CryEngine 5.5 became one step closer with the preview 3 release. The release contains over 400+ improvements, fixes and tweaks. The following are the new features of this release:
Animation General
- Fixed: Attachments (e.g. pistol, shotgun) wrongly attached if compute skinning is used.
- Fixed: Animation update not reusing its memory pools when no level is loaded (resulting in perpetual growth of memory usage when working with external tools such as Character Tool, Mannequin etc).
AI System
- New: Islands connectivity is taking navigation annotations into account.
- New: Debug draw functions are getting navmesh query filter from NavigationComponent with name “MNMDebugQueryFilter”.
Middleware Updates
- Updated to Wwise SDK v2017.2.4
- Updated to Fmod Studio 1.10.05
- Updated Oculus spatializer for Wwise from 1.17.0 to 1.20.0
Audio General
- New: (SDL Mixer) File import for external audio files into ACE.
- New: (SDL MIxer) Audio parameter and switch implementation for SDL Mixer.
- Optimized: Smoother scrolling and faster expanding of treeview items in ACE.
Engine General
- Refactored: Removed small primitive shapes.
- Refactored: Remove now unsupported GameZero cryproject.
- Optimized: Added early out for IEntitySystem::InitEntity should init fail and you want to delete the entity (avoids going through all deleted entities).
Common
- New: Introduce new CryAPIExamples module to compile Doxygen snippets.
- New: Introduce action map listener example.
- New: Add examples for common physics functions.
- New: Introduce networked client listener example.
- New: Introduce minimal plug-in example.
- New: Add simple IEntityAudioComponent examples.
- New: Add XML & Json examples.
- New: Add asynchronous camera injection (VR) example.
- New: Add Trigger and Rope Component examples.
- New: Add ISkeletonPose::GetAbsJointByID example.
- New: Introduce CVar and CCommand examples.
- New: Add ENTITY_EVENT_COLLISION example.
CMake
- New: Support building API examples without the Engine for auto compilation.
Default Entities
- New: Add preview drawing to the Physic Constraint Components.
- New: Geometry and Physics Components with Mass and Density now have an interactive dropdown to select either Mass, Density or Immovable.
- Fixed: Networked property of the Rigidbody Component not having any effect.
Vulkan
- New: Annotating HLSL shader to include resource layout descriptors.
- New: Local shader compilation in Windows platform.
- New: HLSLcc local shader compilation.
- New: Support for DXC and GLSLANG HLSL to SPIR-V compilers and compiler switching feature.
Particles
- New: Enhanced grouping capabilities in new ActivateRandom feature; now supports all possibilities of old SecondGen features.
- New: Replaced SecondGen features (on parents) with child features (on children, who decide when they activate). Replaced SecondGen “Random” parameters with new ComponentActivateRandom feature. Added AddSubInstances and CullSubInstances features, removed KillParticles feature. Parent relationship is now explicitly serialized. Added Component-to-Component node linking in Particle Editor.
- New: Pre-compute effect timings for stability, equilibrium and death.
- New: Added screen-fill stats.
- New: SpawnCount now has option for Max or Total particles emitted.
CryVersionSelector
- New: A backup of a project can now be created in the CryVersionSelector.
- New: When switching Engine version – the user now has the option to automatically create a backup of the project before switching Engine version.
- New: Update package build options with export path selection, configuration selection and the option to include debug symbols.
Editor General
- New: GeometryCache importer.
- New: Added a user confirmation dialog to control the process of updating levels to the new level format.
- New: (Asset Browser) Allow deletion of assets via Delete key.
Additional Fixes
- New: Added CVar to draw full extent of last cached shadow cascade.
- New: Expose CVar to control number of octree nodes visited during incremental shadow cache update.
There are also several known issues with this release:
Known Issues
- UI: Dependency Graph window is not responsive when opening from a selection window. WORKAROUND: It can be closed from the Windows tray bar, however if you don’t have separate icons enabled for the different editor windows on the tray, then this can be an issue. NOTE: Opening the Dependency Graph say for example from the Asset Browser or from the global menu Tools -> Dependency Graph works fine.
- RENDER: (PARTICLE) Particle ‘new_year’ is not being rendered correctly.
- RENDER: (EDITOR ONLY) Shadow square following camera.
- RENDER: Some brushes could flicker directly after level load.
- RENDER: SkyBox could be broken after several level loads.
- CRASH: (VS2017) After compiling and running the Engine with VS version 15.7 the Engine will crash (exception thrown), the problem originates from the last command in ( EditorPythonpluginscrytoolsstartup.py ). For more information about this topic click here.
- C#: Using the CRYENGINE C# extension for Visual Studio 2017 to start the GameLauncher, Sandbox Editor or Server can cause an error when used in the latest version of Visual Studio 2017.
You can read more about this release including how to install this version in the complete release notes available here. For more details on the earlier CE 5.5 release check out our hands on video: