Crysis’ Mesmerizing Realism

Jul 16, 2007

Crysis’ Mesmerizing Realism

A chicken in the game Crysis is a new war-type game which must certainly be one of the flagships of modern state-of-the-art tech in the gaming industry. I came across this three part video recorded at E3 and just couldn’t tare myself from the screen until I’d watched all three parts. Crabs & swarms of fish habit the photo-realistic oceans and react to your presence, as well as dry land animals like chickens who behave incredibly realistically (the blurred shapes in the corners of the thumbnail are the player’s hands, reaching to pick up the chicken).

The videos are narrated by one of the developers, which takes care in showing the superbly designed animals I mentioned above, and for good reason. As you’ll see. I’m not a gaming expert by far, but I read the occasional article on how game A.I. is advancing. Recently, an emphasis has been on making A.I. non-player characters aware — and able to take advantage — of the increased dynamism of environment & scenery of shoot-em-up games such as this one. The narrator of the Crysis demo mentions that making the NPCs aware of the dynamic nature of the game was one of the hardest parts of A.I. development.

The videos don’t reveal much of how the NPCs deal with the dynamism, it’s hard to evaluate without actually playing the game (I’m sure there is some information available online on the game’s AI, perhaps on CryTek’s site but I can’t spare the time at the moment to look it up). But we do get a quick glimpse of them (before they’re severed in half by gunfire), running, ducking behind objects for cover, as well as exhibiting some different modes of operation such as alert scouting & some hiding. In the second video a jeep catches on fire and the narrator mentions that he’s trying to get out (barely visible), but fails to do so before it explodes. I guess that’s a taste of the environmental-awareness he mentions they spent a lot of time on giving the NPCs.

Enough with the talking, enjoy the beautiful realism of modern gaming.

Links & References

Crytek, creators of Crysis
Crysis on Wikipedia

6 Comments, Comment or Ping

Awesom-o

I have to say that the graphics look very realistic and the animal behaviors are interesting but the NPC AI doesn’t look that good. The computer seriously outnumbers the human player and yet fails to put together several NPCs to coordinate their behaviors to try and take out the enemy. Seems like the same old game-AI once again overhyped to sell more copies of the game.

Jul 17th, 2007
Hrafn

They’re using all the processing power to drive the realistic chickens But seriously, they are. As are most of the game developers out there. When they say they spent a lot of time on the AI, I’m sure it’s still only about 10% compared to the time they spend on graphics, physics and design.

I took a look at the techinfo for their game engine. Seems very bent on aiding visual appearances:

Advanced AI System: CryENGINE™ 2 has a flexible and easily customizable AI system which handles both character and vehicle behaviors, it fully supports the complex requirements of the character locomotion system to animate bipedal characters in a believable fashion, and is fully integrated into the CryENGINE Sandbox2 editor.

LUA Script Driven AI System: Allows complex AI behaviors to be created without requiring new C++ code, including extending state machine behaviors from LUA scripts

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

Smart Objects: Provides an easy way for level designers to connect specialized animations to particular objects in the level, so that the character animations and objects are properly aligned at the start and end of the animations, and the correct animation sequence plays.

But, it’s still hard to say from one video, this demo might have been downtuned so that the player wouldn’t get killed all the time while showing off the pretty chickens.

Jul 17th, 2007
Awesom-o

“They’re using all the processing power to drive the realistic chickens”

lol!

Jul 17th, 2007
Arnþór L. Arnarson

This game brings to mind the rather sad current state of afairs, regarding the dominance of DirectX in 3D games. It being a closed standard and all. Putting other OSes, other than Windows, at a disadvantage.

What we really need is a free standard, supported on the bleeding edge of development, by hardware companies.

At the moment OpenGL seems to lag a little behind, DirectX having more leverage due to its connection with Microsoft, therby a superior position in the market.

But the game looks nice enough, and lets hope its AI is good too. With high speed internet connections, games have recently found this convenient way to bypass heavy investment in AI, and instead relied on emphasizing human vis human gameplay.

Jul 18th, 2007
Dante

I swear we’ll need dedicated hardware for Game AI in the near-future…

Oct 3rd, 2008
Hrafn Thorisson

I swear we’ll need dedicated hardware for Game AI in the near-future…

I certainly hope developers will push for it.

Oct 3rd, 2008