I know, the title isn’t particularly inspired, but it does sum up this video quite well – a featurette showcasing the incredible visual power of the CryEngine 3.
If you’re one of our frequent readers, you’ve probably seen me talk about Crysis 3 in other posts. Most of them have been gameplay trailers, and like most Crytek games, they’ve all looked stunning. What wasn’t well explained though, is the technology that powers the game – and that continues to be the case.
You see, the video you’re about to watch is beautiful, and yes, it even tosses out a bunch of buzzwords listing off the various technologies in the game, but if you’re really interested in learning more about what all this stuff means, you’ll need more than just the video. I’ll explain after you watch it.
CryEngine3 and Amazing Tesselated Frogs
Now, that was stunning, wasn’t it? I think we can all agree that Crysis 3 looks amazing, and hell… perhaps they even figured out how to make the game fun. The question on my mind, though, and perhaps yours as well, is: how the hell does this technology work? We see plenty of bullet points, like volumetric cloud shadows, pixel accurate displacement maps, tessellated vegetation, and of course – cloth and vegetation physics. Most of these we can guess at, to some degree, but I would love to see Crytek release a featurette explaining these improvements in more depth, much like Johan Andersson did with the Frostbite 2 engine for Battlefield 3. I may not be a programmer, but I find the information interesting all the same.
Cloth physics are of particular interest to me, as right now they’re virtually non-existent in gaming. Imagine a world in which characters actually have real clothes that crease and bend naturally as characters move around. Even better, imagine a world in which you can take those clothes off people. If CD Projekt were able to work that into say, The Witcher 3, I would be a very happy gamer indeed.
Ordering Crysis 3
As with all games worth a damn (and some that aren’t), you can already lay down your hard earned cash to pre-order Crysis 3. It’s shipping in February 2013, and pre-orders for about $59.99 USD.
