The battle of the engines continues. Crytek has announced that the SDK for its CryEngine 3 will be free--not unlike the competing Unreal Engine 3 from Epic Games. The free toolset includes the CryEngine 3 Sandbox level editor, and promises to be updated regularly, "to make sure our community has access to all the advances we make to CryEngine 3."

Curiously, the press release says the free SDK will make "next generation games for PC," omitting the fact that the engine also works on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

“With the release of our SDK we encourage creators to try out CryEngine 3 and hope it will lead to new companies being formed and using our engine," Carl Jones, Director of Global Business Development said in a press release. "More importantly we expect to increase the talent pool for CryEngine developers, as well as boosting our online community of users."

"This SDK contains more toys than we’ve ever released before – it empowers people to create whole new games from scratch, not just mod Crytek’s own games, so we encourage all aspiring and indie developers to try it out."

Like Unreal Engine, the SDK is only free for non-commercial purposes. Should you want to make a game for commercial release, Crytek will take a 20% cut of revenues from the launch of the game. Epic has a slightly different policy. Unreal Engine is royalty-free for the first $50,000 in revenue, but demands a 25% cut after that threshold.

You can also download the SDK from Shacknews.