegas, Adobe Premiere, and even Windows Movie Maker. However, as opposed to inserting video and audio clips, the developer inserts art, design, and code that will all eventually come together to create a game.