Review of Cryengine 3 Cookbook

I picked up this book because I wanted to get some hands on experience using the CryEngine with a reference book, but had not used the CryEngine before.

I feel this book is more aimed towards beginners, and allows someone new to the CryEngine to be able to easily jump in, and have a reference for doing a ton of stuff that might not be very straight forward, as well as a lot of detail on using the interface.

Overall, just reading through the first chapters, I was able to get comfortable with the interface, and able to create and setup my own basic level. Further on, the book goes into a more general “cookbook” style, with recipes for doing a variety of different things you might need in your level.

The book is well written, easy to read and a beginner can pick it up without a problem. There are lots of recipes for most things you would want to do, such as: creating terrain, changing level layout, placing items, changing lighting, putting down enemies, creating assets to import into the CryEngine, creating vehicles, some game logic, creating cut scenes, and much more.

The one problem I did have with using the book with the CryEngine are that the assets have changed since the book was published, so some of the items, or textures it tells you to look for at the beginning aren’t there. You can use alternatives instead, but it would be nice if the downloadable files included them, or you could know which version of the CryEngine Sandbox was used in the book.

Overall a great book for learning how to use the CryEngine Sandbox, with lots of helpful recipes that will have you creating cool levels.

It was also very interesting frm a game developers standpoint to see the CryEngine Sandbox tool, how it was made, and what kind of things were taken into account for creating levels. It gives me better insight into how I should layout my own tools, for simpler game development projects

You can see the book here:
http://www.packtpub.com/cryengine-3-cookbook/book