CryEngine 3 tech demo / Crysis 2 stuff

[adam_grif]

Click here.

Looks damn fine for running on console. The PC-only parts look amazing, although I'd like to see it all with a better quality video (i.e. not filtered through somebody's camera). I figure this links in with the discussion about Source engine from the other day. I believe I was bitching that nobody had made any progress since CryEngine 2

[adam_grif]

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[Ford Prefect]

I'll be honest: I wasn't impressed by Crysis, graphically speaking. I've seen it fully maxed and running on DX10, and I thought that Metal Gear Solid 4 totally blew it away, despite the considerable hardware disparity. However, I think that Crysis 2 looks much better: and by 'better' I mean 'actually pretty goddamn amazing'. I don't really think the game will be all that amazing, but the engine behind it seems very impressive, so it'd be nice if people other than Crytek used it.

[Stark]

Yeah, Crysis actually had some really terrible texture work (ie, sub-Borderlands). It wasn't really that great, and it really isn't that great now (although Warhead was apparently much better).

And will CE3 be out before UE4 and will anyone give a shit? Answer is 'probably not'.

[Ford Prefect]

You mean the UE4 that they're targetting at consoles which haven't even been invented yet? Last I heard UE4 wasn't expected to be released until 2012.

[Stark]

I mean that UE4 aimed at next gen consoles (ie, not these ones) that should be 'ready' around 2012, yeah.

Okay let me rephrase it. How much money will Crytek make on licencing in the time before the release of UE4?

PS the answer is zero, nobody ever licences their stuff.

[Ford Prefect]

Well, no, that's certainly true. Which I think is a shame, because their technology is actually pretty decent in terms of what it puts out. I wonder why this is? Do developers not like it because it's difficult to use, poorly optimised in some way or so on? Every man and his dog had liscensed UE3, which I thought was kind of interesting.

[Stark]

Their engines are hard to work with, not very scalable, and I imagine they have a really shit business development team (ie they're spotty nerds who don't know how to run a business). Competing with Epic must really suck, since Epic are pretty much the kings of tailoring their product to the market.

Aside from specialist stuff (like really open areas, deformable maps, etc) the UE2/3 engines have been the way to go because it's so familiar, stable, easy, etc.

[adam_grif]

I thought that Metal Gear Solid 4 totally blew it away

Although I'm sure you can find some things that MGS4 does better than Crysis, MGS4 gives you about as much freedom to explore as a typical roller-coaster. The environments are tiny when compared to the vast expanses that you get in Crysis. I'm sure you could build something that blows either game away totally on a PS3 if you only had to render one tiny room and a pair of characters.

[Ford Prefect]

I'm talking purely about graphical presentation, you goose. Crysis had huge areas ... full of ugly textures. I don't really care about how 'vast', 'expansive' or 'free-roaming' something is if it I'm free-roaming around a vast expansive ass. Comparitively CryEngine3 will apparently offer big areas which look great and have interesting shit going on in, which means it actually lives up to the hype set for the original.

[adam_grif]

Ass? Come now. They just aren't as crisp as some of the ones in MGS4. If you think there weren't any ugly textures in MGS4, then you apparently never saw Octo-camo in a cutscene.

[Vendetta]

Aside from specialist stuff (like really open areas, deformable maps, etc) the UE2/3 engines have been the way to go because it's so familiar, stable, easy, etc.

Good documentation is another big reason that people go for Unreal. That's also one of the reasons that until this console generation hardly any Japanese developers licensed it. Shitty documentation in that language. Once they had that, licensing picked up in the region.

[salm]

The blend shading looks very interesting. Will help getting rid of obviously tiling textures in a very easy manner. With current tech it´s a pain in the ass.
Procedural destruction and deformation looks quite usefull which could actually not only be used for better looks but also for new gameplay aspects.

[Ryan Thunder]

I thought the big thing with the Crytek engine was rendering an entire forest of decent-looking trees at a reasonable speed. Have I remembered this wrong?

[salm]

I thought the big thing with the Crytek engine was rendering an entire forest of decent-looking trees at a reasonable speed. Have I remembered this wrong?

