NGPentlemen, Start Your Engines

A rash of announcements from third-party types has seen most of the tools used to develop the best games unveiled as working tools for NGP developers to use.

The latest announcement is CryENGINE from Crytek, that powered the gorgeous Crysis games. What its not saying is which version of the engine, apart from the fact that it will be a custom edition. Here's hoping its CryENGINE 3 which is powering the awesome Crysis 2 and Warface games.

Late last week, Morpheme 3 from NaturalMotion, an animation engine used to produce more realistic character movement and other effects. Add that into the previously announced monster Unreal Engine, the Havok physics engine plus a host of audio and interface solutions and it is clear that any developer can just get on with the job of producing a fun game without having to worry about building a host of tools to get the job done.

You can find a complete list of middleware tools, here.