By John Walker on October 15th, 2009 at 11:55 am.
Crytek last night announced the latest incarnation of their engine, CryENGINE 3 is now available to be licensed. Now that may not affect you or me (unless you’re a games developer of course), but there’s some interesting implications of this latest tech. Of course, it first of all means games are going to be prettier – these are the people who keep bowling us over with each new engine as it creates vivid beaches and jungles. But it’s also looking to streamline development across multiple platforms – letting programmers see how the game will appear in PC, 360 and PS3 on the fly. And rumours abound that it may be the engine of choice for STALKER 2.
I take it we’ve moved on from calling the current generation of consoles “next gen”, as Crytek are describing CE3 as “next gen ready”. This seems a bold claim, since Microsoft and Sony aren’t. But presumably they mean it’s ready for DirectX 11 and anything else that’s likely to appear in the next couple of years. I dunno, what, do I look like a tech manual to you? They say it comes with “scalable computation and graphics for all major upcoming platforms,” which means it’s psychic technology!
If you watch the trailer below you can see the sorts of things it’s boasting. Perhaps one of the more significant ingredients is an improved WYSIWYP tool (What You See Is What You Play), called CryENGINE 3 Live Create, which is increasingly the sensible trend for development tools – no more chipping away in wireframes and streams of code, then rendering it to find out whether you messed up. Or as Crytek put it:
“It allows developers to work with a single editor, but see and play the results in real-time on PC, PS3 and Xbox360, hooked up to a single dev PC. The engine takes care of the conversion and optimization of assets in real-time; enables instant, cross-platform changes to any part of game creation and as a result materially increases the speed, quality and significantly reduces the risk of multiplatform development.”
Carl Jones, a suit at Crytek explained, “even producers, project managers and suits will love CryENGINE 3!” Surely this cannot be? The engine that will unite us all?!
The first game announced on the engine is, as was revealed at E3, rather predictably Crysis 2. The website for the new toy is currently struggling under weight of traffic, but you might be able to get at it here.
There are also rumours bubbling around the guts of the internet which suggest that GSC Gameworld have licensed, or intend to licence, Crytek’s new engine for their next full game: Stalker 2. Gamasutra picked up on the rumours from here and here.
What’s interesting about this, says Jim, is that GSC are expected to give up their X-Ray engine, which had seemed pretty cutting edge. Could it be that they lost man-power and expertise to the development of THQ’s new Ukraine studio, 4a Games? Just speculation on our part, obviously, but it makes for interesting times.
Here’s the CryENGINE 3 tech trailer:
15/10/2009 at 12:10 Lewis says:
I’d not seen the launch vid yet. What a stupid engine. STUPID. Ridiculously, obscenely beautiful. Should not be allowed.
15/10/2009 at 12:11 John Walker says:
I faked your comment here, Lewis. To explain the Gravatar confusion : )
15/10/2009 at 12:50 Dracko says:
I bet they’ll use this for Bioshock 3.
I love Bioshock.
I really really do.
15/10/2009 at 14:27 Lewis says:
Wait, what did I do? Did I post it on the wrong thing or something? My poor little brain. :-(
16/10/2009 at 05:18 MD says:
John Walker == Lewis Denby????
15/10/2009 at 12:11 nakke says:
So for PC it’ll need something “next gen”, but at the same time it’ll also work fine on a console with four year old hardware in it? Makes sense.
15/10/2009 at 12:19 AndrewC says:
That’ll be the scaling technology. Lizards, you see, have cold blood, so the tech doesn’t need as many fans.
15/10/2009 at 12:24 nakke says:
Ah, but of course.
15/10/2009 at 12:36 RagingLion says:
From what I’ve read about this CryENGINE and previous ones I think ‘need’ is the wrong word (yes a new PC will make everything look better than consoles). It will just produce the best graphics it can based on the hardware you give it. That’s what it means by scalability. Sounds like they think CryENGINE 3 will be able to produce the best graphics on the hardware available in a few years time, even where there’s perhaps a new generation of consoles out.
15/10/2009 at 16:05 nakke says:
Yeah, but I really doubt it’ll run well on PCs with similar hardware as the 360. I hope I’m wrong of course.
15/10/2009 at 16:38 pepper says:
These consoles have a fancy technique called cell processing, which shines in rendering stuff. There is a reason people use Xbox’s and PS3′s to render animations and setup render farms. These processor do require some good coder to write specific sets for it. But once that is done its very powerfull and can outperform PC’s. PC’s are hard to deliver such an optimized experience, since there are thousands of hardware combinations, and the way ATI/Nvidia handles certain procedures differs a lot. So even they need to make specific drivers for specific games sometimes.
Anyway, i almost started drewling over this, i worked with UT3, and this looks like the UT3 editor + a whole lot more! Nowadays you dont just have an level editor or material editor, its all integrated into one pipeline, which i reckon is a good thing.
15/10/2009 at 12:13 Node#1006 says:
Woo pretty, John. And the new engine looks good too.
15/10/2009 at 12:15 paddytehpyro says:
Shiny. Now I wish I had a PC anywhere near being able to run it…
15/10/2009 at 12:15 Schaulustiger says:
I hope that in the near future CryEngine is preferred over the Unreal Engine. The latter is so overused and always has this ugly plastic look. With the opmization for mediocre hardware (read: consoles) it looks like the third CryEngine finally gets rid of its hefty hardware hunger and still looks as impressive as it did in Crysis.
15/10/2009 at 12:18 Alexander Norris says:
Blehr, high-fidelity graphics.
No, really. Aren't we collectively tired of "realism" in game aesthetics yet? I'd've thought that with the current generation of console hardware sticking around for a while, people would stop slavering over pretty lighting and water physics.
Crysis was one of the worst-optimised games I've ever seen (to whit: my computer can run everything that's come out in the last year at 1680*1050 in DirectX 10, with everything on the highest setting including 4x AA – because my GPU refuses to do 8x AA, for some reason – and yet my computer struggles to run Crysis at more than 20fps on High settings). I'd be interested in knowing if this is an engine thing or if Crytek are just rubbish at making games, but assuming they're not completely shit at their job, I can only conclude that CryEngine 2 is horribly unoptimised, and that CryEngine 3 will similarly prioritise eye-candy over actually running on anything manufactured this side of 2020.
Considering how bland and boring Crysis' gameplay was anyway, I don't think I'll be losing out on much by not playing Crysis 2.
15/10/2009 at 12:29 ZeeKat says:
Where all this “bad optimisation” critique comes from? Is there any other as sophisticated yet faster engine to compare? Maybe that’s well optimised engine for things it can do (because damn thing looks and moves fantastic). Hard to tell without anything to compare.
Of course it possible there is something as great looking and faster, have to admit I’m not exactly up to date with freshest hit :). Feel free to enlighten me in such case.
I love Crysis(es) by the way, incredibly fun lil’ games :>
15/10/2009 at 12:39 subedii says:
No it’s pretty well optimised, you just don’t understand everything it’s trying to pull off. Your complaint that it doesn’t run well maxed out therefore it’s poorly optimised doesn’t make sense from a logical standpoint. Other games take place in FAR more confined environments, with massively reduced draw distances, far less ambient detail, and far fewer AI and physics entities being processed simultaneously and in real-time. I’d understand the complaints a bit more if the game didn’t look freaking amazing even on medium.
As for Crysis gameplay, well I could go on a lengthy diatribe about how awesome I thought it was and that I believe it was genuinely one of the best FPS’s of the past few years, but that’d be more subjective.
15/10/2009 at 13:04 Bhazor says:
I think the Farcry 2 engine, Dunia, was much better optimised and earlier footage showing proper Jungles I thought actually looked better than Crysis.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nboLP-nbOi8
15/10/2009 at 13:20 Alexander Norris says:
You do realised that there are more settings above High, and that High includes no AA, right (at least I’m fairly sure it does out-of-the-box; in any case, AA was off)?
Any game that can’t run at a playable framerate when half the bling is turned off, on a machine that is perfectly capable of running games that came out two years later and at the highest graphics settings is a poorly-optimised game. It doesn’t take an Aristotelian philosopher to work that out.
Of course, this is all a moot point if Crysis 2 can run properly (while not looking like ass) on gaming machines built around the date of its release. Either way, the really impressive part of that video is the real-time editor and simplified cross-platform development.
15/10/2009 at 13:22 cdm says:
“because my GPU refuses to do 8x AA, for some reason”
Sounds like you don’t know much about operating your PC then mate.
Crysis was great stuff, lovely graphics and fun open FPS gameplay. People who whine about it being unoptimised don’t appreciate how advanced the graphics were, have no idea what they are doing and/or have a shite PC.
15/10/2009 at 13:25 Alexander Norris says:
Yes. Because the default ATI drivers refuse to let my GPU operate anti-aliasing above 4x, I clearly do not know anything about computers. Well-spotted there, random Internet man.
15/10/2009 at 13:40 cdm says:
Well my friend, I have a old PC here with an AGP 3850 in it, and it does 8x MSAA just fine. Not quickly of course, but it works. So keep ranting, revel in your ignorance, and have a nice day.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R600#Texturing_and_anti-aliasing
15/10/2009 at 13:42 subedii says:
No, I’m afraid that’s the faulty logic I was talking about. FEAR 2 was released two years later as well, so what? It doesn’t push things as far as other games on the market, its visuals require less intensive hardware but it doesn’t look as good as other games on the market, hence the problem
Crysis was made with future developments in mind. The issue isn’t whether you can max it out, the issue is how well you can get it looking on your hardware, and whether that compares to other games on the market. That’s the common logical fallacy that people keep applying, and it doesn’t make sense. Doom 3 couldn’t be maxed out on release either. Heck, John Cramack made a point of saying that the highest definition textures available in the game wouldn’t be useable until in the future when graphics cards with higher amounts of RAM were available. Doom 3 is also a game that took a while before people could “max it out”, but calling that the flaw is missing the point.
As I said, the issue is whether the game looks up to scratch compared to other games running on the same hardware. Me? I’m really freaking satisfied that’s the case, I don’t think I’ve seen anything come close. It’s pretty much matched most other games I’ve seen even when running on medium. When I’ve got it running high and very high, it’s pretty gorgeous all round. A lot of subjectivity comes into this naturally, art-style always plays a big part in visuals and if you didn’t like the art-style then it doesn’t matter how well shaped it is. From my own perspective I was pretty much amazed the first time I was exploring the alien mothership. They really went to town on the visuals and the design there. Frankly I’m a pretty jaded gamer when it comes to visuals but that sequence really did have me on the edge of my seat for most of it, purely for how stellar it all looked. Although as I said, if the art-style didn’t work for you, then that’s a different issue.
15/10/2009 at 14:01 Vandelay says:
Have to say, I thought Crysis looked horrendous on medium (particularly lighting). Looks great on high though, and is certainly the best looking game around.
15/10/2009 at 14:03 subedii says:
Well horses for courses and all. I thought it looked good even at medium, but then I’m not going to argue that point.
