CRYENGINE has finally released CRYENGINE 3.8.4 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Click here for more in-depth specifics.
Source: CRYENGINE.com