As part of my return to regular work life I've been digging around to see what has been going on in the industry and I see the official release of the Crysis engine sdk was released. So I thought I'd check out what came with it and what was in the works by the community.

After waiting what seemed years, I immediately ran out and picked up Crysis when it released. The engine for this game is amazing. Unfortunately, as many of you can probably attest, it takes quite the god box to see everything the engine can do. According to their development team this is a bit of future proofing on their part. Of course theres "future proofing" and theres running it today. Crysis ran fine on an older machine that was cutting edge 3 years ago but I had to settle with all medium settings and that just wouldn't do. It took putting two Geforce 8800's in my machine to be able to turn everything to very high settings in the game.

Unfortunately it looks like the fear of its hardware requirements have hurt the sales of Crysis. As of mid December only 86,633 units were sold. That probably won't cut it when it comes to paying the bills.

Happily they have released the SDK to the mod community.(as an extra bonus the tools are designed to interface with 3ds Max) I think, in the long run, the sdk and mod community could turn things around. With an engine with this much headroom and the speed that hardware is improving there could very well be a good market by the time the killer mods come along.

So just whats in the works from the mod community?
You can check for yourself at www.crymod.com but here is a couple of my favorites

Mechwarrior Living Legends - For all you closet mechwarrior fans you have to check this out. The included video doesn't show but the good part is at the end. The idea of running a mech around through the forest smashing through trees and stomping jeeps appeals to me and I'm pretty sure this engine could make the whole thing sing.

Jurassic Park - Imagine Crysis with dinosaurs. Yep, got my attention too. I look forward to trying this one out. In the online multiplayer I want to be the t-rex.

In a addition to doing the standard mods a number of people are doing some great machinima with the engine and some architectural firms are starting to play around with doing real time visualization in engine. You can see an example of the architectural use here http://digitalurban.blogspot.com/2008/01/crysis-importing-architectural-models.html

Its a shame the game hasn't done better considering the investment in technology. I can only hope that improving hardware and a great mod community can keep this game alive.

Anyone out there working on a mod for Crysis with 3ds max or maya? If so let us know what you think of the mod tools and engine.