15/10/2009 at 15:05 Wisq says:
Those of us who played Operation Flashpoint when it came out, then upgraded our hardware later and were able to play at even higher settings to good effect, have certainly grasped the benefit of targeting a platform higher than the current average — so long as you can scale down to the current average and still look good.
There are so many PC games from the early Windows days that just look like crap if you try to play them today. It’s nice to see “medium today, ultra-high tomorrow” titles, and if this engine helps that happen, then great.
If you want crappy optimisation, look to things like free Chinese MMOs, or to all the other broken-at-any-settings titles like Cryostasis. These are the sorts of things that often seem to somehow give newer GPUs an even harder time than older ones, or that somehow perform worse under SLI/Crossfire than without.
15/10/2009 at 16:33 Geoff says:
“Any game that can’t run at a playable framerate when half the bling is turned off, on a machine that is perfectly capable of running games that came out two years later and at the highest graphics settings is a poorly-optimised game. ”
So, does your amp go to 11?
15/10/2009 at 18:41 bhlaab says:
Buy a new video card, Crysis was one of the most amazingly optimized games ever made
15/10/2009 at 18:51 Gorgeras says:
I’m not a whizz on specific computer science, so I’m not informed enough to comment on the technical optomisation of the CryEngine 2.
I do know Crysis looks PIG ULGY on medium settings and is only moderately better looking on High setting than Far Cry 2, Bioshock or Assassin’s Creed to give three different examples using three different engines.
I know DirectX 10 does bugger all to improve performance, most of it’s features have an equally viable DirectX 9 alternative in Crysis, which runs with much better performance overall. The only benefit was a ‘paper benefit’; DirectX 10 used slightly less memory. I would have preferred for it to use that memory and run faster.
I know that CryTek deliberately misled everyone by turning those DirectX 9 features off in order to make DIrectX 10 look better than it was. I know that they claimed people would see a performance increase of 10%-15% for every additional core they had after two, instead the performance between similar dual-core and quad-core proccessors were almost the same. PC Gamer never did actually post the performance specs of their ‘Crysis-beating PC’ in one of the PC building guides they had before Crysis was released.
And now I know they’re still beating that dead horse and there are going to be people that swallow it no matter how short the reality comes of the selling points.
15/10/2009 at 12:20 FatRat says:
Utterly gorgeous. Look forward to the first games to be made using it.
15/10/2009 at 12:21 pkt-zer0 says:
Notice how the logo in the bottom left goes from X360/PS3 to “Next-gen ready” at the more impressive scenes. Sneaky, very sneaky.
15/10/2009 at 12:30 Alex says:
Sounds kind of like Eskil Steenberg’s brainchild, Verse, with the whole “WYSIWYP tool” thing. I wonder what he thinks of it considering he seems so disdainful of mainstream games development.
15/10/2009 at 12:33 CMaster says:
If it helps make developing easier, including cross platform then that’s definitely a good thing. Ws intrigued to see Voxels mentioned – are those coming back into fashion?
The real time preview etc is really important – more and more people abandon Source specifically because it lacks that.
15/10/2009 at 12:33 Tom says:
Hopefully console support means Crytek’s optimized the nuts out of their engine.
That would be nice. That’s what’s great about the UE3 engine. It’s so optimzed it still looks great even on older hardware.
15/10/2009 at 12:34 icabod says:
According to Tom Francis in the latest PC Gamer (UK), the new CryEngine is not a huge visual improvement on the previous engine, but will run on more (slower) hardware.
Meaning I can make an “it’s not prettier, it’s just runnier” joke.
17/10/2009 at 19:15 MajorManiac says:
So it’ll run like hot sh…er stuff off a shovel on most PCs. :)
15/10/2009 at 12:35 Tom says:
And it would be jolly nice if GCS moved away from xray. Good looking as it is, it runs like a dry turd.
15/10/2009 at 12:41 toni says:
problem is, people thought they could run Crysis at full settings with current pc hardware. this was not even the recommended setting detected by the game itself. once you did stick to what the engine determined your system was worth I could run the game at 1680×1050 with low/medium settings and have ~ 40fps, the visuals, drawdistance still surpassing everything that came before/after it (the DUNIA engine, e.g. shows that it was made for consoles in mind with their constant memory hax). I can’t blame a PC dev/publisher if people flat out ignore their recommendations for performance-settings.
my friend played Crysis on a P4 3Ghz single core PC with an 6600 nvidia card on 1024×768 and had no problems whatsoever.
Cryengine3 is basically Cryengine2, expanded or “adapted” for consoles (more tradeoffs in texture streaming, memory management, precaching), so you can develop a kick-ass game for the most powerful platform (PC, PC and … PC) and the current or next-gen consoles or whatever they wanna call them. the same discussion existed after the FarCry1 release. “Nobody” could play it and so on and so on while all they had to do is NOT put every slider on MAX as they were accustomed to with other games.
15/10/2009 at 12:44 Schmung says:
The interesting thing is the differences between the 360 and PS3 varaints (for console types anyway). The flexibility is a huge boon for developers though and competition wfor UE3 can only be a good thing.
15/10/2009 at 12:45 Casimir's Blake says:
Currently the only way for someone to get “DRM-Free” access to the Crysis engine is with the original game. Warfare had that frustrating activation protection. I AM interested in whatever Crysis game follows up using this new engine, and hell it might even get me making levels again if the engine is that simple, but not if it has activation.
15/10/2009 at 12:45 Seniath says:
Still apt, I think.
15/10/2009 at 12:57 subedii says:
It was apt maybe two years ago. These days a machine that can play Crysis on high and very high settings out isn’t really a huge deal. Crap man, I bought my PC almost two and a half years ago, apart from a slightly upgraded graphics card (last one croaked unfortunately) it’s the same machine, and it runs Crysis with most settings maxed out.
