So these may sound harsh but don't get me wrong. I'll probably keep CryEngine as a hobby engine for some more time. Actually I have been keeping it like that for 11 years now I just wanted to give up a "heads up/wake up" call in a simple form.
So my "No Offense" warning heard loud and clear ? Good

https://www.cryengine.com/roadmap

- I don't know the manpower capacity of, or what is going in Crytek but judging from Roadmap it is completely off the target.
- What is considered as a standard future for other engines today such as Visual Graph Editors for Animation, AI and UI, Animation Retargeting and Mirroring, Multiplatform and Multi-OS support are only depicted under R&D, meaning they are nowhere in sight. Even Lumberyard, which was just an old CryEngine version has these futures today.
Now why is this ? I would say problem is twofold. One is that instead of "directly" starting to build new systems for the above-mentioned topics, Crytek is trying to revamp/clear/refactor old ones and then will try to build a graph editor (possibly Schemtyc integration) on it later. This choice is obviously wrong, it should be done in reverse order. The systems should have a visual, intuitive graph based editor, and then later as time goes on the underlying system should be wholely revamped, without the users noticing it.
The other one is confusion in the upper decision making levels possibly. CryEngine is "still" almost presenting itself as "that other free choice" and versions reflect this approach, such as I mentioned above, trying to refactor old systems with bad UI's and usage, dependency to outside DCC to still some degree etc. This would be acceptable if engine was free. However the business model is based on percentage income sharing, meaning I am actually "paying you" to use this software. Any decent, straightforward logic dictates that everyday game developer must be considered first for new versions and the "reverse order" I mentioned up must be followed.

Part 2
- Many followers of CryEngine are actually here because they like the graphics and fast render times. Fast compile times are also a factor. But there is a fundamental misunderstanding here. Advancement in graphic by no means imply the neglect of other systems. Heck, the people who are working on graphics and subsystems are different people and they are working on simultaneously on the engine independent of each other anyway. It is not "every engine has strong and weak points", it is simply "you are doing this wrong". Good graphics and easy to use systems are not fundamentally non-inclusive. They are independent.
This is understood wrong and taken as "haters gonna hate". Nope. Common logic of the great percentage of the game developers simply asking the obvious: "There is no reason for this engine to be like that. So why ? "
Remember, Lumberyard was under development for 2 years and it has all these futures. They actually didn't touch the graphics and related systems because they were quite good to begin with. Why invest resources there ?


Part 3
- The community "support" . There is no such thing as "taking a ticket" and wait for 4 days to get an answer for a forum or discord community. It is only acceptable if I am a working memeber of a big company which is a paying licensee of Crytek and that waiting time is under 2 hours.
This is another part of "Corporate Identity" approach "of upper decision making levels".
Example. I wanted to make an MOD SDK for my future project and wondered if I was allowed to do it for each engine. UE4 was already supporting this by default and people answered what I can include or not with links in a day. With Lumberyard forum, community manager just said give me a second. Replied to topic with a "Big good OK" and said if there is anything else I wonder I can write there and he will ask the team and answer.
CryEngine: Asked on forums (found several other threads with same question with no answer) Insisted. Directed to mail address. Sent a mail, got a ticket, explained the situation in detail. Days passed (I don't even remember how many). A mail pops up . 3-4 short lines: "No you can not make a MOD SDK. For further information please....."
This is 1999s era system. Not even gonna explain further.

So I wanted to leave this here as a note. Neither CryEngine nor Crytek is not facing a good future if decisions are not changed. Because no company can survive without a decent regular income and licensing engine to other companies, selling of source code to other willing parties (like Amazon) and bank credits only lasts so long.

Thanks and best of Regards.

Thanks for your feedback, tan. It has been forwarded to the relevant parties.

Just to speak about limitations here for a second: We have exactly two dedicated community people and a couple more in support, but the bottom line is; most of our competitors have bigger teams. On the other hand everyone here at Crytek is very dedicated to our community and some of our developers are very active and approachable on our dedicated channels - but as they have other tasks that are a priority, their input is subject to availability and cannot be guaranteed.

While I perfectly understand that this isn't your problem as a user - and shouldn't be - dedicated support with turn-around-times you mentioned are available for enterprise licensees. And actually many of our competitors do pay-gate such support requests as well, so it isn't uncommon business practice.

I apologize if we didn't see your original request, but business development statements are usually negotiated between parties in private and not publicly. Our EULA, that we usually quote when answering such requests, has some info that might help with your questions and is available publicly for everyone: https://www.cryengine.com/ce-terms
General feedback about our terms has been forwarded to the business team.

You can check availability, conditions and suitability for your commercial project by requesting a quote, here: https://www.cryengine.com/enterprise

If you operate under old Pay-What-You-Want license or the general royalty statement, please make sure to register your game with Crytek here: https://www.cryengine.com/user/register-your-game so we can better support you and open a more direct channel to support.

