CryEngine and Far Cry: a tropical paradise for gamers and hell for PCs

Technological game engines have always been a sign of the quality of a future game project among true gamers. Some of them have been forgotten over the years, while others were passable and did not deserve attention. And we continue our series of articles in which we will talk about legendary game engines and graphics technologies. This time, we will mention CryEngine, which became synonymous with cool graphics in its time and became the ancestor of the eponymous series of computer games from Ubisoft.

The development of developers

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The late 90s and early 2000s were a unique time for technology, as megacorporations had not yet managed to take over the gaming industry. The history of gaming was created by enthusiasts, including students, geeks, and just ordinary computer enthusiasts. Therefore, it is not surprising that the German company Crytek was founded in 1999 by students of a German university of Turkish origin. Among them was a young programmer — Cevat Yerli and his brothers Avni and Faruk Yerli.

Like most enthusiasts, Jevat collected German computer magazines and copied out the code, and that’s how he learned to program His first game was “Trade It” — an economic simulator.

Later, Earley submitted Trade It to a contest he found in one of his magazines, and a few weeks later he got a call from the editor. He said that the work was great, but it was too long to print in the magazine, even if they published a double issue

Then he worked in the German offices of Black Legend Entertainment, a British company that published games for the Amiga, which later went bankrupt. The Internet helped him find people with common interests. That’s how he met professional graphic programmers, physicists, researchers, and people interested in creating games. By 1998, Earley had gathered them under the banner of a company he named Crytek. Together with these “people from the Internet,” he created three games and almost got expelled from the university.

X-Isle demo

In 1999, the three brothers traveled to Los Angeles to demonstrate their games, which had been previously recorded on a regular CD. They had a series of setbacks along the way, so they arrived at their destination without a single cent. However, with nerves and stubbornness, they managed to get NVIDIA to give them 15 minutes to launch the X-Isle demo after the E3 Expo 1999 closed.

And then they got a contract with NVIDIA to promote X-Isle as benchmarking software with every new NVIDIA graphics card next year. The incredible success of the collaboration with NVIDIA motivates the brothers to turn their development into a full-fledged engine for creating their own games and then create 2 games: “X-Isle and Engalus. But none of them was ever released.

Now let’s see what happened in the final version of the demo — X-Isle: Dinosaur Island. The demo was very advanced and demanding at the time, so owners of outdated systems were in for a lot of frustration with low FPS.

In the demo, you can set the 32-bit color depth, Z-buffer depth, and choose different rendering modes. By default, it starts with the Fly-high real-time movie demo. There are also interactive educational demos, bump mapping, reflection, and refraction demos.

Features of the CryEngine engine

When pixel and vertex shader version 3.0 graphics cards were released (GeForce 6 series (GeForce 6xxx) and ATI starting with the Radeon X1300), Crytek developed a version of the engine 1.2 that utilized some of the features of the 3.0 and 2.0b shaders to improve graphics quality.

The essence of the innovations was that on objects with complex lighting, especially when creating relief images, the old version 1.1 (or 1.0) calculated lighting in several passes. This consumed precious resources of old accelerators. The use of shaders 2.0b and 3.0 combined all these complex calculations into one very long new generation shader.

In general, shaders allowed the use of several visual effects, such as pixel-by-pixel lighting, bumpy reflections, refraction, animated textures, transparent computer displays, bullet holes, and more. Also, shaders were used to create fog, which was more realistic than other engines available at the time.

CryEngine introduced a texture creation method that uses real polygons to achieve a three-dimensional effect, unlike the normal maps used in bump mapping. It allowed creating more detailed and realistic images, especially when combined with self-shading technology.

PolyBump could reduce the total number of polygons in 3D graphics while maintaining high image quality. By reducing the number of polygons, it allowed more objects to be displayed on the screen without overloading the system. But on the other hand, the use of real polygons made the CryEngine game very processor-dependent.

Later, Crytek added support for DXTC5 for nVidia graphics cards and 3Dc for ATI graphics cardsand HDR.

Another interesting technology supported by CryEngine was Geometry Instancing, which significantly saved resources. Previously, when using the standard approach to rendering a scene and all its objects, only one object was generated in one Direct3D call (by vertices, illumination, etc.)

Prior to Geometry Instancing (GI), distant identical objects could be rendered as sprites, i.e. 2D textures. However, when approaching such two-dimensional objects and changing the view of the observer, their two-dimensionality was striking and spoiled the overall impression.

Geometry Instancing renders the geometry of all similar objects in a single Direct3D call. This significantly saved system resources and increased the realism of the scene. The first graphics cards to support hardware GI were nVidia GeForce 6800 (NV40) and ATI Radeon 9500 (R300). Microsoft first added this technology in Direct3D 9.

Far Cry — the birth of a legend

Nowadays, it is hard to meet a player who has not heard of the legendary series of games from Ubisoft. But the name Far Cry hides a crazy adventure hodgepodge of first-person shooters. Fans of the series have fought with whomever and whatever we have seen: from the African vastness, the crazy Vaas Montenegro, the cruel dictator, the cultists of Hope County, and ending with Far Cry: Primal, where we were transported to primitive times.