I paid a premium for that machine, I’ll admit, but it wasn’t an insane amount. These days however it’s not really costly to build a machine that can play Crysis quite easily.
15/10/2009 at 12:48 Mako says:
Beautiful but unbelievably sterile.
15/10/2009 at 22:19 toro says:
You hit the nail in the head. :)
15/10/2009 at 12:59 DeliriumWartner says:
CryENGINE 3′s tears cure cancer, but CryENGINE 3 never, um, Cries.
15/10/2009 at 13:05 Lewis says:
What’s happening with the gravatars? Are they confusing people?
15/10/2009 at 13:07 Hmm says:
Pretty? Oh COME ON, PEOPLE! There’s absolutely NOTHING in this video we haven’t seen in equally good quality (or better) in Crysis before. It looks the same as it did in 2007.
15/10/2009 at 13:11 subedii says:
I thought the shader details looked better, but that might just be because they spent extra time tweaking the look for the demo.
Other than that, yeah, I can’t say it looks too different from CE2. But hey, I’m looking forward to a sequel, I don’t care about bigger visuals than what they’ve got now, those are still pretty stellar. More importantly, I just want the gameplay to be as awesome as it was in Crysis and Warhead.
15/10/2009 at 13:16 Rob Hale says:
As a developer I will throw my hat into the ring and say the Crysis Sandbox is just better than everything else when it comes to making a level and then playing it.
The fact that it didn’t run on consoles was why nobody licensed it. Hopefully that will change now.
15/10/2009 at 13:16 Digit says:
It look nice, the thing that excites me most is the destructible environments. I can happily play an ugly game if it has real interactive environments, but I’m really tired of stunning environments that are as solid as an anvil. :x
15/10/2009 at 13:30 Hermit says:
Aye, if the environment is as destructible as that collapsing bridge suggests, this would be awesome for a STALKER game.
Group of soldiers holding a checkpoint under a railway bridge? Drop said bridge on them.
15/10/2009 at 19:26 Στέλιος says:
Dropping a bridge on the soldiers at Cordon? I was more thinking “drop APCs on bloodsuckers” – accompanied by squish noise; maybe put together then a Benny Hill-styled high speed montage.
15/10/2009 at 13:32 Fenchurch says:
Wasn’t there a bit there where instead of a space marine you were a young woman/girl?
That felt rather out of keeping for Crytek. =-P
15/10/2009 at 13:44 Hermit says:
Get the feeling they were trying to avoid the whole “Engine only does trees” image. Now, it does trees, urban environments, Helm’s Deep, and The Path.
Now that’s progress!
15/10/2009 at 13:47 subedii says:
Well if they’re going to advertise the engine, they need to show off a range of visuals, not just the standard nanosuited soldier over and over again. It’s also why they showcased stuff like the cityscape, those aren’t really things you see in Crysis since it primarily takes place on a tropical island. Well, people have made city levels in Cryengine, but it’s never been anything done officially by Crytek.
15/10/2009 at 13:40 Joseph says:
Wow, pretty. Just have to write this so I can reply to someone and actually have it reply to them.
15/10/2009 at 13:43 DXN says:
Holy good jeaygis that’s pretty! Not to mention easy-to-use-lookin’. Hopefully the rumour’s true, because the thought of Stalker 2 in an engine this nice and which (I can only assume) will run much faster and more smoothly than X-ray is incredible. I hope it makes it easier for them to code non-dodgy AI and animation, too!
15/10/2009 at 13:46 Radiant says:
I look at my ancient pc and realise that the engine is very well named.
My bank account cries too.
15/10/2009 at 13:56 Joseph says:
Ok that didn’t even work, can delete the above… sorry.
“Any game that can’t run at a playable framerate when half the bling is turned off, on a machine that is perfectly capable of running games that came out two years later and at the highest graphics settings is a poorly-optimised game. It doesn’t take an Aristotelian philosopher to work that out.” – Alexander Norris
If, by “poorly optimised”, you mean “has better graphics than other games and is therefore requires more processing” then you are correct. That’s just the way the dev’s chose it to be – I’m guessing you can’t have a game that both runs very quickly AND looks & acts like Crysis does.
If you think it just runs poorly because they are bad at coding, then wtf are you smoking, can’t you see the difference in realism between Crysis and other games, yes even the ones that have come out 2 years later? THAT is why it runs slower than them – it takes a lot of power to look so real.
And FYI my single 8800GTX ran it perfectly playable on the Highest settings in Windows XP. From what I heard I’d only have achieved Medium or High playably if running Vista.
15/10/2009 at 14:02 subedii says:
That would be because you can only run it on “high” and not ” very high” on XP. DX10 mode only works on Vista and Windows 7 (one of MS’s more retarded attempts at marketing), it enables additional graphical features. To be fair if you tweak the .ini files, facsimiles of those effects can be enabled under DX9, they’ll just be emulations and won’t necessarily work as well.
Realistically the game looks pretty awesome on High, you’ll just be missing on some visual effects.
15/10/2009 at 14:03 Adam says:
I love the way it says “Advanced Character Animation” then proceeds to show a child traipsing around clumsily.
15/10/2009 at 14:09 subedii says:
That would be because it’s procedural animation. A better indication of what it’s talking about might be illustrated from one of the earlier marketing vids for CE2:
[url]http://www.gametrailers.com/video/gdc-2008-cryengine2/30964[/url]
About 1:25 onwards in that video, I’m pretty sure that’s the sort of thing they were referring to. The way that characters are procedurally animated and shift and pivot their weight when running and moving about terrain. It’s not a feature exclusive to CryEngine or anything, but it’s pretty cool.
