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[ClovingWestbrook]

There's a dev kit coming, but not one including all the game assets like in crysis 1 (or UDK that you got with unreal 3).

Can't sell that DLC if people be making maps for free now can you.

Then what is this?

 

[Alxjn]

There's a dev kit coming, but not one including all the game assets like in crysis 1 (or UDK that you got with unreal 3).

Can't sell that DLC if people be making maps for free now can you.

Crytek has said they're releasing both an sdk AND an editor.

Hello to all of you.

Here at Crytek we value our community, and we love what you do with our engine. In recent times our focus has been heavily on the development of Crysis 2, however our modding community has been, and remains, very important to us.

So, I wanted to tell you about our plans for supporting you in the future with some really exciting news, which I want to share with you now. Modding with the most powerful game engine is coming back!

We want to see what you guys can do with CryENGINE 3 and we hope we'll be as amazed with the things you create as we have been over the past few years. This time around, we're going to do things in a different way - offering you the right tools to achieve your vision.

First of all, we will be launching an Editor for Crysis 2 early in summer. This will allow you to build new maps, items and more custom content for Crysis 2. For teams looking for even more creative freedom, we have another option: The free CRYENGINE SDK.
Be Free

In August 2011 we will be launching a free CryENGINE SDK. If you want to use it for fun, like all our previous MOD SDKs it will be completely free of charge, to anyone who wants to play with it! You just register, download the SDK with a personalized license key and you're good to go!
Be Creative

We'll be giving you access to the latest, greatest version of CryENGINE 3 - the same engine we use internally, the same engine we give to our licensees, the same engine that powers Crysis 2.

This will be a complete version of our engine, including C++ code access, our content exporters (including our LiveCreate real-time pipeline), shader code, game sample code from Crysis 2, script samples, new improved Flowgraph and a whole host of great asset examples, which will allow teams to build complete games from scratch for PC.
Be The Developer

With all this power in your hands - we know you're going to do some amazing things with the engine, so we're working out how best to support you.

We'll also be sharing our documentation with you, which is written by the developers of the engine, and we'll be giving you a new and improved crymod.com. We'll update the Free CryENGINE SDK regularly, to make sure you have access to all the advances we make to CryENGINE 3.

If you want to use it to make a game to launch commercially, we'd like to help you with that. If you want to take your product down a traditional commercial route, we will offer an innovative low cost licensing model if you want to release your game digitally.

If you're looking to use CryENGINE for non-gaming purposes, we'll have a per-seat business model for the engine - please enquire at mycryengine.com for further details.

So to go over the details again:

Our next release will be the Crysis 2 Editor, this is for those of you who want to create content for Crysis 2. In August 2011, we will launch our Free CryENGINE SDK for all of you who want to create totally new content on CryENGINE 3. If you just want to make fun, free projects, you can do that free of charge. If you want to try and commercialise your game, we'll be here to help you with that.

I truly value the contribution you have all made to our company and I hope we can continue giving back to you in future.

All the best,



Cevat Yerli

CEO & President of Crytek

 

[Foliorum Viridum]

It's a shame this is happening now and wasn't available at release.

Lazy.

 

[Anton Sugar]

LOOK AT THE BRICKS

 

[Vitet]

For blind people:

Every brick has volume now, in DX9 it's just a flat textured surface

 

[BIONIC-ARRRMMM!!]

Wow, a bit touchy there. I'm a console gamer too. I find I have a much lower attention span for games on consoles than I did when I was an exclusive PC gamer. Now I play both again, and I still find myself having a low attention span, as a function of playing too many games each month.

Try your very best to not make shit personal. It makes you look juvenile.

Sorry, but still, don't post insane generalizations if you don't want to be responded to...

 

[Corky]

Way to pick out the worst example.

Yeah you're right, the first shot I was shown just happened to be the worst example sorry my bad.

 

[Mithos]

Look closer.
The bricks actually have volume.

But it's day and night difference, we shouldn't have to watch closer to spot it.

Spoiler

It's more obvious when seeing the pictures switch back and forth.

 

[thetrin]

Sorry, but still, don't post insane generalizations if you don't want to be responded to...

You could have just asked for clarification. No reason to fly off the handle at the first sight of opinions that clash with your own.

