Inside Crysis

Embracing DirectX 10
Crysis is probably the first game we’ve heard of that’s being developed for both DirectX 9 and its Vista replacement, DirectX 10. The new API has been a hot topic of late (although we covered all the important stuff way back in issue 59) we couldn’t help but ask Crytek what the deal was with Crysis.

'The game is being developed with both DX9 and D10 as our target platforms. While we will push the state of the art with DX9 as far as we can, for the best and richest game experience, a DX10 system will be beneficial.’

With all that deformable flora, we’re pretty sure DX10’s Geometry Shader, which can work on entire primitives (lines and shapes instead of single vertices), will get a good workout in Crysis.

Soft versus hard
To add even more realism to Crysis, Crytek has replaced the hard shadows found in CryEngine with soft shadows for CryEngine 2. The difference between these is that hard shadows are treated as just ‘on’ or ‘off’ – basically something has a shadow or it doesn’t.

Hard shadows are generated via the stencil buffer, which simply occludes an area leaving a hard-edged black shape. A soft shadow on the other hand requires the engine to calculate the area completely blocked, and partially blocked, by the light source. With these values, it can ‘soften’ the area between them and create a more realistic shadow.

As you might have guessed, this technique is computational expensive and hence most games that support soft shadows, like FEAR, only recommend it for high-end PCs.