15/10/2009 at 14:05 Tei says:
I like the forest, and well.. everything… looks to me like much more real than current crop of “realist” like games.
15/10/2009 at 14:08 Joseph says:
Reply still not working.
@Subedi: No, I ran it on Very High using the tweaks you mentioned, and then even increased the detail level past Very High with various cvars, and it still ran fine ~30fps. Admittedly my 8800GTX was overclocked along with my quad core, but hey that still means it ran perfectly on higher-than-max-settingson the latest hardware at the time :P
15/10/2009 at 14:11 Joseph says:
Yay it’s working now. Yeah it looked AMAZING and it was fun to mess around with, I especially liked hiding in grass and playing army/rambo guy games with the AI while blowing up stuff and stealing boats and jeeps and such. It was very fun to play around it, but it did feel a bit empty and I wasn’t driven enough to finish the game.
15/10/2009 at 14:23 Cooper says:
I can see why GSC might be moving away from XRay.
XRay is a -beautiful- engine, but does need a leg up to start looking exceedingly contemporary.
Moreover, the fall of most of the Stalker games has been the iffy implementation of ‘ALife’ and the missions on top of the engine. A ready-made graphical platform which adheres to their desire for super photorealism may give them more time to iron those issues out.
Furthermore, a cross-platform engine might give them the break in western Europe and the US that they so deserve.
15/10/2009 at 14:26 [dandan] says:
Sergei Grigorovich, a senior guy in GSC, said in an interview on June 26th 2009:
“To the rumors and concerns of our intention of using CryEngine2 for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2. This engine is not considered seriously for S.T.A.L.K.E.R . 2. I would say more – we are in the process of writing our own new engine. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 – the project of a very distant prospect, as long as we focus on the release of CoP.”
Note he does only mention Cryengine2, but he does say they’re busy writing their own engine and it would seem strange for them to abandon the X-ray technology they’ve been working on for years. Also I imagine it would be hugely expensive to license Cryengine3, and I’m not sure how much money GSC have to throw around.
That said perhaps a stable up to date platform would be the right thing for STALKER, who knows. I don’t feel strongly about it either way. I just want moar STALKER!
15/10/2009 at 18:53 Shalrath says:
I think that a sequel to stalker, especially engine-wise, would be much, much improved over the bugginess of the past. Any time a studio gets to do multiple projects on an engine, and then make a new one or vastly improve the existing one.
I have a lot of hope for their new stuff. Stalker is one of the only games I play frequently year after year.
15/10/2009 at 14:49 Malibu Stacey says:
1 – an graphics engine only looks as good as the art assets put in it.
2 – pretty graphics don’t automatically equate to a good game. Never have, never will unless you’re one of the “console” generation who actually believe the converse of that.
15/10/2009 at 14:59 Tei says:
yea, to show a engine you need good art, or else people will think your engine is really bad.
still… I think most people understand this, and take it into account.
15/10/2009 at 15:01 Dodo says:
And it should run waaay faster then the old engine.
Also, compatibility with consoles means more games and hopefully more pc games in the process.
15/10/2009 at 15:58 Tei says:
Compatibility and Optimization are oposites.
A engine designed to work everywhere sould be much slower than a engine specially crafter for a architecture. What is good for a engine, to run on a PS3, can be really bad for XBox, and absolutelly awfull for PC.
15/10/2009 at 15:07 Danny says:
Don’t care for all the technical mumbo-jumbo, all I know is that I just came in my pants.
15/10/2009 at 15:57 LionsPhil says:
WRT in-game editing and on-demand optimisation, don’t forget that one of the CryEngine developers is (or at least) Wouter, who made Sauerbraten.
15/10/2009 at 16:27 Monkeybreadman says:
You can keep the photo realistic graphics, its the physics that gets me hot
15/10/2009 at 16:34 Hug_dealer says:
well if they are making a new engine. you can be pretty sure they will keep the latest parts of xray, while dumping the stuff from earlier.
xray is atleast 10 years old now. So by writing a new engine, they can dump a ton of the clutter that doesnt need to be supported any longer, and also include optimised features for the current generation. Its alot harder to simply keep adding more parts to your current engine, like they have with xray.
15/10/2009 at 16:41 Sergey Galyonkin says:
When I talked to Bolshakov around a year and a half ago, he said, that they considered CryEngine for STALKER 2 and even got all the tools from Crytek,
At that time he said they had one problem with CryEngine – STALKER looked not like STALKER, but like a darkened version of Crysis. He said, game on CryEngine lost STALKER feel, which was quite important for them.
But Bolshakov is no longer working at GSC and Crytek released a new CryEngine, so everything is possible ;)
15/10/2009 at 16:41 A-Scale says:
RPS gods:
Could you please do a roundup of all worthy mods that have been made for the original Crysis engine? I found the game to be terribly unfun, but the engine itself was stupendous. I long for a mod that lets me explore islands in a dinghy or something similar. I’ve seen the Monkey Island mod here, but not much else.
Thank you for your time.
16/10/2009 at 01:32 A-Scale says:
RPS gods: Don’t bother. I looked myself. It’s all shite. Nothing original.
15/10/2009 at 17:02 Dreamhacker says:
NOOOOOOOOOO!
Give STALKER 2 the Far Cry 2 Dunya-engine, it is evidently superior!
15/10/2009 at 17:52 Jack says:
Holy mother of god that’s a crazy engine!
