Inside Crysis

Freeze frames
Crysis will be powered by Crytek’s latest revision of Far Cry’s CryEngine. The developer has done some serious work to the technology to push it above and beyond anything we’ve seen previously. Destructible forests, deformable flora, dynamic lighting, day and night cycles, motion blur… CryEngine 2 packs plenty of graphics power.

‘We heavily changed the engine – we removed some legacy support for older graphic cards, made the whole lighting dynamic (no lightmaps, moving sun) and support soft shadows everywhere (removed stencil shadows). Extensive HDR [High Dynamic Range] support is now integral part of the production. Our animation system features more realistic animation and as it is now GPU based it allows much more detailed high poly characters,’ explains Crytek programmer Martin Mittring.



Although legacy cards won’t be supported, Crytek has been smart and is using Shader Model 2.0 as the baseline. ‘This is more a production decision as Shader Model 2.0 defines a good feature set. Almost all effects can be done with this feature set but newer cards allow special optimisations,’ says Mittring.

Perhaps the game looks so great because Crytek decided to aim high – photorealistically-high in fact. So, along with skin and cloth support (yes, they’ll be there), expect Crysis to be a dynamic and consistent world complete with ‘sky, stars, shadows, clouds, ground fog and volumetric fog all with a moving sun’.

With realism such a priority, physics has obviously been an important consideration. Crysis will make use of multiple CPU cores to handle this load. It wasn’t made clear if AGEIA’s PhysX would be supported, however Diemer and Mittring did say it was a ‘very interesting topic’ and welcomed the hardware support for physics.



Of course, Crysis’ deformable flora and destructible environments have garnered the game a lot of attention. While we’ve seen the latter before (albeit poorly implemented) the former will be a first for an FPS.

‘The deformable and destroyable vegetation is a key gameplay feature in Crysis. The movement of the foliage is detected by the AI, so hiding in bushes just became harder,’ says Diemer.

According to Crytek, entire tree lines can be mowed down with the right amount of lead and smaller pieces of vegetation can be knocked clean over. With the jungle falling down around you in heavy engagements, it’s just another danger – or tactical opportunity – you’ll have to consider. It’s not too bad for the immersion factor either.



‘This makes the concept of cover in the jungle very dynamic and the combat experience is incredibly intense. I think we managed to set a new standard with our E3 demo: From now on, every jungle in a game has to be destroyable,’ says Diemer.

Beyond the ice dome
Far Cry was famous for its modding abilities and Crysis will be no different. Incorporated into the game is a new version of Crytek’s level editor, Sandbox 2. It’s the same tool the team is using to make the game, and allows modders to change just about anything.

‘We have already selected two [community] teams that are working on mods with us, giving us feedback on how to improve the editor,’ says Diemer. ‘New features include a graphic scripting tool, a character editor and a tool to make in-game sequences.’ That last addition should make in-game cinematics much easier for modders, and of course, machinima fans will welcome the news.



Even with the progress that’s been made in this area, and the game in general, Crysis is still set for a release in January next year. Getting everything just right, including the AI, will be an important task for the team.

‘One of the greatest challenges was making the AI understand the dynamic environment, for example falling trees. Before we taught the AI that this can be a danger, they would just stand there and ignore a big palm tree falling over right next to them. So you could mow down a forest around a guy and he would just stand there right in the open,’ explains Diemer.

It’s the little details like this that will secure Crysis its place as the best FPS of 2007. And the awesome features like customisable weapons, a suit with super abilities, oodles of freedom and graphics you’d sell your hands and feet for should help to put this at top of everyone’s watchlist.