Watch Crytek demo its next-gen CryEngine

Crytek has announced the next version of its powerful CryEngine. It's simply named CryEngine.

The new version will replace CryEngine 3 and be scalable for PlayStation 3 and 4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One, Wii U and PC.

Advanced lighting, physics, time of day and weather effects are among the latest tweaks and upgrades shown off in the footage below. One impressive detail is the fact that puddles left by rain are now slowly dried up in sunshine.

Crytek has decided to stop referring to CryEngine by version number as its new iteration now bears little resemblance to its predecessor.

"Since CryEngine 3 was launched in 2009, we've dramatically changed the engine so many times, with so many major new features, it's not the same engine anymore," Crytek exec Carl Jones said.

"We have revolutionised many parts of the engine: we have overhauled our entire lighting system, built movie quality character rendering and animation solutions, vastly improved the speed and effectiveness of our Sandbox editor, and even our rendering has changed with tessellation, pixel accurate displacement mapping and now physical based rendering; all of this while maintaining our first principal: that making games should be real-time, all the time."

Watch the engine in action below demoing Ryse and Crysis 3, amongst other things.