Opening a level in the CryENGINE 3 Sandbox

As most people involved in the game's development process should be familiar with opening levels, this section will take you through the relatively straightforward task of opening a level within the CryENGINE 3 Sandbox editing tool.

Getting ready

Having already located the Editor.exe in either your bin32 or bin64 folders, it will now be started in this section.

Note

If a level is not already loaded, the editor's subsystems can still access assets and resources from your game. Keep this in mind as some tasks don't require the loading of a level.

How to do it...

Let's get to opening a level:

1. Launch the Editor.exe located in either the Bin32 or Bin64 folder. You will be presented with an interface, as shown in the following screenshot:

   

2. As there are already example levels installed with the SDK, we can open them.

3. To open an existing level, we need to access the File menu.

   

4. The File menu includes commands related to the handling of level files such as opening, saving, showing log files, and a list of recently-loaded levels.

5. As we want to open a pre-existing level, choose the Open option.

6. You will then be presented with a browser window defaulting to the CryENGINE3/game/levels folder.

7. Browse to Forest and open the folder.

8. Within the folder there is a Forest.cry file that contains raw level data for editing.

9. Open the Forest.cry file.

The editor will now start to load this level for you to start exploring!

How it works...

The editor reads the .cry files and can also access the subfolder layers within the level folder.

As the level loads, it reads the information present in the .cry file.

There's more...

You may want to know what the .cry file is composed of or even how to apply console command changes to individual levels.

What is a .cry file?

A .cry file is the principle level editing format for all levels built in the CryENGINE. It is actually an archive comprised of binary and XML data that is used only by the editor. You can open .cry files in the editor, or you can open them with an appropriate archiving program such as WinRAR.

Using a level.cfg

Similar to the system.cfg, the level.cfg is a file that is executed upon the loading of a level. The level.cfg can simply be stored in the level's directory. You may add console variables or level-specific configurations to this file.

See also

• Having launched the Sandbox, you can continue to the Navigating a level with the Sandbox Camera recipe in this chapter

• To get right to modifying a level, go to the Selecting and Browsing level objects recipe later in this chapter