Crytek to demo CryEngine Linux support at GDC

March 12, 2014 | 09:14

Tags: #cryengine #directx #opengl #pc-gaming #steam-os

Companies: #crytek #valve

Crytek has been quietly working on porting its CryEngine game engine to Linux, and has announced plans to unveil the results at the Game Developers Conference on the 17th of March.

Featured in the company's popular Crysis series, as well as the Xbox One exclusive Ryse: Son of Rome from which new features are to be pulled into the licensable engine, the CryEngine is known for its stunning visuals - if you've got a powerful enough system, of course. Although the engine has been ported to consoles, its PC support has been limited to Windows - until now.

During the event, Crytek has pledged to offer hands-on sessions of native Linux support in the latest CryEngine builds. While this doesn't necessarily equate to plans for the company and its licensees to port existing CryEngine games across to the open-source operating system, it holds promise that games released from here on out using the engine will be playable on the OS - including Valve's Steam OS variant, optimised for gaming.

Other demonstrations at the event include the latest build of free-to-play first-person shooter Warface, a military strategy game for iOS and Android devices dubbed The Collectables, and promises of a showy demo of the Physically Based Shading (PBS) rendering pipeline previous exclusive to Ryse and now a feature of CryEngine itself.

The news of native Linux support in CryEngine - which joins big-name engines like Source, Unity, Unreal Engine and Unigine in supporting the OS - comes as Valve releases its own DirectX-to-OpenGL abstraction layer package, ToGL, under an open source licence. While written with the company's own Source engine in mind and supporting only the most commonly used features of the outdated Direct3D 9C API, the code is expected to make it easier for developers to bring their Windows exclusives to OpenGL-based platforms like Linux.
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