CryENGINE® 3 - Specifications

Characters and faces are becoming features of almost all modern AAA titles, and Crytek is in the vanguard of the quest to achieve realistic individuals in real- time graphics, as demonstrated in Crysis®. CryENGINE®3 brings together the most technically advanced, integrated and scalable animation and graphics technology to deliver astonishingly real characters to cross-platform games, at no extra licensing cost.

CREATE CONVINCING, LIFELIKE CHARACTERS

• Character Animation System
  The new character animation system considerably raises the standard of the art in real-time characteranimation. A dedicated character editor lets designers preview animations inside CryENGINE®3 Sandbox™ across all supported platforms, while the powerful animation tools allow animators to visually define the states and transitions of a character to ensure realism is achieved in concert with aesthetic quality.

• Character Individualization System
  CryENGINE®3 uses an innovative attachment system that lets skinned, animated, or physicalized elements be attached to the skeleton or mesh of a character. With this system, it's even possible to replace entire body parts such as heads, hands or the upper and lower body in real-time. A multiplatform, hardware-based, shape-deformation system also allows flexible variation of the character meshes, supporting manual and procedural generation to ensure a small memory footprint. An additional variation system based on shaders can be used for dirt and decals for clothes, as well as war paint, tattoos and camouflage for skin.

• Parametric Skeletal Animation
  By blending example-motions based on user-defined parameters, CryENGINE®3 delivers responsive and interactive control over a character, with a focus on believability. Characters in CryENGINE®3 can follow paths where the direction and speed changes smoothly or suddenly, move up or downhill and react to changing scenarios on-the-fly – blending animations to create representation of movement that's believable and realistic, yet dynamic and game-controlled.

• Procedural Motion Warping & High-End IK Solutions
  Procedural algorithms such as CCD-IK, analytic IK, examplebased IK or physical simulations are all used to augment pre-authored animations to avoid the typical computergenerated look that is often seen when combining artificial and captured animations. The CryENGINE®3 scalable, cross-platform warping technique preserves the style and the content of the base motion, despite the transformations complying with the ever-changing constraints.

• Unique Dedicated Facial Animation Editor
  The powerful facial animation editing tool within CryENGINE®3 SandboxTM uses audio waveform analysis technology to extract phonemes (and other key features of speech) to animate facial features and provide convincing lip-sync. The sophisticated yet convenient user interface allows expressions to be defined and combined, then animated quickly and intuitively to multiple models across multiple platforms. The CryENGINE®3 video tracking tool first captures movements from an actor’s face. These movements are then transferred directly to the facial model in the editor, where the expressions can be combined with the lip sync and/or further edited by an animator.

• Subsurface Scattering
  This unique tool simulates the diffusion and diffraction of light transmitted through translucent objects like ice or jade. The CryENGINE®3 unified solution can be used on in-game assets such as trees and plants, or to create realistic human skin.

Realistically rendered and animated characters require state-of-the-art AI systems to respond intelligently to the game environment and maintain the illusion of realism. CryENGINE®3 features powerful, scalable and flexible AI technology that handles character behaviors with modular sensory systems (such as sight and hearing) and supports the complex requirements of the locomotion system. AI in CryENGINE®3 requires no additional middleware and is fully integrated for your game within CryENGINE®3 SandboxTM, with WYSIWYP functionality on all platforms.

• Designer-Friendly AI Editing System
  CryENGINE®3 SandboxTM lets designers control basic AI behaviors using the flow-graph visual scripting system, placing most AI gameplay control in their hands. Simple LUA scripting enhances the variability of these behaviors, creating more complex AI responses and even extending state machine performance. This combination of systems enables the creation of any AI behavior through an extremely simple WYSIWYP pipeline.

• Dynamic Path Finding
  Advanced 2D and 3D algorithms allow the AI navigation paths to be modified in real-time in response to events which may create, modify or destroy existing paths – a critical feature for creating believable AI in a highly interactive and destructible environment.

