Crysis 2 Editor ( CryEngine 3 Sandbox ) Available for Download

Another good news for people interested in game development and modding came from Crysis 2 developers — just recently became known that Valve's Source Engine SDK will be available for free, and now Crytek makes own move and releases Crysis 2 ModSDK — a free set of modification tools for Crysis 2, which uses newest CryEngine 3 game engine.

CryENGINE 3 Sandbox Editor allows to create mods, new maps and other content for Crysis 2. Toolset includes additional helpful utilities, such as FMOD Designer, Poly Bump, plugins for 3ds Max and Maya, etc. Also users will be supplied with example content bundled with Sandbox 3 Editor to test all of possibilities provided by CryEngine 3.

In addition to ModSDK release CryMod.com website was re-launched and updated — it's an official community for modders who uses CryEngine-based editors and SDK's ( primarily Sandbox 2 & 3 ). Website have Forum, Wiki, documentation for Editor and other goodies — if you have plans to become a part of Sandbox 3 users community, definitely consider make a bookmark for it.

Unfortunately not all as good as it supposed to be — ModSDK for now was released only in 64-bit edition. Accordingly to this, owners of 32-bit systems will be unable to use Sandbox 3 Editor, what is already caused a lot of angry and unsatisfied messages from modders on developer websites.

It's hard to tell if CryTek will make compromise with part of modding community and release 32-bit version of Sandbox 3 Editor, but we can assume that such step wasn't occasional and developers have some reasons not to release 32-bit version of editor. For example, one of the commentators on CryMod website wrote that loaded scene in editor can "eat" more than 3 Gb of RAM, what is almost maximum that available to 32-bit OS. Thus complex scenes can require a lot more of RAM, what can be a cause for unstable editor behavior and random crashes due to lack of memory. This can be the reason why CryTek decided to release only 64-bit version of editor that can access much larger amount of RAM.

In any case, 64-bit environment for a long time didn't have any problems of compatibility for 99% of users, while belief in that 64 bit is worse than 32 bit and have many problems is a myth. Actually 64 bit is better in many aspects — so most sensible way is just to move on 64 bit OS and happily use Sandbox SDK with no limits in accessible amount of memory. If you're already owner of 64 bit OS — you can go straight and download Crysis 2 ModSDK ( Sandbox 3 Editor ) immediately and try to make something great in it *.

*Note: The Crysis 2 Mod SDK requires a full installation of the game Crysis 2, updated to Patch 1.9 — otherwise it can't be installed.