15/10/2009 at 17:58 Justin C. Sherrill says:
I would point out that GSC migrating (or not migrating) to a new game engine for the STALKER series may make sense in terms of manpower or cost or whatever, but not much difference to the game. All 3 STALKER series releases are on the X-Ray engine, and I still don’t really like Clear Sky that much. The underlying engine won’t really change that. It’s like saying “I don’t enjoy reading this website because it’s run using Apache instead of Lighttpd.”
16/10/2009 at 01:45 Wisq says:
That analogy works fine, up until some Apache+mod_perl/mod_php/whatever site gets suddenly extra-popular and utterly collapses under the memory load, when a lighttpd+fastcgi site would still be chugging along fine. At which point it becomes “I don’t enjoy reading this website because it’s DOWN”. (Cyanide Blood Bowl forums, I’m looking at you!)
… but yeah. The on-topic equivalent would be my favourite graphics-optimisation whipping boy, Cryostasis. Lovely ice and water effects. Slideshow performance. A premium graphics engine won’t save bad gameplay, but even with decent gameplay, your choice of engine can still cripple your game. If this engine had been out then, and was licensable at an agreeable price point for them, maybe things would have been different. (Then again, maybe not… Except for the surfaces of bodies of water, I didn’t see much in the way of water/ice effects in that demo video.)
15/10/2009 at 18:04 Bogie says:
Nice engine I just hope they have fixed the spongey motion on your avatar. They should take a leaf out of COD’s book.
15/10/2009 at 18:18 678 says:
The CEO of GSC said that no STALKER will use CryEngine3. It’s a stupid news, actually. Did GSC worked 7 years on their engine just to later use a middleware solution ?
15/10/2009 at 18:36 Radiant says:
Look it’s not about how well the game runs on anyone’s future or present or ancestral computer.
Crysis was shit.
Not worth the investment in pc parts it would have taken to run it well at all.
15/10/2009 at 18:38 Thirith says:
I hated Far Cry but thought that Crysis was good fun. The nanosuit allowed for a number of different approaches and the art design was generic but still much, much better than its predecessor’s.
15/10/2009 at 18:39 Ymgtg says:
“2 – pretty graphics don’t automatically equate to a good game.”
True. But let me add :
3 – pretty graphics don’t automatically equate to a bad game either.
Crysis has so much gameplay depth between weapon customisation and switching nanosuit modes on the fly, yet between the folks who threw a hissy fit because their “uber rig” couldn’t run it on High (it looks better with a lower resolution or on Medium than any other game, but REAL MEN DON’T LOWER GRAPHIC SETTINGS, or something) and the casual gamers who stay in armor or cloak 99% of the time and claim the game is easy (probably the same guys who complained Far Cry was too hard… You can only blame yourself.), it’s been catalogued as “just another gorgeous-but-bland modern shooter”.
15/10/2009 at 20:21 A-Scale says:
Really? I usually found that it devolved into a sprintathon-sprayathon no matter how much I tried to go stealth.
The only particularly superb stealth incident that I experienced was punching a rowboat into a river, laying in the bottom of it and using my invisibility to float towards the enemy, popping the lone ones with a poison dart while the others looked away. That was amazing. Unfortunately, those 20 minutes were totally unrepresentative of the rest of the game for me.
15/10/2009 at 20:23 Vinraith says:
Interesting, whenever I try to run and gun in Crysis I’m almost instantly dead. The only viable tactic I can make work (and I’m entirely open to conceding that I suck at this kind of game, mind you) is pop up, kill a few guys, stealth, displace, repeat.
15/10/2009 at 20:49 A-Scale says:
That IS interesting. This is a very divisive game, even as far as playstyle goes. For me, the only effective playstyle was to run into the fray, waste a magazine of ammo, throw a grenade and sprint back out to cover to heal. Stealth was rarely an option, and never worth the time spent.
15/10/2009 at 20:53 Vinraith says:
Maybe it’s a difference in difficulty level? I’ve been playing on normal, though I’m thinking seriously about restarting on hard.
If it’s not that, my only guess is that it’s a matter of individual player competences. I know I’ve never been great at running and shooting at the same time in FPS games, maybe my play style is simply dictated by a need to stand still and aim.
15/10/2009 at 21:18 A-Scale says:
I’ve always tended towards the mobile rifleman/sniper role of play, but I don’t know what that says about my selection of play style in Crysis.
I think what influenced my decision was the fact that the Goddamn Koreans seemed to have chests made of metal, dying only with a great number of shots or with a few close up blasts to the head/body. It made sniping feel less effective than I usually expect.
15/10/2009 at 21:22 Vinraith says:
Ah. We noticed the same thing and dealt with it in different ways. You concluded that since they were so hard to kill you needed to get up close and blast them. I concluded that since they were so hard to kill I needed to very carefully aim for the head. Presumably both solutions are valid.
15/10/2009 at 21:28 A-Scale says:
I also tried to go for the head-shooty-man technique, but I just found it ineffective. Proper sniper rifles weren’t always available, I seem to recall.
15/10/2009 at 21:32 Vinraith says:
Sniper rifle ammo is painfully scarce, yeah. That’s why I end up using stealth a lot. Stealth, get close, pop a few skulls, run like hell and restealth. Repeat. It’s made markedly easier once you get a scope for the assault rifle, of course.
15/10/2009 at 21:36 A-Scale says:
Do try punching a rowboat into a river at some point and riding it down the river, cloaked. It was quite the amazing experience.
Or just punch one out to sea and pretend that you’re Santiago defending your catch from hungry sharks (Old Man and the Sea).