• Automated Layer Nagivation Mesh Generation
  CryENGINE®3 features an automated navigation mesh generation for AI pathfinding that's unlike most waypoint-based systems, creating paths and information about the vicinity. The system is unified for indoor and outdoor areas and generated automatically, within volumes placed by designers. Generated nav-mesh supports multi-storey surfaces (such as floors in a building), special moves (jumps, climbing) and adapts itself in real-time to dynamic obstacles.

CryENGINE®3 VIVID INTERACTIVE WORLDS

CryENGINE®2 introduced incredibly interactive photo-realistic worlds, with huge natural environments that responded to player input and game events as if in the real world. From naturally frozen nature to fully destructible vegetation and buildings, players saw the game world as near-real for the first time. CryENGINE®3 continues to raise the standard of interactive realism in worlds that are limited in size only by the development budget, thanks to intelligent
streaming of game data.

INVENT SPECTACULAR, BELIEVABLE WORLDS

• Natural World Effects
  CryENGINE®3 features the most natural-looking environments available in real-time – adding enhanced natural lighting to its existing large-scale natural world representations.

• Fully flexible time of day system
  The time of day changes dynamically during a game mission to reflect the position of the sun and moon, as well as lighting and atmospheric conditions over any predefined day/night cycle, from a foggy morning sunrise to a fiery sunset or a clear moonlit night. Create visually rich time-of-day simulation for your game world or its locations and achieve the most realistic or creatively surreal settings.

• High Quality 3D Water
  Crytek has spearheaded the creation of realistic, real-time 3D water in games over the past 10 years with X-Isle, Far Cry® and Crysis®. CryENGINE®3 water and ocean surfaces can be modified according to wind and wave direction, generating soft shoreline effects automatically where the water meets the shore or bank, depending on the shoreline contour and water depth. In the same way, caustics simulation creates the most realistic-looking moving shadows and highlights in underwater environments that are available in real-time 3D.

• Dynamic Volumetric Light Beams & Light Shaft Effects
  Designers can use these illumination effects to create visually stunning light beams and shadows when light intersects with solid, highly detailed geometry. They can also be utilized to generate god-ray phenomena in skies, on earth and through water.

• Streaming
  Game levels rarely fit into the memory of most hardware platforms, so streaming content is often required. With the CryENGINE®3 scalable streaming solution, data is clustered for fast access, platform- specific features are utilized and data content is prepared and compressed for optimal streaming. CryENGINE®3 uses multiple CPUs and schedules access based on dynamic priorities to deliver an efficient and scalable multi-platform streaming solution.

• Integrated Multi-threaded High Performance Physics Engine
  CryENGINE®3 physics can be applied to almost everything in a game world – including buildings, props, trees and vegetation – to model realistic reactions to forces such as wind currents, explosions, gravity, friction and collisions with other objects. All this can be done without the need for external middleware.

• Interactive & Destructible Environments
  All environments in CryENGINE®3 can be dynamically physicalized, regardless of their nature (wood, steel, concrete, natural vegetation, cloth and soft body physics). This allows procedural destruction and deformation of as much of the
  environment as the game requires. All broken objects and parts can be interactive, with realistic properties such as mass or buoyancy applied to all kinds of debris.

• Advanced Rope Physics
  Bendable vegetation that responds to wind, rain or character movement, realistically interactive rope bridges and physically driven creature tentacle animations are just some of the uses to which Crytek has put its rope physics technology.

In 1999, Crytek started working with a new team on ambitious games that no existing technology could deliver. By concentrating our efforts on CryENGINE® as much as our games, we found that we improved as developers. Great tools make great developers!

The benchmarks that Crytek set for graphics performance and quality in our games are matched by the performance and quality of the development tools used by our internal teams and all our engine licensees. CryENGINE®3 features many innovations to accelerate development and ensure teams are able to maximise their own creativity without delays or painful development processes when building multi-platform game content.

