How does crysis achieve its shadows?

I notice the shadows in crysis are truely supreme, wonderful shadow and lighting engine, all realtime. Hows it done?

They used coders, artists and few PCs... and wrote this too:

http://portal.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=1281671&type=pdf&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=15151515&CFTOKEN=6184618

It seems to be what they call "dot3shadows"

After reviewing that CryEngine 2 .pdf, one thing I noticed is that their water mesh is composed of perfect triangles instead of 2 triangles arranged to form a quad. I find that interesting.

Quite an amazing read that.

Well sibs, hop to it.

think they use a lot of ambient occlusion maps, when I load a saved game the textures pop up over a few seconds and I can see the ambient occlusion map on some meshes before the diffuse and normal map textures kick in

Deferred renderer with cascaded shadow maps.

What the hell are "perfect triangles"?

Prahaps?

Excuse me, an equilateral triangle where each internal angle is 60 degrees...

As opposed to an equilateral triangle with three angles of some number other than 60 degrees? ;)

I wonder how much CryEngine 2 costs? Also, it's probably good for this sort of game, but maybe not for an abstract type world, sort of like a Tron "inside the computer" look or something that would look like the visuals from the movie "The Last Starfighter" outer space scenes, where realism isn't really what is needed.

I think it's all taylor made for the Sandbox editor and the type of gameplay Crytek is looking for. Some technology in there is probably good for a lot of other types of game, but it doesn't look like a generic game engine. Still an incredible engine none the less.

I'm still mostly interested in the raytrace type graphics.

Well the original CryEngine cost a lot more than the Unreal Warfare engine, so you can probably reasonably assume that the latest version costs considerably more than the Unreal 3 engine. I don't see why price is really an issue though, as if you had the money to make a game which did the engine justice you'd have the money to use the engine, and money is not usually a barrier to development anyway. ( For example, the Unreal Engine is often licensed with a relatively small up-front payment if they like the product. )

Mmmhmm.

Still, I wonder what's the significance of using equilateral triangles for water. Any of the water created by coders in this forum has used a quad type approach.

I think it is a minor detail. They probably tried it, thought it looked slightly better than quads, and decided to use it.

I would say that using triangles gives you more fined grained detail than quads and probably makes the overall shape less blocky.

I read the PDF too, it's pretty impressive.

Using triangles like that can help you avoid a grid look to things.

Cloth sims work pretty good with triangles too, and you can usually get by with less polys without things looking blocky.

@Mustang
Interesting read, thanks! Are there more such Crysis PDFs around?

More? Haven't really looked/asked but there's at least this:

http://crymod.com/thread.php?threadid=9702

Interesting stuff there too, but only if you like engine manuals/docs.

Thanks!

-> http://doc.crymod.com/frames.html?frmname=topic&frmfile=index.html

Wouldnt it be better (for cloth sims, water...) to use equilaterals laid out in a tesselating hexagonal array? What with hexagons being the most efficiet shape to cover a 2D space with.

i know... they are using the devil shadow system!