Epic Games made huge news recently with their release of the Unreal Development Kit, which gave anyone free access to most of Epic' Unreal Engine 3 tools to make their own stand alone games. Now Crytek is doing something similar with its new CryEngine 3 game development tech but on a smaller scale.

Today Crytek announced that it will allow its CryEngine 3 tools to be made available for free to schools for use in their courses and for research projects. While not as broad as Epic's offer with their UDK release, having a powerful tool like CryEngine 3 in game development classes and other educational projects is certainly going to be a big help for budding game creators and others wanting to learn more about 3D graphics development. The first actual game that is scheduled to use CryEngine 3 is Crytek's own FPS Crysis 2 which is due out in 2010.