Monday, August 24, 2009

CryEngine 3 demo impressions

Earlier this month a new video of CryEngine was shown at the SIGGRAPH 2009 conference.
CryEngine is well known to all gamers, well most of gamers. If you haven’t played Crysis you are one of very few…

In video below there are few things I would like to point out.

Even with use of DirectX 9.0c Crytek is managing to create impressive lighting environments with great performance. First part of the video, Sponza atrium, is built from 1.4M triangles and it looks great but I don’t like the camera movement – too fast and too sharp.




Second part, 53” from start is Manhattan apartment is much more interesting. This scene has little bit less details, only 1.1M triangles and it runs at 113 FPS. Author of this demo playes a lot with position of sunlight to illustrate light capabilities of new engine. The engine does it very nicely with diffuse coloured lights bouncing off objects like blue couch/chair or green and red carpets. Real time lighting is really good even if it may not be 100% accurate. I am not saying that it is not but programs like Lightscape create very, very realistic images. Here is a sample.

Apartment_01 

Development of the GPU and technologies like CUDA and FireStream enabled us to have scenes like one below in real time. Mind you, this is a screen capture from a video.

CryEngine1

Last part of the video is about handling of object and materials. It starts at 2’26”. It is easy to see how light volumes are affected by objects like carpet. Light is reflecting from it and gives the light reddish colour.

Seeing this functionality really makes me keen to try is out for myself. Even if I could have the engine and the editor only. But if I can get all that plus the good game for about NZ$120 then why not?!

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