Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

The long anticipated FPS game Crysis is coming out in only one week of time! (November 15, 2007 in Canada) I tried out the demo yesterday at my friend's place using his XPS 720 and the 30" LCD. I have to say, this got to be the best graphic game available this year! The outdoor Jungle settings are much more enjoyable than the traditional warehouse scenes. For those whom have played Farcry and Counter Strike 2, you would know what I am talking about! This game is comparable to Halo 3 in every prospect, the PC platform will provide players more rooms for upgrades and gaming enhancement than game consoles thats for sure. It certainly pushes the best personal computer today to it's limit. On top of the fantastic graphics, the game has got great sound effects, amazing physics and complex yet smartly designed weapon controls just make FPS fans like me drool. Well, I better stop the "sales pitch", here is comparison between real-world photos and the in-game graphic. You make your own judgment!

Crysis uses the CryENGINE™ 2 which is one of the most advanced 3D engine out there. It's known for the superb effects in lighting and collision detection. According to the officials,

the CryENGINE™ 2 comes complete with all of its internal tools and also includes the CryENGINE™ 2 Sandbox world editing system. Licensees receive full source code and documentation for the engine and tools. Support is provided directly from the R & D Team that continuously develops the engine and can arrange teaching workshops for your team to increase the learning process. On the 17th of September, 2007, Ringling College of Art & Design became the first higher education institution in the world to license CryENGINE2 for educational purposes.

Here is a quick description of the 3D Graphic Engine from Crysis' official site:

Polybump™ 2 can be used as either as a standalone utility, or fully integrated with other tools such as 3DS Max™. This tool creates a high quality surface description that allows quick extraction of surface features like normal maps (tangent-space or object-space), displacement maps, un-occluded area direction, accessibility and other properties. The extracted information can be used to render Low poly models with surface detail almost making them look like the high-poly models but it will render much faster. The data is stored in a intermediate file format so it can be exported in different ways without doing the computation again. Very high polygon counts (e.g. 10 million triangles) are processed quite quickly.

Some worth-mentioning features of the 3D engine:
- Real Time Lighting and Dynamic Soft Shadows;
- Volumetric, Layer and View Distance Fogging;
- Terrain 2.5D Ambient Occlusion Maps;
- Normal Maps and Parallax Occlusion Maps;
- Real Time Ambient Maps;
- Subsurface Scattering;
- Eye Adaptation & High Dynamic Range (HDR) Lighting;
- Motion Blur & Depth of Field;
- Light Beams & Shafts;
- High Quality 3D Ocean Technology;
- Advanced Shader Technology;
- Terrain LOD Management Feature.

It looks like I am going to lose a lots of weekends over this one in the coming months!