• Performance Analysis Tools
  Powerful instrumentation features let the developer analyze engine performance in real time, create detailed memory-usage reports and run automated walkthroughs of each level to get consistent test results from build to build.

• CryENGINE®3 Sandbox™ Development Layers
  In a similar fashion to most professional art programs, CryENGINE®3 SandboxTM features a layers system that allows controlled separation of a game level. By locking any elements into (up to) 256 layers, each can be worked on in parallel, exported, imported and merged. This system lets an entire team of developers make changes on a single level simultaneously, without impacting on each other’s work. Such unequalled parallel control of levels, local and layered source control of assets and clearly organized level data management significantly increases development progress.

• Polybump™2.0
  Crytek developed Polybump™ in 2001 and shipped Far Cry® in March 2004, as the first game ever to feature normal mapping powered by Polybump™. Polybump™ can be used either as a stand-alone utility, or be fully integrated with other tools such as 3ds Max®. Polybump™ creates a high quality surface description that allows quick extraction of surface features like normal maps (tangentspace or object-space), displacement maps, non-occluded area direction, accessibility and other related properties. The extracted information can be used to render low-poly models with surface detail that's almost indistinguishable from higher-poly models at high-render speeds. The data is stored in a intermediate file format so it can be exported in different ways without having to redo the computation. Even very high polygon counts (such as 10 million triangles) can be processed quickly with the improved Polybump™ 2.0 technology.

• Offline Rendering
  Creating streaming videos or still images from within the game is made easier by the inclusion of specific console commands which can output a scene at any arbitrary screen resolution and/or aspect ratio, including generating auto-stitched panoramic views for use on 360-degree projection video displays. Creating marketing material becomes a matter of a single button-press!

• Resource Compiler
  Resource compiler assets are compiled from their original formats to an optimized, platform-dependent one by the resource compiler at project-build time. This facilitates global changes (such as mip-map computation or mesh stripification) to the output data, depending on presets and target platforms, without either affecting the final level-loading times or requiring developers to keep multiple versions of assets on hand for different platforms.

• Data-driven Sound System
  Complex sounds can be easily created and delivered with studio quality, while supporting any available surround-sound speaker configuration up to 7.1. Multi-platform compatibility, improved data streaming and individual performance optimization for the Xbox 360TM or PlayStation®3 are all guaranteed by the included sound library FMOD Ex®.

• In Game Mixing & Profiling
  Integrated editor functionality and advanced sound-specification tools ensure the WYSIWYP method. Turnaround times of only a few seconds ensure a well-mixed game in every development stage. Reviewing and polishing
  the game audio through network auditioning, and then profiling it on any target platform both possible and easy, at any time.

• Dynamic Sounds & Interactive Music
  With minimal coding effort, sounds can automatically react in a complex manner to parameters such as distance, time of day or battle noise using real time DSP effects. This technique provides non-repetitive and responsive audio feedback in an interactive and physicalized game world. The customizable music system reacts to any desired game event, giving the player a movie-like emotional experience.

• Environmental Audio
  Sound designers can create a dense sound impression by accurately reproducing sounds from nature, with seamless blending between different environments sweetened with one-shot sounds on top. Newtechnology allows ambient sound to be directional in the distance and then open up into a surround mix the closer the player gets.

• Key frame Accurate Sounds in Animations
  In CryENGINE®3, it's now possible to trigger sounds by adding them directly onto blended animations to improve implementation of all foley effects – allowing, for example, limping characters over several walk cycles. Adding audio assets onto animation attachments in this way efficiently increases character individualization.

• Sound Moods
  Audio mixes can be defined to match any gameplay situation. Sound designers can not only control volume and pitch, but also add DSP effects such as filters and equalizers. In-game, the audio mix blends into the predefined sound
  moods in real-time and mimics the current environmental effect such as, for example, driving inside a tank.