The younger generation probably does not know that the first Far Cry was different, primarily in terms of the plot. In addition, the game was several years ahead of its time, first offering conditionally an open world and a long list of graphical innovations. Progress was so fast that the game was quickly overtaken by competitors.

The system requirements looked serious at the time. Some old-timers can tell stories about how they played Far Cry on their Pentium III and Radeon 9500 at almost 60 fps without any problems. Through the prism of years, it is forgotten that even 15 FPS It was already looking good.

The resolution played a big role. While the frame rate on a GeForce 6600 was acceptable at 1024 x 768 pixels, the situation changed significantly at 1280 x 1024. At that time, users were just switching to “flat” monitors from their CRTs.

Graphics, physical model and artificial intelligence in Far Cry

After a spectacular (for its time) intro, the main character, a guy in a red Hawaiian shirt, finds himself stranded in an incomprehensible place. Wandering through the half-flooded corridors, one could already appreciate that this is a technologically very difficult game. But it really becomes clear when we finally get out into the open.

CryEngine did a great job with lighting and shadows, combining pre-calculated shadows in real time, combining them with stenciled shadows and lighting maps to create a dynamic environment. It supported the realization of high resolution, correct perspective, and three-dimensional “smooth” shadows.

After assessing the situation, the clever players immediately noticed the barrels that were begging to be shot at. And then there was a second surprise — after a spectacular explosion, objects realistically flew apart, and the blown-up mercenary floated on the surface of the water, throwing his red blood cells into the open ocean. Half-Life 2 will be released in six months, setting a new benchmark in physical effects.

The physics system did not use third-party engines like HAVOK, whose SDK was introduced in 2000. Instead, the engine perfectly supported the interaction with solids, liquids, and vehicles that appeared in the scenario. In addition, the engine successfully simulated the effects of tissues and soft bodies

Thanks to the physics of explosions, the game mechanics gained additional drive. After all, what could be better for a boy of that time than to feel like a real Schwarzenegger blowing up unprincipled mercenaries like in the movie Commando.

Despite the fact that the opponents threw not only grenades at the hero, but also a good word, the artificial intelligence system was imperfect. It seemed that the enemies had two modes. The first one was available to copper-headed mercenaries who moved around without any tactical skill, replacing the right actions with noise and chaotic running. Monsters generally acted on the principle: run in a straight line and hit.

Scripts written in a separate language were responsible for collective behavior — LUA, so there was no need to touch C++ once again. The scripts are written in LUAThe code did not need to be compiled, so you could rewrite it yourself and integrate it into the game without any problems.

Far Cry already had its own network mode at that time. The game used a client-server system that provided not only a minimum amount of ping losses but also good speed. This allowed you to play both on the local network and on the Internet.

Sound

In terms of audio features, the game offered a pretty good selection, but there was nothing special from the point of view of a connoisseur of epic soundtracks. But also

interactive dynamic music system tracked and reacted to the player’s actions and situations, as well as reproduced sounds in high quality with full 5.1 surround sound.

Ambient sound recording and the SFS Engine accurately reproduced the sounds of nature with a seamless blend of ambient and interior sounds in 5.1 audio format. The game also supported EAX 2.0.

Development environments

In 2004, Crytek officially released CryEngine MOD SDK. This set of tools the development kit included a set of tools for the CryEngine engine and the CryENGINE Sandbox level editorIt was quite interesting that the developers even took into account the possibility of integrating buildings and objects from 3ds Max or Maya into the editor.

Impact CryEngine for the future

In general, the engine has given us not only Far Cry with many add-ons, but also MMORPGs”Aion: The Tower of Eternity”. In 2009, it had 3.5 million subscribers in Asia. The developers from NCSoft purchased the CryEngine for their MMO, although they have seriously modified it to suit their needs, optimizing it for the specifics of multiplayer online games.

At the time of development, the following was already available CryEngine 2, but the degree of development was so great that it was inappropriate to drop everything and change the engine. Despite the numerous changes, the developers additionally implemented support for the then current technologies — SLI and CrossFire, which allowed to make a tandem of two video cards at the same time and use their performance for optimized games.

After Ubisoft acquired all the rights to CryEngine and Far Cry in 2006, it continued to develop the engine for XBOX, XBOX360, and Nintendo Wii. Later on, completely different generations of the CryEngine appeared, licensing changed, but that’s a completely different story.

In 2008, inspired by the game, the “master of thrash” himself — Uwe Boll made a feature-length film Far Cry. The result was predictable.

With the advent of modern virtual reality headsets like Meta Quest 3, Far Cry was successfully ported in 2023 to VR platform. For this, special thanks to the German programmer Friedrich Holger So if your vestibular system is as strong as Monolith, I advise you to plunge once again into the legendary tropical paradise where the legendary Far Cry series began.