I replayed the game ; and you can cut bended trees in several parts,
no , in fact that's a real optimised function to divide (cut) a mesh
in some others.

Indeed the engine has some cool features after big use of LOD

There is a free SSS Shader on the internet somewhere - SSS for faces. I can't remember where it is exactly, but if you do a search it will come up

You can shoot and break pretty much everything. Nothing is pre broken and everything is done in real time. The SSS effects are incredible. This game is going to rock!

For your enjoyment, I took these screenshots yesterday.

great screenshots not much special about the first one but the others are great. SSS is sadly very subtle, making it difficult to see what it is actually doing most of the time -- in this case the faces look great but the gentle lighting could easily be achieved with a subtle blurry environment map (for the reflecting of the sky's colour) and a very soft 1d sampler for the normal mapping. or the lighting could be done by an environment map as well (independent of the camera's angle and position). a lot of it is a good skin with baked ambient occlusion. the effectiveness of SSS would probably be much more prominent in a scene where the characters are casting shadows.

of course, that doesn't stop it from looking really impressive.

i'd still really like to see some shots on low- and medium-settings.

julz

we should talk and post screenshots of the world editor

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We have three different ways of breaking in the Sandbox.

1. procedural breaking
2. jointed objects
3. pre broken objects


1. Procedural breaking

In this technique we are using direct physicalized render geometry. There are no extra proxys which would make this method very heavy on physic performance. It’s used for glass and trees. We define a subtract object which will be subtracted from the object placed in level. This object is also giving the mapping and material details for what the cut is.


2. Jointed objects

A Jointed Object contains different sub objects which are held together by joints. Joints are helper objects which give strength information for the connection at this point of the object. After breaking a joint you could also define pieces which will displace the old object. You can also joint procedural breaking objects.


3. Pre broken objects

Pre broken objects consist of main part, remain part and pieces. The main part has health. If health is over, the pieces and the remaining part is spawned. This is a more or less historical object class. We try to avoid this kind of breaking object and rebuild it with jointed versions instead.


Vegetation can only include procedural breaking. But there are also two more techniques which allow branches and leaves to bend.

1. touch bending
2. wind bending

1. Touch bending

This is used for vegetation and object collision. It’s a bone which is instanced on all meshes in one object which share the same mapping coordinates. You can use different amount of bones for one object and give them different amount of pivots. When ever something hits one of these bones, the object part will bend.

2. Wind bending

Wind bending is vertex color based. We define different colors for different behaviors. Blue is for up and down, red for side movement and green for overall variation. Later in shader you can say how strong which color should bend. This way you can tell a palm leaf to bend more on the outer side than on the inside.

Not every branch can break. This will happen in 5 years time when hardware has more power. Generally speaking, everything is breakable that we define to be breakable
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I have a Laptop with a geforce GTX260 and a quad core and crysis runs all settings on very high and my pc completely destorys the game... It looks beautiful. alot of the effects can be done in 3dgs. but the sheer number of pixels that crysis pushes is almost impossible to do in 3dgs. The real-time ocean shader is complex...not just a plane with some effects. I could imagine some active terrain deformation to immitate the ocean shader. Ive seen some recreations of the shader but i dont remember where. HDR(not real HDR) is already possible with Shade-c. Motion blur on the other hand i have yet to see much about but im positive it is possible but not in the same fashion that it is implemented in crysis. Detail mapping has been around forever and is possible in 3dgs without really compromising frame rate. Theres a whole number of other effects that go on in crysis that i havent mentioned. alot of them are possible...but all at the same time would take some serious shader optimization.

Some very serious; As far as I know, the CryEngine uses detail normal mapping on every surface, plus more shaders for specified effects; I think the smallest problem are the post effects, the objects shaders are what makes the engine struggle. I think lots of these effects are possible with A7, but not in combination, the sheer number of effects is too high.

If you are really interested, then it is easy to find detailed informations about the render model in Crysis:
http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch16.html

It looks like they use deferred rendering: "In CryENGINE 2, we use a deferred rendering approach, by first rendering a z-pass and writing depth into a floating-point texture."

But I also read somewhere else, that they use a combination of deferred and traditional forward rendering. The new Torque3d engine does it in a similar way. I am not sure about Unreal3.

Foxfire is as far as I know the only one working on a similar solution for Gamestudio. The standard way to put just some shaders together will probably be too slow.

New CryEngine 3 Demo
http://kotaku.com/5335483/new-cryengine-3-demo