 

[BlackDove]

For blind people:

Every brick has volume now, in DX9 it's just a flat textured surface

Yes.

Now it is revolutionary.

 

[How About No]

First of all, we will be launching an Editor for Crysis 2 early in summer.

But...it's already near the end of June.

Edit: BlackDove, I wish you a long and bountiful life on GAF

 

[BattleMonkey]

You can see the bricks get more polygons by the fact that they pop out of the wall now. I bet that wall looked pretty shit to you before, but now it's the best wall ever made.

Allocating more computing resources to a brick wall, for non-existent graphical fidelity improvements.

Ingenious development strategy.

Ten out of ten, game of the year.

Adding improvements to a game that already looks fantastic, that seems like a nice bonus to me.

 

[SneakyStephan]

Tesselation! Our precious flat rubble piles will finally be complete! :3



I think the problem with POM is its refusal to work with texture filtering, making the farther part always look like a blurry mess at extreme angles (at least in Crysis). Also, when POM also created a strange warpy effect on cliffs and around edges:

Pretty sure tesselation doesn't have this problem, but I don't know much.

Pom does work with AF, a modder has since gotten it to work just fine.
The first pom screenshot I posted is pom+AF.

 

[Vitet]

I kept reading pom as porn until that last post and I was wondering why the first Crysis 1 screenshoots didn't have any chicks on it.

 

[Raistlin]

But it's day and night difference, we shouldn't have to watch closer to spot it.

Spoiler

It's more obvious when seeing the pictures switch back and forth.

Well ... I'm not quite sure why it needed to be pointed out ... seemed obvious to me?


Regardless, it's something that certainly would be easy to spot in motion. For example with this particular scene, you'd see the obvious vertical line for the edge of the bricks when strafing or walking by it. With tessellation on, the line would be completely absent. You'd see natural, organic modeling in its place.

Like many things in graphics, seeing it in motion is where the difference becomes quite noteworthy.

 

[Stallion Free]

Pom does work with AF, a modder has since gotten it to work just fine.
The first pom screenshot I posted is pom+AF.

No one ever seems to have a link to the mod.

 

[Alexios]

The screens show the POM effects of Crysis 1 too. But will those only be viable for people with DX11 cards now? No DX10 anymore? I'd have thought theyd ditch DX9 first, then eventually 10, instead of just killl the middle first... I'd have liked to get a little better performance using DX10 at least, if not add some more bells and whistles on top too...

 

[SneakyStephan]

Crytek has said they're releasing both an sdk AND an editor.

That is great news, and not what they initially said.
They said no new cryeditor for the game, but a seperate free SKD for indy devs and fans (aka just the editor with barebones asset/texture/material pack for people intending on making their own games and stuff from scratch.

 

[sp3000]

I think the problem with POM is its refusal to work with texture filtering, making the farther part always look like a blurry mess at extreme angles (at least in Crysis). Also, when POM also created a strange warpy effect on cliffs and around edges:

Pretty sure tesselation doesn't have this problem, but I don't know much.

No, there was a shader that allowed POM and anisotropic filtering to work together.

Tessellation is much easier to do than POM, which requires a specific parallax map for every texture that it is applied to. So its a mixture of laziness and the fact that modern GPUs have tons of extra horsepower laying around.

 

[DieH@rd]

So with this patch we get both POM and Tesselation. Sweet.

My GPU will cry.

 

[a176]

My ATI Radeon 8500's tessellation engine can finally be put to use!

 

[Gram Negative Cocci]

Maybe my eyes fail me, but huh? These shots look preeeetty similar to me...

The bricks are "3D". They seem to be No longer a texture but polygonal entities (technically they are still a texture). They pop-out of the wall.

Big question is do they cast self-shadow?

 

[mrfolego]

Will these downloads work for the Steam version?

Any clue about this anyone?

 

[pakkit]

It's a shame this is happening now and wasn't available at release.

Lazy.

It's not lazy. They were working on 3 different versions of a game. They gave PC the least amount of time up front because they knew they could work on it later, whereas console updates are more difficult to do. It's not fair, but hey, PC will definitely be the definitive version of the game once these extras come along, and the console ports are excellent.

 

[Alexios]

The bricks are "3D". They seem to be No longer a texture but polygonal entities (technically they are still a texture). They pop-out of the wall.

