CryENGINE 3 Cookbook [ペーパーバック]

As a veteran game developer, I've had the chance to work with a number of game engines, with varying qualities and quantities of tools, but few have impressed me as much as Crytek's CryEngine 3. Speaking as a developer, as far as I'm concerned, an engine is only as good as its development tools and workflow.

While development timelines haven't changed much, the complexity of game art and gameplay mechanics have made enormous leaps. We're expected to create larger and more beautiful worlds with more interaction than ever before, and given no extra time to do so. In this scenario, a game engine with lackluster tools has the potential to create all sorts of development headaches. At a minimum, spending excessive time fighting with or learning development tools can have a negative impact on meeting milestones.

CryEngine 3 has a respectable tool suite and editor (called Sandbox) which are easily comparable to the other AAA engines on the market. Of course, without a good introduction to those tools, you might find yourself with a giant question mark over your head as you stare at the editor, especially if you've never worked with 3D game development tools before. This is where PACKT Publishing's new CryEngine 3 Cookbook comes in. Written by Dan and Sean Tracy, both developers from Crytek, the CryEngine 3 Cookbook is a well-structured, step-by-step guide to the basics of using the CryEngine 3 tool set, broken up into twelve easy to follow chapters.

Dan and Sean take you by the hand, covering everything from how to launch, modify, and use the editor to creating levels, terrain, characters, and even vehicles. The book is 313 pages in length, but is a surprisingly quick read, with few pages presenting walls of text. Most pages provide bullet points and illustrations, and the book contains very little fluff, as I'd call it. Getting straight into the "how tos", CryEngine 3 Cookbook is written as a collection of hands-on tutorials. Its content is geared toward teaching newcomers to both CryEngine's editor and 3D game development in general, and, for the most part, it does an effective job remembering who its audience is.

If CryEngine 3 is known for anything, it's the incredible real-time lighting simulation its renderer can do. Great care and detail are given on how to create terrain and enhance your levels with real time lighting conditions and weather effects, including dynamic time of day lighting simulation, HDR (High Dynamic Range) lighting and global illumination (which simulates bounced light).

The Asset Creation chapter explains how to setup the 3D Studio Max environment to work with CryEngine, as well as how to setup CryEngine plug-ins for Photoshop and Max. Chapter 9 is devoted to explaining how to create some basic gameplay logic using the Flow Graph. The basics are covered, but there's a lot more to be learned here. The chapter on AI doesn't really cover details on how to build AI, but instead focuses primarily on how to add AI control objects, such as nav meshes, to the level.

If I had any complaints about the book, the first would be that it lacks any coverage of CryEngine scripting, which uses Lua. I don't consider this that serious of a fault however, as truthfully this topic could easily fill an entire book of its own, and this book was written primarily to teach the content creation pipeline, as opposed to the programming side of things. Some basics would have been nice though. And second, the book sometimes contains very brief explanations for things I'd like to know more about, or forgets to explain where a particular interface element is located in the editor. For a seasoned game developer, these types of omissions are very minor, but for someone just learning how to use these tools, it could cause some confusion. Finally, if I could add a section to this book, I'd add one covering the basics of user interface creation. But that would just be icing on an otherwise well-made cake.

Despite these few issues however, I think the CryEngine 3 Cookbook is well worth the cost and contains a thorough "getting to know you" experience for Sandbox and the CryEngine 3 content creation pipeline. As a former level editor and 3D artist, familiar with 3D content creation tools already, but a complete newbie to Crytek's Sandbox editor, I found the book a perfectly great and relatively painless way to get started using the tech.

I picked up this book because I wanted to get some hands on experience using the CryEngine with a reference book, but had not used the CryEngine before.

I feel this book is more aimed towards beginners, and allows someone new to the CryEngine to be able to easily jump in, and have a reference for doing a ton of stuff that might not be very straight forward, as well as a lot of detail on using the interface.

Overall, just reading through the first chapters, I was able to get comfortable with the interface, and able to create and setup my own basic level. Further on, the book goes into a more general "cookbook" style, with recipes for doing a variety of different things you might need in your level.

The book is well written, easy to read and a beginner can pick it up without a problem. There are lots of recipes for most things you would want to do, such as: creating terrain, changing level layout, placing items, changing lighting, putting down enemies, creating assets to import into the CryEngine, creating vehicles, some game logic, creating cut scenes, and much more.

The one problem I did have with using the book with the CryEngine are that the assets have changed since the book was published, so some of the items, or textures it tells you to look for at the beginning aren't there. You can use alternatives instead, but it would be nice if the downloadable files included them, or you could know which version of the CryEngine Sandbox was used in the book.

Overall a great book for learning how to use the CryEngine Sandbox, with lots of helpful recipes that will have you creating cool levels.

The disadvantage about the book is that the only colour illustration is on the cover. The figures inside are all in black and white, and do not convey the efficacy and realism of the shadings possible under CryEngine.

Having said this, the authors do provide a lengthy explanation of the many features of the Sandbox, an IDE specialised to CryEngine.

Attention is paid to how to create and import graphical assets. Photoshop is used for the former. The CryEngine developers have wisely stayed away from the low level operations of drawing graphics; for this Photoshop is the de facto standard for many coders. Instead, we can see how the importing into CryEngine is straightforward, along with the subsequent integration of these graphics into to overall context of your game.

There is underlying the interactions within a game a physics engine. This deals with issues like the realistic behaviour of moving objects under a gravitational field, and how to model collisions. Along with this are occlusion issues. Purely graphical issues where one object partially or entirely blocks another. The reader is warned that collision calculations need to be kept as simple as possible, since they are computationally expensive and can crucially slow down the real time nature of a game.

At a low level, the physics engine comes with many adjustable parameters that you can easily set at values to uniquely characterise the game. While the graphics are obviously what the player immediately sees, the physics engine is where you can subtlely distinguish your game from others at a subliminal level.