So they shouldn´t improve the engine that it can also render cities and other stuff? Or what are you trying to say?

[Commander 598]

The environments are tiny when compared to the vast expanses that you get in Crysis.

What vast expanses? Everything behind the invisible wall/impassable cliff doesn't count.

[Ryan Thunder]

So they shouldn´t improve the engine that it can also render cities and other stuff? Or what are you trying to say?

I just thought it was worth mentioning since people were complaining about texturing.

[salm]

I'm talking purely about graphical presentation, you goose. Crysis had huge areas ... full of ugly textures. I don't really care about how 'vast', 'expansive' or 'free-roaming' something is if it I'm free-roaming around a vast expansive ass. Comparitively CryEngine3 will apparently offer big areas which look great and have interesting shit going on in, which means it actually lives up to the hype set for the original.

What exactly is wrong with the Crysis textures?
They look fine to me.

[CaptHawkeye]

Crysis' expanse and levels are no bigger then fucking Quake's. Everytime someone talks about Crysis having big levels or expanse I almost piss myself laughing.

What exactly is wrong with the Crysis textures?
They look fine to me.

From a distance sure. If you look close at the textures in the game you'll see a lot them are actually pretty lazy texture maps copy/pasted from games as old as Far Cry.

[Tolya]

What exactly is wrong with the Crysis textures?
They look fine to me.

Look them up close. It feels like they were taken straight out of the old game called Vietcong - thats how bad they are. I always thought Crysis looked amazing but now, when I at last have a computer that can run it at high detail, Im not so impressed.

And Im not really impressed with Crysis 2. I feel like everyone is just trying to showcase their lightning engines and basically achieve the same and same results since Far Cry 2. Yes, it looks impressive, but rebuilding a Boeing 747 won't make it revolutionary.

Im more interested in the actual interactivity. If Crysis 2 would actually let you topple an entire building over then I would really be impressed.

Come on Crysis guys, you need to try harder.

[Stark]

By contrast, UE3 very aggressively and efficiently LODs textures; this is most visible in a split-screen co-op game on console (where the hardware limitations really start to show). Almost every step toward an object results in the texture improving, with the 'best' version almost never used beyond a meter or so.

By contrast Crysis' textures looked like dogshit at every distance beyond 'far away' and were just covered by effects.

[General Zod]

It could just be that I'm running it on a laptop, but when I played the Crysis demo a few months ago I just didn't see anything that was supposed to blow me away. There were some nice grass textures. . .and that's about it. (I had it at medium settings). I'm just not sure what it is about Crysis that's supposed to blow me away compared to games like Arkham Asylum or MGS4.

[Stark]

Crysis is neither as good looking as people drooled about nor as demanding on hardware as people complained about. I also felt it was pretty average in these respects.

[Commander 598]

When I initially played it, anything involving snow/ice chugged into unplayable for no apparent reason (Apparently fixed in patches). Everything else was fine, except the physics seemed to only work properly about 1/3 of the time which I found odd since when I initially ran the demo the physics worked fine.

[adam_grif]

Crysis' expanse and levels are no bigger then fucking Quake's. Everytime someone talks about Crysis having big levels or expanse I almost piss myself laughing.

Are you joking?

There are multiple instances of the game opening up with levels that are several square KM in size by my reckoning, and you can run nearly anywhere in them. The best level in the game, Assault, comes to mind primarily. Have you ever infiltrated the korean warships through the water? How about the very next level in the game, Onslaught, where you assault the Koreans using a bunch of tanks? The fucking demo level is bigger than anything ever shown in MGS4. Even on the more linear levels, you can see a whole bunch of island and the "linear path" you follow takes 10+ minutes to traverse on foot (sans super speed), with huge expanses of jungle being drawn in with not-insubstantial detail.

Considering we're comparing this to Metal Gear Solid 4, I'd like some examples of the MGS4 levels that come anywhere close to having to render the number of assets or levels of the size that crysis does. MGS4 is a series of small rooms connected to each other, and it fucking loads 75% of the time you go through a door, into another small room.