Big question is do they cast self-shadow?

I think the point of tessellation is you get actual geometry, not a lighting trick as with normal mapping. It should basically be a smooth as butter LOD setting that dynamically alters back and forth with seamless stages and no obvious pop in different states so they should have shadows. The extra texture layer (heightmap?) is used so that it can know what geometry exactly to create, instead of end up with something messy like that TruForm stuff. Don't quote me on all this though, I may be way way off just as well...

 

[BIONIC-ARRRMMM!!]

It's not lazy. They were working on 3 different versions of a game. They gave PC the least amount of time up front because they knew they could work on it later, whereas console updates are more difficult to do. It's not fair, but hey, PC will definitely be the definitive version of the game once these extras come along, and the console ports are excellent.

But the game itself was sadly rushed (And I actually love it), no amount of patching can fix that...

 

[dragonelite]

Had hoped they would use tessellation more for bullet and grenade damage like this.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff729715(v=vs.85).aspx

 

[jim-jam bongs]

What's the over/under on BlackDove making it to full member status?

 

[Gram Negative Cocci]

I think the point of tessellation is you get actual geometry, not a lighting trick as with normal mapping. It should basically be a smooth as butter LOD setting that dynamically alters back and forth with seamless stages and no obvious pop in different states so they should have shadows. The extra texture layer (heightmap?) is used so that it can know what geometry exactly to create, instead of end up with something messy like that TruForm stuff. Don't quote me on all this though, I may be way way off just as well...

Thanks, did not know that!

If they are real, new polys then it's even more impressive.

 

[L0st Id3ntity]

Call when they fix the worst A.I of all time.

 

[mr_nothin]

For ppl that dont see or understand what's going on in the Crysis 2 Bricks picture:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-10C60tF-7I

 

[Gravijah]

What's the over/under on Black Dove making it to full member status?

Gonna say somehow he makes it.

BIG MONEY BIG MONEY!

 

[qazqaNii]

Isn't the bricks with tesselation off, more realistic? I mean most apartments with bricks are made in one clean line and I barely see any houses made with bricks like that.

Well I will just go shit bricks for now.

 

[sp3000]

Thanks, did not know that!

If they are real, new polys then it's even more impressive.

It's still essentially a lazy substitute for actually hand making high poly models. Since the original models are designed for consoles, they just apply tessellation and call it a day. It looks better yeah, but not by a huge margin.

Now smarter devs would build up a high poly model for PC and scale it down for consoles. But laziness usually triumphs when it comes to such things.

 

[Alxjn]

That is great news, and not what they initially said.
They said no new cryeditor for the game, but a seperate free SKD for indy devs and fans (aka just the editor with barebones asset/texture/material pack for people intending on making their own games and stuff from scratch.

Ah ok, I'm glad they changed their mind. The editor for the original was a total time vampire, and I'd love to see some jungle maps for C2.

 

[RedSwirl]

Far Cry 2 landed intact though. I think it was a design decision more than a technical one. Directed experiences are the new thing. I can definitely see how a person might like one more than the other.

Far Cry 2 ended up being an incredibly shallow game though for how wide it was. Whenever such a sandbox game is made on consoles there have always been sacrifices somewhere whether it's model detail, AI, or general depth of level design. That's why stuff like Crysis 1 and STALKER are PC only, the only exceptions being Bethesda's games.

I think Crytek said that the main issue with Crysis 1 and consoles was insufficient RAM.

 

[SapientWolf]

It's still essentially a lazy substitute for actually hand making high poly models. Since the original models are designed for consoles, they just apply tessellation and call it a day. It looks better yeah, but not by a huge margin.

Now smarter devs would build up a high poly model for PC and scale it down for consoles. But laziness usually triumphs when it comes to such things.

Consoles can actually push more polys due to API overhead on the PC.

 

[SneakyStephan]

What's the over/under on BlackDove making it to full member status?

Pulling the junior card on him? That's classy...

@ stallion, you aren't going to suggest that xzero made it all up and the people who posted the screenshots and videos did too because incrysis had to rollback their forum?

I'm sure you'll find a link if you look around or pm a member on crymod.

 

[Alexios]

they just apply tessellation and call it a day. It looks better yeah, but not by a huge margin.