15/10/2009 at 21:40 Vinraith says:
Yeah, I’ve actually done the “riding a boat down the river stealthed” thing and agree that it’s neat as hell. :)
15/10/2009 at 23:02 woppin says:
I recommend Crysis on the hardest difficulty, I had a great time with it. The stealthy approach was the best against everything except the cheating helicopters. Get good at throwing grenades, you can decloak and clear a room with a good nade. Always stay off the paths too…Don’t rely on the sniper rifle, you need to get decent at headshotting with the rifle, which is easy once you get the scope. Change the firing mode on your rifle and it gets easier (and does more dmg per shot so you can conserve ammo)
15/10/2009 at 18:54 Gorgeras says:
It was just another gorgeous(on the imaginary magic rig CryTek used for their demonstrations, confined to just small and atypical scenarios with not much going on) but bland modern shooter.
15/10/2009 at 19:29 subedii says:
Or a gorgeous and absolutely awesome shooter, depending on who you ask. Subjective subjective OLOL.
We get it, you hated Crysis, fine, whatever. Please realise that a lot of us thought it was a really good game, and that’s not because we’re taken in by the hype, however much you like to portray it that way.
The key thing about Crysis is that it really allowed for the player to choose their own approach to any scenario that cropped up. When I played the demo I was pretty much instantly hooked on the game. In the short time between then and actually getting the game, I must have played through the starting level about six times. And the thing is, each playthrough was almost completely different. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve played through the harbour level in the full game. The scope for creativity in the combat scenarios is just right, the best levels being where you’re essentially dumped onto islands, given your tools, and told “fulfil these objectives here, here, and here. Everything else is up to you.”
A comparison video I saw a while back made an interesting point of what makes Crysis different here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyQTCeobZlg
Admittedly it’s not that professional and a bit gushy, but I feel he really nailed the point at the end. In a game like CoD4, if you like it or don’t, it’s nothing to do with how you choose to play it, it’s all about the scripted sequence (and arguably, there’s no popular FPS more scripted than CoD4). In Crysis it’s all about how you choose to play it. If you play it like a bland and linear shooter, that’s exactly how it’s going to end up.
Incidentally, it’s difficult for me to say that the Crysis computer was mythical when my two year old PC can run it really well.
15/10/2009 at 19:31 subedii says:
Or a gorgeous and absolutely awesome shooter, depending on who you ask. Subjective subjective OLOL.
We get it, you hated Crysis, fine. Please realise that a lot of us thought it was a really good game, and that’s not because we’re taken in by the hype, however much you like to portray it that way.
The key thing about Crysis is that it really allowed for the player to choose their own approach to any scenario that cropped up. When I played the demo I was pretty much instantly hooked on the game. In the short time between then and actually getting the game, I must have played through the starting level about six times. And the thing is, each playthrough was almost completely different. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve played through the harbour level in the full game. The scope for creativity in the combat scenarios is just right, the best levels being where you’re essentially dumped onto islands, given your tools, and told “fulfil these objectives here, here, and here. Everything else is up to you.”
A comparison video I saw a while back made an interesting point of what makes Crysis different here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyQTCeobZlg
Admittedly it’s not that professional and a bit gushy, but I feel he really nailed the point at the end. In a game like CoD4, if you like it or don’t, it’s nothing to do with how you choose to play it, it’s all about the scripted sequence (and arguably, there’s no popular FPS more scripted than CoD4). In Crysis it’s all about how you choose to play it. If you play it like a bland and linear shooter, that’s exactly how it’s going to end up.
Incidentally, it’s difficult for me to say that the Crysis computer was mythical when my two year old PC can run it really well.
15/10/2009 at 19:32 subedii says:
And double post hooray. I can’t wait for when the edit button finally makes its triumphant return
15/10/2009 at 20:40 Wooly says:
I’m still waiting for Lucasarts to remake some Monkey Islands on the CryEngine 3! *hopes*
15/10/2009 at 20:40 Polprav says:
Hello from Russia!
Can I quote a post in your blog with the link to you?
15/10/2009 at 21:42 V. Tchitcherine says:
Sometimes I get the impression that the overwhelming majority of grief directed at Crysis is from spurned gamers who like jilted lovers attack the game because they could not run the game anywhere near high settings. I mean, the story was not special and the dialogue either unremarkable or lamentable but it was certainly better than many other games, especially the original Far Cry.
The presentation was extraordinary and the gameplay was extremely diverse, often I wanted to play far more of a particular section than was on offer, such as terribly impressive tank offensive. The graphics have also yet to be surpassed on technical grounds even now, two years after release. The gameplay itself was extremely emergent and quite open given the diverse array of approaches, tactics, tricks and cunning one can deploy against unfortunate soldiers.
It’s an incredible shooter which certainly is not bland, though it has a somewhat bland storyline.
15/10/2009 at 22:41 Hug_dealer says:
crysis fails because of this.
Worst end boss battle ever. Seriously i felt like i was in a 3d fps contra game during it. It so incredibly simple, and followed all the rules that generic boss must do in a game. it tells you when its going to shoot, he tells you what its weaknesses are, etc etc.
That right there turned a decently fun game into a turd sandwich. I though, i faught through all that just for this. what a crap, utter crap. I follow up with not buying warhead because of it. Even my damn grandma was like "shoot there sonny, my boss battles did the exact same thing 80 years ago."
16/10/2009 at 05:10 Psychopomp says:
HOW *DARE* A GAME HAVE A BAD BIT IN IT?
15/10/2009 at 22:45 toro says:
Crysis is one of the most sterile FPS that I’ve played. Why? Because a great game is more than just graphics and Crysis is only graphics. It’s a real achievement when no weapon in Crysis is feeling right. Even the weapon from the last Dust 514 trailer has more personality than any weapon from Crysis. For any CS/COD4 players is hard to take those weapons seriously. Add the constant floating of the player and Crysis feels like Quake, without push backs from weapons, you could say that DM4 time is back.
