As one of the first online publications to break the story back in back in April of this year and was featured and discussed in depth on Slashdot, we’re now pleased to announce another update on the free CryENGINE 3 SDK. This time the news is pretty straightforward: the SDK is now finally available for download (official link available below).

This means that everyone is now free to download and play around with the CryENGINE3 SDK. It is important to remember that the development engine is only free to use when creating non-commercial games (including for educational use). The full toolset and editor are effectively now available to developers and modders so they can start creating full blown game worlds utilizing one of the most powerful modern game engines currently available.

This will offer a great learning experience for new and experienced game developers a like, and of course if you create something amazing and later want to commercialize it there’s nothing stopping you from then purchasing a commercial license from CryTEK in order to be able to sell it. This will be a great opportunity to level the playing field in game development and allow people to get started without having to fork out tons of money up front. A truly inspired and great initiative from CryTEK.

Also if you really want to get into the intricate facets or be able to customize and modify the game engine directly, you can contact CryTEK and request access to the source code which naturally will have usage licenses attached to it.

While it may seem like a daunting and technically advanced set of tools to understand and learn, Operation Reality will in the near future be releasing some exclusive tutorials, reviews and guides on how to best utilize this amazing new free game development platform. There have also been some great books written on the subject leading up to the release of this SDK and we have been in contact with some of the key publishers and authors behind these CryENGINE 3 books.

Operation Reality will shortly be organizing a free to enter competition and giving away various prizes including several of these hot new CryENGINE 3 development books so stay tuned for that if you’re interested in winning some. In order to be eligible to participate and get the latest news on when the competition begins you should follow us on our Facebook, and Twitter pages in order to get the latest information on how to enter. Of course naturally we will also be posting updates on this give away on our sites also, including this one. So grab our RSS feed or bookmark the site and check back often if you don’t want to miss this exclusive giveaway.

In the meantime, for those who are interested in getting started right away and play around with the new SDK feel free to check the basic System Requirements for both developers and end users below and see if you’re good to go. Also here’s a link to the free SDK FAQ. Have fun and make sure to report back to us if you’ve created a great new game and want some publicity for it! We’d be honored to help new CryENGINE 3 developers out.

DOWNLOAD LINK

System Requirements [Developer]
• Supported operating Systems: XP, Vista, Windows 7 (with Windows 7 recommended)
• CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 2GHz, AMD Athlon 64 X2 2GHz or better
• Memory: 1 GB RAM (4 GB recommended)
• Video Card : nVidia 8800GT 512MB RAM, ATI 3850HD 512MB RAM or better

System Requirements [End User]
End Users who only use the game launcher without Sandbox have lower system requirements.
• Supported operating Systems: Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista SP1 or SP2, Windows 7
• CPU: 32-bit or 64-bit processor (a multi-core processor is strongly recommended)
• Memory: 1 GB RAM (2 GB recommended)
• Video Card: ShaderModel 3 capable graphics card (for example an NVidia 6 series card)