Details On Crytek's CRYENGINE Linux Engine Port

One of the big announcements this week at GDC was Crytek finally announcing CRYENGINE on Linux. The visually impressive CRYENGINE that powers many popular titles will be natively available on Linux. I spoke with a lead Crytek Linux developer at the Game Developer's Conference about their great engine on Linux.

Some of the key notes from my brief discussion in San Francisco with this Crytek developer and Phoronix reader included:

- They are not ready yet to publicly say when the first CRYENGINE Linux title will appear.

- Crytek's Linux work has really ramped up over the past year.

- Not many at GDC were excited about Linux support particularly. On the first day of the expo, only about six people had commented/recognized it was CRYENGINE on Linux.

- The current CRYENGINE code-base is still catered around a Direct3D renderer. In a similar move to Valve and others, internally the engine is translating their Direct3D commands to OpenGL as opposed to writing a pure OpenGL renderer at this time.

- In translating the Direct3D calls to OpenGL, OpenGL 4.3 is their Linux GL support requirement as it was the most easy target in translating from Direct3D 11.

- Right now all of their Linux development work is happening with the binary NVIDIA Linux graphics driver. AMD Catalyst testing will come later. Obviously until the open-source drivers support OpenGL 4.3, that's rather off limits for this beast of a game engine.

- Ubuntu Linux is the distribution they're targeting right now. Other Linux distributions may be officially supported based upon licensee requirements, etc.

- CRYENGINE is using SDL 2.0 and the SDL library was praised by the developer.

- They didn't encounter much middle-ware Linux issues in porting; one small item was encountered and hacked around.

- Crytek seems to see potential for Linux gaming but from my impression they don't seem to be crazy/committed about Linux (in comparison to Valve) quite yet.