CRYENGINE 3.8.4 Released

CRYENGINE 3.8.4 has released and updates include: Visual Studio 2013 and 2015, Height Map AO, and Rendering Performance Profiler. There are also improvements to Designer Tool, UV Mapping Editor and Character Tool, and many others.

Character Tool

Creating and specifying animation events when setting up characters is now much easier. Improvements and additions have been made to tooltips and warnings, majority of which has to do with the properties within chrparams. Before users had to create the text files manually, however, now users can create new animation events files from within the properties panel of chrparams files, when there is no animation events file specified.

Height Map Based Ambient Occlusion

For outdoor environments a very efficient and approximate large scale ambient occlusion solution will be provided. Together with Screen Space Directional Occlusion (SSDO), Height Map Ambient Occlusion (short Height Map AO) provides extra shading cues to the eye, resulting in enhanced scene depth perception.

Volumetric Fog: Sun Radial Scattering

Normally, voxel-based Volumetric Fog only has one fog color and anisotropic factor, making it difficult to control the balance of halos that surround the sun and the overall scattering. Artists can now make halos around the sun using Voxel-based Volumetric Fog. With this update, the Fog has Radial color, Radial lobe, and Radial size parameters.

Rendering Performance Profiler

Updates provide an overview of the location of the main performance bottlenecks and GPU times prioritized by importance rendering passes. It’s a combination of information from various profilers of the past and it is also shown in a interface that is much clearer.

Visual Studio 2013 and 2015

VS2013 and VS2015 is now partially supported, but some plugins and features may not be available because third party dependencies may not have libraries that would be compatible with these versions of Visual Studio.

Designer Tool and UV Mapping Editor

Although Extrude is used frequently in Designer Tool, the issue is that only one polygon can be extruded in a direction normal to itself. To solve this, Extrude Multiple has been added as a support for extruding multiple polygons in individual normal directions, an average direction, or an x/y/z direction.

Two extra features to the UV Mapping Editor has been added as well that simplify edge sewing (SmartSew) and border selection (Loop Selection).

Some Other New Additions

• New: Dynamic distance shadows.
• New: Supersampling support in game launcher.
• New: Temporal AA is working with dual stereo rendering and VR now.
• New: Improved vegetation shading, addressing issues with shading discontinuities and overly strong specular on foliage planes.
• New: Added Flow Node inputs to FogVolume for easily setting values of the entity.
• New: Updated WAF support for VS2013 and VS2015.
• New: Exposed CVar for game to specify cursor (r_MouseCursorTexture).
• New: Added technical documentation on Time in CryAnimation.
• New: Reload Actionmaps during editor runtime.
• New: Added release configuration support.

Click here for more in-depth specifics.

Source: CRYENGINE.com