In an open letter titled "Be Free... Be Creative... Be the Developer," Crytek CEO and President Cevat Yerli gave an update on plans to let the modding community get its hands on the engine behind Crysis 2. Early this summer, the developer will release a full-featured editor for Crysis 2. With it, modders will be able to build maps, items and custom content for the game.

After playing around with that over the summer, for those looking to do more, Crytek will release the complete version of CryENGINE 3 in August completely for free. The CryENGINE SDK will include everything needed to create a complete game from the ground up. To support those efforts, Crytek also plans to share all its documentation for the engine written by the developers and launch an improved crymod.com site for the community.

Like what Epic has done with its Unreal engine, Crytek also intends to extend its support to helping teams take their projects commercial. Though not giving any specifics, Yerli said that Crytek will offer a low cost licensing model for digital distribution of games created with the SDK. And, if you just want to make games for fun, that will remain completely free.

That's an awful lot of toys to play with. It should be interesting to see what creative ideas they can help bring to life.