Hello,
My new client wants to use CryEngine 3 in a multi-viewport environment. However, I'm told that CryEngine 3 does not support multiple viewports. My first thought was to use Render To Texture, and to simply create virtual multiple viewports by texture mapping quads with the dynamic textures. This is sort of how a rear-view mirror would work. Only now I'm told that CryEngine 3 does not support rear view cameras either??
Your thoughts would be much appreciated!
Thanks.
I have not used cryengine 3 but I can't imagine that they don't support render to texture - if they don't that is a real shame, because it makes your task a great deal harder... can't even think how you would do it without it.
:(
Thanks bwhiting. Since it's based on DX11 I assume they can. I was doing Render to texture in 2004 in DX9, but using third party engines can be limiting compared to working from scratch.
They are considering using multiple instances of the whole application, which seems like a hack.
They already have the application running in CryEngine3. I'm reading that it's not very intuitive and they have been using a middleman of sorts to get inside info. What engines do you recommend these days? Unity 3D? Thanks.
Does your client have the source code to the Cry engine itself, or are they using version with a binary/pre-built engine and only game-level source code?
If you have the engine code, you can definitely add in support for an arbitrary number of views, assuming you're ok with D3D11 programming and navigating massive, over-complex code-bases.
If not... then hopefully there is some RTT hack you can use :/
If the client is a non-games business where buying loads of expensive hardware is an option, then running multiple networked versions of the engine may actually be the easiest option... We did this in the past for a military contract - we had to add some extra HUD features, and the easiest option was to add an extra PC which rendered those HUD elements and sent the images over the network to the main PC... 
cryengine supports VR rendering, that's multi viewport, thus it has multi viewport support.
The cynical interpretation of that is: it's definately supports one specific case of having two almost identical viewports 
On a side note; their preferred VR rendering mode is to use a single viewport, which is then post-processed with a parallax shader to emulate two similar viewports.
