CryEngine 2 Hands-On Demo At GDC 2007

Right after posting the previous story about Epic's plans to show (off) their Unreal Engine 3 technology at GDC 2007, I noticed that Gamasutra also has a report about another major graphics engine that will be demonstrated at next month's Games Developer Conference. And if it's not one of id Software's doings, it must be Crytek's. The German developers that brought us the exotic shooter Far Cry, and are currently working on Crysis for the PC, announced that their latest engine iteration - CryEngine 2 - will be presented to the public for the first time ever at GDC.

Gamasutra writes that the presentation will actually be a hands-on demonstration of the features and capabilities of CryEngine 2, which means that not only interested developers, but also the general public will be able to toy around with some of Crytek's tools and editors, as detailed below:

"Crytek has announced that the features shown for the first time will include an interactive "what you see is what you play" Sandbox2 Terrain and Visual Mission editor, including adjustable time of day settings, an integrated character animation editor, and a new motion captured / phoneme driven facial animation editor."

Other features, such as the middleware's new asset creation pipeline (used for creating realistic, interactive and breakable objects and vegetation) will only be demoed to developers interested in licensing the technology and tools for their own use. So if you happen to be in San Francisco between March 5-9, you might want to visit Booth 848 at the 2007 Game Developers Conference for a demonstration.

Last we heard, Crytek was in the planning stages for a future Crysis beta testing phase, which they recently began talking about (as in, talking about the plans, not the actual beta). We'll see how things develop, after, of course, we get some new jaw-dropping tech-trailers from GDC.

(N.B. Archive text, links removed)