CryEngine 3 tech demo / Crysis 2 stuff

[Artemas]

Anyway.

So in the video it showed you shooting an apartment building, and some breaking off and falling down. Was that actual wall, or just detachable chunks for decoration? I am suspicious of any claims regarding destructible environments, especially in urban areas. But bad company 2 did a pretty excellent job.

As to the blue and black guys... maybe North Korean alien cult worshippers? Or some such ridiculous shit.

I actually enjoyed the more open areas of crysis. Warhead was a tighter experience though.

I just wish there were more combined assaults on nork positions with a bunch of ai marines backing you up.

[Stark]

The building destruction is certainly a part of the game, but it's prefab bits rather than dynamicish like in BC2 (although BC2 is pretty limited also). It suffers from the fragile no-mass physic problems most games have with large objects. Watching sheets of corrugated iron move in bizarre ways is pretty funny, but Crysis is gertainly not alone with that.

[Commander 598]

I think people need to differentiate between the Crysis games and the CryEngines. Just because a game sucked doesn´t mean that the engine it used was crap and vice versa.

Given that "the engine" managed to make mostly white textures the laggiest thing I have ever experienced, I think "game sucks" rants can tell you a lot about an engine.

[General Zod]

I think people need to differentiate between the Crysis games and the CryEngines. Just because a game sucked doesn´t mean that the engine it used was crap and vice versa.

Given that "the engine" managed to make mostly white textures the laggiest thing I have ever experienced, I think "game sucks" rants can tell you a lot about an engine.

How many games even use the CryEngines anyway? Surely there can't be enough to really distinguish the two.

[Artemas]

His point I think is that art assets don't make the engine. So crysis is an example of what can be done, not what necessarily has to be.

[Ford Prefect]

How many games even use the CryEngines anyway? Surely there can't be enough to really distinguish the two.

There's a few, but only a handful of these are what you'd consider mainstream major game projects

The building destruction is certainly a part of the game, but it's prefab bits rather than dynamicish like in BC2 (although BC2 is pretty limited also).

Funnily enough, a some CryTek dude, as a personal project, developed an engine designed to procedurally render interiors so that it would possible to enter basically any building in a game world (by blowing open a wall, mostly). I honestly doubt that's going to be involved in CryEngine 3, but it's technologically quite interesting, much like Digital Molecular Matter.

[adam_grif]

but it's technologically quite interesting, much like Digital Molecular Matter.

TFU was incredibly disappointing.

[Ford Prefect]

Yeah, because it didn't make enough use of Digital Molecular Matter.

[adam_grif]

Har Har. I remember all the devs and PR guys waffling on for hours about DMM and Euphoria, and how it was going to be totally convincing and shit. The only thing that ended up looking awesome and convincing was the metal doors bending, everything else looked just like other games or failed horribly (i.e. Trees on Kashyk at the start).

[Ford Prefect]

You could see it in some other areas, like some of the glass panels you could encounter, but it was extremely underutilised given what it's capable of. Euphoria is similar, though you could pick up where it's coming into play, but when it's just storm troopers grabbing on to shit, it's not so impressive. TFU2 might have better usage, given greater familiarity with the technology, but I don't want to make any wild claims. I just want to kind of imagine what you could do with infinite resources and some of this stuff.

[Tolya]

How many games even use the CryEngines anyway? Surely there can't be enough to really distinguish the two.

Actually, none of the mainstream productions, according to wikipedia at least. Cryengine 1 was used (apart from Far Cry) was used in some korean MMORPG called Aion, while the only notable game that was made using Cryengine 2 apart from Crysis was Entropia Universe (a really shitty MMORPG) which is really a switchover, since the studio that runs that project switched to Cryengine from something called Gamebryo.

Other CryEngine 2 stuff includes a military training software and some stuff that hasn't yet been released, no one heard about it and frankly, nobody cares.

[Tolya]

As for the procedural damage modelling I saw some of the GDC's videos on gametrailers and the only thing they shown was some concrete barriers being blown to pieces, which frankly is lazy, because all they had to do was to use the tree destruction mechanism from Cryengine 2 (the guy showcasing this stuff actually admits that its just like with the trees in Crysis).

There is also something called "deformation", which is new and interesting, but at current stage feels underused. It works like this: you shoot a barrel or a door and they deform from the bullet impact.

At this stage there seems to be a lot of destructible elements on the micro scale. What I would very much like to see is the ability to blow a huge hole on a building, make it topple over etc. I think everyone is pretty much used to the idea that barrels can roll over and barriers can be destroyed.

[salm]

How many games even use the CryEngines anyway? Surely there can't be enough to really distinguish the two.

What?
You dont´t need multiple games to distinguish between an engine and a game. They´re both completely different entities.

Given that "the engine" managed to make mostly white textures the laggiest thing I have ever experienced, I think "game sucks" rants can tell you a lot about an engine.

Why is "the enigne" in quotes? Are you trying to say that the Cryengine is not a real engine or something?

"Game sucks" rants don´t necessarily tell you much about the engine. Personally i could rant about Crysis all day long because i found it pretty boring. But i still like the engine for being able to do render a crap ton of destructible plants and its daylight system for example.
There might be other engines out there that do some things better but that doesn´t mean that Cry Engine 2 is crap.
It would be interesting to know the different engines prices but besides Id the companies usually make a secret out of that.

There is also something called "deformation", which is new and interesting, but at current stage feels underused. It works like this: you shoot a barrel or a door and they deform from the bullet impact.

The deformation is also seen in the video where a large chunk of building hits and squashes a car and a big container. This is pretty interesting if it works well.

[Zac Naloen]

You could see it in some other areas, like some of the glass panels you could encounter, but it was extremely underutilised given what it's capable of. Euphoria is similar, though you could pick up where it's coming into play, but when it's just storm troopers grabbing on to shit, it's not so impressive. TFU2 might have better usage, given greater familiarity with the technology, but I don't want to make any wild claims. I just want to kind of imagine what you could do with infinite resources and some of this stuff.

The lucas arts producer guy basically said they didn't get it working properly until too late in development, so they couldn't design levels around it.

And it showed.

Here's hoping FU2 is better in that regard. I want to melt a door/wall with my lightsaber.