One of the only reasons I picked up CryEngine was because it had a feature complete fps template that costs hundreds of dollars (over many packages from different authors) on other asset stores. Unfortunately, things are getting deprecated and future support or a replacement for the project is not confirmed.
I've thought about just starting from scratch in Unreal, since that already has everything - great blueprints system, behaviour tree and other node based visual editors. While Unity is catching up, I still feel unreal or cryengine is a better choice for an fps currently - cryengine due to its gamesdk examples, and unreal due to many modern systems that are in place.
I got excited when they teased schematyc 2.0, but that was a year ago, and we've heard nothing since then. On one hand, I can wait until they finally add some features, so I no longer have to use scaleform and so forth, but yeah, not sure how long that will be, and I'm feel like unreal seems like a good option at this point. GameSDK is such a good template, with so many parts, but it seems like everybody uses it and yet nobody updates the thing, and now its just being deprecated. This kind of stuff makes me kind of tired of building games. I could just figure out how to do things from scratch, but I feel like that would have taken longer - on the other hand, cryengine crashes constantly (could be my older hardware, but still), and the future is unsure. I've also posted questions and such in these dead forums in the past with no response. Man, I should have never gotten into this industry, everything is just messed up.

One of the only reasons I picked up CryEngine was because it had a feature complete fps template that costs hundreds of dollars (over many packages from different authors) on other asset stores. Unfortunately, things are getting deprecated and future support or a replacement for the project is not confirmed.
I've thought about just starting from scratch in Unreal, since that already has everything - great blueprints system, behaviour tree and other node based visual editors. While Unity is catching up, I still feel unreal or cryengine is a better choice for an fps currently - cryengine due to its gamesdk examples, and unreal due to many modern systems that are in place.
I got excited when they teased schematyc 2.0, but that was a year ago, and we've heard nothing since then. On one hand, I can wait until they finally add some features, so I no longer have to use scaleform and so forth, but yeah, not sure how long that will be, and I'm feel like unreal seems like a good option at this point. GameSDK is such a good template, with so many parts, but it seems like everybody uses it and yet nobody updates the thing, and now its just being deprecated. This kind of stuff makes me kind of tired of building games. I could just figure out how to do things from scratch, but I feel like that would have taken longer - on the other hand, cryengine crashes constantly (could be my older hardware, but still), and the future is unsure. I've also posted questions and such in these dead forums in the past with no response. Man, I should have never gotten into this industry, everything is just messed up.

Yes. You are absolutely right.
Most cryengine tools are outdated and are not as powerful as before. Project GameSDK has its place!
For example, the tool below is very weak compared to UE4(SplineDistributor tool)

viewtopic.php?f=9&t=11085

One of the only reasons I picked up CryEngine was because it had a feature complete fps template that costs hundreds of dollars (over many packages from different authors) on other asset stores. Unfortunately, things are getting deprecated and future support or a replacement for the project is not confirmed.
I've thought about just starting from scratch in Unreal, since that already has everything - great blueprints system, behaviour tree and other node based visual editors. While Unity is catching up, I still feel unreal or cryengine is a better choice for an fps currently - cryengine due to its gamesdk examples, and unreal due to many modern systems that are in place.
I got excited when they teased schematyc 2.0, but that was a year ago, and we've heard nothing since then. On one hand, I can wait until they finally add some features, so I no longer have to use scaleform and so forth, but yeah, not sure how long that will be, and I'm feel like unreal seems like a good option at this point. GameSDK is such a good template, with so many parts, but it seems like everybody uses it and yet nobody updates the thing, and now its just being deprecated. This kind of stuff makes me kind of tired of building games. I could just figure out how to do things from scratch, but I feel like that would have taken longer - on the other hand, cryengine crashes constantly (could be my older hardware, but still), and the future is unsure. I've also posted questions and such in these dead forums in the past with no response. Man, I should have never gotten into this industry, everything is just messed up.

Your words are my words... except for the game industry
The industry is amazing, but you need to choose your path and your tools very carefully. I have changed my choices several times, until i get confortable with.

Be careful with investments.

Invest on projects with potential and future

My partner Tymur Artemyev https://companycheck.co.uk/director/915 ... EV/summary and I have invested a lot of projects by using crytek. I know what I'm talking about.

I would just like to answer as it regards the "visual graph editor for animations" comment.

Two "visual graph" editors are not equivalent. We are developing a _new system_ that has two different graph editors, with some similarities with the UE4 one but also many differences which we hope will help differentiate it from theirs. It is also quite modern in how it's designed, and definitely beyond what's considered "industry standard". I hope we can show more in the near future.

We've also been offering for quite a while animation features in Mannequin (contextual variants, "fat" transitions with clips, abstract setups which can be remapped to use different assets) which are definitely beyond what's considered "industry standard" for a game engine to offer out of the box. Unfortunately some of these features are quite badly presented in terms of UX because the editors were initially developed for internal use. We hope to make these features, which mostly help large projects scale better and not develop into state machine spaghetti, more accessible to inexperienced users with our plans for 5.7.