You don't "just apply" tessellation, otherwise you end up with shit like that ancient TruForm stuff that just round everything up with more polys and automatic approximations. The beauty of tessellation is you can tell it exactly what to create, like you say by having the high quality reference to pull (again, a lot like normal mapping - granted these days you don't necessarily have to actually model the high quality reference, you can also "paint" the details in something like Z-brush, but that still takes skill and work to be done effectively, and isn't optimal for everything). Obviously if they didn't bother creating high quality assets for the original launch they weren't gonna do it all now, so they stuck it on simpler things like bricks which are tiled and what not. But tessellation can be used in much more impressive ways as the various tech demos show and isn't a lazy solution.

Consoles can actually push more polys due to API overhead on the PC.

Uuuh, facepalm.gif? That's relative to their actual power, not relative to anything as you put it, considering how much more powerful computers can be built these days. So yeah, a console may push better visuals than a PC of comparable power, since it's a locked setup that can be exploited to its full ability without compromises for different configurations, but that doesn't mean they can push more polys than say, Stallion's PC can. Or any high end PC built in the last 3-5 years. Seriously, don't be silly.

 

[jett]

dat mismatched brick texture

nah i'm just kididng it looks nice

 

[Zombie James]

Really?

Really?

Please, in detail, describe exactly what you refer to as "cool" in that image.

It better not be the polygon re-distribution which makes the bricks re-align and make it appear as if they've been altered in any significant manner.

Because that is not cool. Not cool at all my good friend. Not cool at all.

The bricks actually look like bricks instead of a flat wall with brick-textured wallpaper.

 

[Detox]

No one ever seems to have a link to the mod.

I had been looking for this mod for ages as well, even posted in xzero's thread on crymod and he just ignored it. Someone on the Steam forums uploaded it, it is safe I have downloaded it and scanned with Malwarebytes and Avira.

 

[K.Jack]

Yes.

Now it is revolutionary.

Why are you being such a dickhead?

Not afraid of the J. Member permaban?

 

[CabbageRed]

Glad to hear that they have been hard at work. Im not a huge fps fan but enjoyed crysis and have been waiting for the "true pc" patch.

Also fun to see a Jilted and Venomous Ex-girlfriend meltdown. OT just doesn't do drama like it used to.

 

[Alxjn]

Far Cry 2 ended up being an incredibly shallow game though for how wide it was. Whenever such a sandbox game is made on consoles there have always been sacrifices somewhere whether it's model detail, AI, or general depth of level design. That's why stuff like Crysis 1 and STALKER are PC only, the only exceptions being Bethesda's games.

I think Crytek said that the main issue with Crysis 1 and consoles was insufficient RAM.

That's true. From my understanding, Crysis loads up a large chunk of the level, you can pretty much interact with things across the map and it keeps everything you've done to the level in memory. Even on low settings, it was using up around a gig of ram.

 

[jim-jam bongs]

I must admit that, although the difference isn't insanely dramatic in most instances, tessellation adds a huge amount of authenticity to the scene. Unless it's done really poorly like Dragon Age 2, then it just looks like wasted GPU cycles.

Gonna say somehow he makes it.

BIG MONEY BIG MONEY!

Dayum, you got huge cojones ese.

Pulling the junior card on him? That's classy...

What the fuck? I'm saying he's being extremely aggressive with his posts which can be a death-sentence when you're a junior member, I'm not having a go at him.

 

[cyberheater]

It's not just tessellation. The are several improvements for shadows, water, particles, depth of field and motion blur and other optimisations and improvements like realtime local reflections and contacts shadows. Some of the new screens look gobsmacking.

 

[kamspy]

The guy's only intention in this thread is trolling. No interest in Crysis 2 or a texture pack.

 

[Stallion Free]

@ stallion, you aren't going to suggest that xzero made it all up and the people who posted the screenshots and videos did too because incrysis had to rollback their forum?

I'm sure you'll find a link if you look around or pm a member on crymod.

No, that would be absolutely retarded.

But the mod does have mystical properties and fell into the bermuda triangle.

 

[Brofist]

Consoles can actually push more polys due to API overhead on the PC.

I wouldn't say that, it just allows the weaker console hardware to do more with what's given.