Crytek's CryEngine 3 technology, which we've seen most recently in the company's own Crysis 2, is the driving force behind a $57 million project from the US Army aimed at teaching its soldiers how to fight.

While virtual battlefields have long been a staple of military training, the new Dismounted Soldier Training System (DSTS) looks to blow previous efforts out of the water, using the latest in gaming tech to give soldiers one hell of a realistic video game experience training ground run.

The DSTS isn't a simple game played on a PC or console. It's a full virtual experience, with soldiers donning a vest and helmet (both lined with cameras, vibrators and sensors) and then standing on a 10x10 foot pad, which is also full of sensors.

This means the experience is almost fully motion-controlled, and instead of being projected on a screen, the program's visuals are displayed on a pair of virtual reality goggles attached to the soldier's helmet.

CryEngine 3 comes into it with its ability to model not just infantry combat but vehicle and aircraft controls as well, and also display wildly different terrain and weather conditions.

The DSTS is expected to go into service next year, with around 100 units available for training.

[via GamePro]

For about a year, Crytek has offered universities a free license to its CryEngine 3, the guts of this month's big release, Crysis 2. Since it made the offer more than 250 universities have asked for the code, the studio reports.

That's a pretty significant indicator of the mainstream utility of gaming code in a college classroom, if not of the mainstream presence of games design in their curricula.

"From its very first days, Crytek aimed to strongly support students and educators by sharing the CryEngine tools with universities," Avni Yerli, managing director at Crytek, said in a statement. "Thousands of students now have access to the same cutting-edge technology that the world's best developers are using for their ongoing projects. With our CryEngine 3 educational SDK we want to enable them to achieve their vision and create their very own innovation to become the next generation of developers."

You don't have to be a university department head or a bigtime developer to get your hands on Crysis' development tools. A modkit will release to all users sometime in early summer, Crytek has said.

Over 250 Universities Worldwide Signed Up For CryEngine 3 Educational License [Gamasutra]

This is Crash Bandicoot Return, the closest we'll get to the classic PlayStation platformer looking as good as a Crysis game. This Crash Bandicoot game is actually running on the Crysis engine, because it's a fan-made mod that pays homage to Naughty Dog's 15-year-old series.

Crash Bandicoot Return is a Crysis mod from Anonym-Art Productions, which only recently announced the game's existence. In the above video, featuring very early gameplay, we see the oldest of Crash levels, N. Sanity Beach from the original PlayStation game. It may not have the polish of a complete Crash game at this stage, but it's already one of the prettiest games to star a bandicoot that we've seen.

Read more about the mod at ModDB, but hope that the people who hold onto those Crash Bandicoot rights—you know who—let this PC mod enjoy its fan-made, fan-loved existence.

Crash Bandicoot Return [ModDB]

Crytek took it in the shorts from PC loyalists who felt Crysis 2 was handled in a way that catered more to console users than to PC gamers. In an interview, the studio's graphics engineer said Microsoft and Sony have way underweight RAM configurations, and whatever they build next needs 8 GB of RAM, minimum.

"My finger-pointing at Microsoft/Sony would really be on the memory side," Tiago Sousa told Eurogamer. "It's way too low, and the biggest crippling factor from a visual perspective.

Naturally, the outfit that gave us Crysis, a profoundly demanding game for PC architecture when it was released in 2007, wants 16 times the current generation's memory. That's right, remember, the PS3 and the 360 both have just 512 MB of RAM. While that is aptly described as "nowhere near enough," the things were built going on five years ago now. Still, I don't see Sony or Microsoft packing their next consoles with 8 GB of RAM unless we truly are talking about 10 year plans for the current hardware.

Tiago Sousa, Crytek's top man in graphics, did praise Sony and Microsoft for their developer support, saying Crysis 2 was only possible on those consoles thanks to toolkits that allowed Crytek to wring "as much performance as possible from the fixed architecture."

The Making of Crysis 2 [Eurogamer]

Details are basically non-existent, but Crytek has officially announced that there will be a DirectX 11 patch for Crysis 2 to take full advantage of modern PC gaming hardware. [MyCrysis.com] (Thanks, Kyle!)