The entire game feels like a arcade shooter and all the gimmicks are just a shield used to hide the shallow game mechanics. SS2/Deus EX had emergent gameplay and to a minimal extent Dead Space/Bioshock had emergent gameplay. Crysis is just a soulless technological demo. Peace.
15/10/2009 at 23:15 Dominic White says:
“Crysis is one of the most sterile FPS that I’ve played. Why? Because a great game is more than just graphics and Crysis is only graphics.”
Y’wha? It has some of the best AI in any game, period, and lets you play it in almost any manner you want. I’m seriously convinced that the people who hated Crysis have no imagination whatsoever. I’ve heard plenty of people complaining that they beat the entire game just crouching in the jungle and headshotting people over and over again and then complaining that they didn’t do anything interesting.
Meanwhile, I’m punching through buildings, throwing guys off cliffs and kidnapping people from squads.
15/10/2009 at 23:28 Vandelay says:
I think your right, Dominic. I remember playing the demo of Crysis when it first came out and being slightly underwhelmed, not helped by it running fairly poorly. When I got a new graphics card I thought I would try it out again had an absolute blast once I started pissing about with it. You can create loads of fun by mixing up all the different abilities and really missing with the enemy. I’ve still yet to play the full game, but I will certainly get the pack with the original and Warhead at some point.
16/10/2009 at 04:27 Legionary says:
A version of this article was originally posted by Jim, but it was about CryENGINE2 I seem to remember. I guess you were the only person to reply to it before John re-did the article, and he ‘moved’ your comment so that it didn’t just disappear.
16/10/2009 at 04:53 Ian says:
This again?
GSC has stated multiple times that it would not use CryEngine 2 for any of it’s games.
And, since CryEngine 3 is less technically impressive than 2, I doubt that a shoddier version for consoles will be used by a PC developer.
16/10/2009 at 07:16 Spacewalk says:
I liked the part where all the boxes got blown away.
16/10/2009 at 11:17 Chaz says:
Well, that looks nice. Guess I’d better get ready to see the bank manager, for a loan to buy a new PC.
16/10/2009 at 12:14 frymaster says:
I’d just like to +1 the “just because you can’t run it maxed out and you can run everything else maxed out doesn’t make it badly optimised” comments. maybe it just means their “max” goes higher than everyone elses.
I’m reminded of people saying the same thing about gta4 when it transpired that maxing it out meant drawing 9 times as much stuff as the console version due to a larger draw distance, for exampe
16/10/2009 at 14:35 Gorgeras says:
Both complaints about GTA 4 and Crysis were justified. Crysis was not enormously more better-looking than games that have come out since, the quality of work was inconsistent in that whilst people looked like they really had realistic skin(notable exceptions being the spy held in the school who looked like those things ouf of Cocoon the way she glowed), the buildings and their interiors could have come straight out of a Source engine game. The whole thing was awful on Medium settings, the disparity between Medium and High settings was huge and the whole thing suffered from terrible dynamic scaling where whole scenes were drawn unneccessarily whilst objects were popping up 20 metres ahead of you.
The problem with GTA 4 is that you could stick it on the exact same settings consistent with either of the consoles and the PC did not see a better performance increase, it should have been vast. You got very little improvement from down-scaling and the benchmark that came with it was a joke that at no point pressures the engine as much as the actual game will in most circumstances. This was not a CPU limited game like everyone claimed; it’s an engine limited game that was most certainly not re-done from scratch for the PC like Rockstar claimed. If you play Unreal on a modern PC, you won’t see a huge performance boost over the best PCs when it came out; that’s what I mean by engine limited. The same will be the case with GTA 4: Rockstar’s claims that the higher settings are intended for ‘future tech’, in a game that doesn’t actually properly utilise more cores than two, doesn’t take advantage of 64-bit proccessing, has no anti-aliasing, no SLI or Crossfire support, probably isn’t even using nvidia unified shaders properly(as evidence by some people experiencing glitches that put the frame-rate at over 100 but with broken shader effects). This game will not see any significant performance increase in the future and even nVidia and ATI acknowledge this enough that they have not done the slightest damn thing with their drivers since release to get more out of it; it isn’t worth the effort.
16/10/2009 at 12:30 Melupom says:
I really do hope that GSC move to CE3 – for all its goodness 2 or 3 years ago GSC hasn’t done all that much to improve the Xray engine for CoP other than do pretty much what various mod teams were able to do on the original engine for SoC – the handful of new effects barely bring it up to CE2 standard, and no doubt any improvements done by modders will totally destroy the optimisation of the engine, unlike what appears to be the case with CE3.
17/10/2009 at 00:46 Blurr says:
I think a lot of people missed the bit of the STALKER Call of Pripyat announcement that said stand alone expansion (now I dono about you but that means “same tec, new story and bits” to me).
I would love to see the Zone in CryEngine 3 tec (can you imagine the Red Forest at night with a blood sucker on your tail?!) but I would rather they incremented XRay to 2.0 rather then drop what was (and still is) actually not a bad engine at all.
As for the Crysis bashing I think O might indulge in a bit of it myself….. My problem with it was that, yes you can go and punch ppl off of cliffs and kidnap them but even if the move your trying to pull fails and your left in the middle of 15 enemies you can still survive with ease. There is no challenge because its basically impossible to die
16/10/2009 at 17:51 Gamer! says:
good news!
18/10/2009 at 23:25 GOnzale$$$ says:
Stalker > Crysis …. Xray < Cryengine 3 ……. Stalker 2 = Cryengine 3 …that's what i want to see
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