Adding More Detail

Now that most of the vegetation is done I can start working on adding detail that will make the map interesting and fun to play. Roads will provide a welcome break from thick jungle and will allow the player to use vehicles to travel quickly. Vehicles will also provide interesting gameplay and I may even incorporate enemy AI that drives and fights in vehicles. adding vehicles AI will be a great challenge and possibly one that I may never accomplish, due to its difficulty. I have also added a large crashed alien spaceship in the middle of the island. Around the spaceship the trees have been destroyed and the area is frozen with pockets of anti-gravity. If the player enters an anti-gravity area they will float around, just like any object that enters the area. Around the spaceship there will be aliens of various types to fight. So far I have only places the spaceship and removed the trees. The rest comes later. Here are some photos of the roads and the alien spaceship. The photo of the roads in on the lowest settings and the alien spaceship has been bumped up to high.

For extra performance, the editor only loads the vegetation onto the screen when the camera gets close enough. At the altitude shown in the photo below, the camera is too far away from the ground so it appears that there is no vegetation, even though there is.

Progress

I've got 95% of the vegetation done now. There is really a lot of detail and I had to put thousands of trees and other plants over the whole map. I spent over five hours working on the map the other night. I managed to fix the major problem where vegetation wasn't being placed on a certain texture. I tried a few different things including painting over the old texture with a new one. That didn't work and I wasn't sure what to do. Eventually I decided to just paint over most of the island in one texture. This fixed the problem but it did reduce the vegetation diversity. This is a compromise I am comfortable with and people who never saw the map originally won't know the difference. Here are some pictures of the various jungle types. In these pictures the editor is set to the lowest quality settings so I have a smooth frame rate, is does look rubbish though. I will be posting screenshots on high (not very high) settings later.

Group Split

Just thought I'd let you know in detail what happened with the group split up.

Zack Adaszynski and myself had planned to do a game map in Valve's Source Engine SDK editor. Our friend Tom Chandler joined SDI and we decided to work together in a group on our initial project. Another guy in our class called Tom Oxley (who looks identical to the first Tom) had been doing a project with another guy called Reece who had left SDI. Tom Oxley needed a group and our's was the only one that he could really join.

After about a month of Zack trying to train the rest of the group in the Source SDK, we all decided that that project just wouldn't work with four people, two of which had never used the program before. We then came up with the idea of designing a website called "in a nutshell" which was like a mini Wikipedia. The idea was that people could write up an article on a topic that was short and to-the-point, no more than a paragraph or two. Basically, that topic "in a nutshell".

While we liked the idea and the name of the website, we now all realised that we had our own projects that we were interested in. We split the group up and did our own thing. Zack started modelling his house in the Source SDK, Tom Chandler started an architecture project, Tom Oxley started an art project and my Crysis project was born.

Jungle Types

I have now created vegetation over the whole island. This includes bushes, palms trees, banana trees, grass and dead leaves. I have light vegetation near the coasts. Valleys are very dense jungle with dead leaves and the higher/steeper areas are still thick jungle, but with a more open canopy and grass instead of dead leaves. I've just started adding roads and inland water.

Here are the first images from the engine itself. As you can see, I am creating the map in the shape of Tasmania. I did this by getting a photo of Tasmania and Tom Chandler converted it to a black and white image in Photoshop. I import this black and white 'heightmap' into the engine. The top photo shows all the textures applied. There are beaches, cliffs and jungle floors. Inland water bodies will be created later.

What I am Planning

I would like to create a map with:

• Sea
• Beaches
• Thick jungle
• Roads
• Inland water

The gameplay will be focused on jungle combat against the North Korean army and aliens that have crash landed on the island. I would also like to have small anti-gravity areas in the jungle near the alien crash sites.

Vehicles will be placed, the most common of which will be military Humvees. I may or may not include tanks, helicopters and VTOL aircraft (Vertical Take-Off and Landing). The tanks would be hard to use in thick jungle and the aircraft would destroy my infantry-based combat gameplay. Boats may be included to access different parts of the island's coastline or for inland bodies of water if I create ones that are large enough.

Most of the scenery will be thick jungle on relatively flat ground. Vegetation will mostly be palm trees of various heights, banana trees (lots of these), leafy bushes and dead leaves on the ground. Closer to the beaches there will be grass.

Enemies will vary and so will their weapons. Koreans will come in different variations such as Regular Soldiers, Snipers, Shotgunners and Spec-Ops. Aliens will come in various forms, all of which are different sizes ranging from small to very large.

Some rare and special Koreans will be wearing Nanosuits, the special type of armour that features in Crysis and makes it different from any other game. The Nanosuit is worn by the player's character during the whole game and some Koreans wear then also. The Nanosuit is an exoskeletal suit that is worn over the whole body.

The Nanosuit has energy that can be channeled to different parts of the suit, giving the wearer different abilities. There are four modes: armour, speed, strength and cloak. Armour gives you extra protection from bullets and explosions. Speed allows you to run incredibly fast. Strength allows you to jump high, lift extremely heavy objects, punch through wooden buildings and hurl enemies into the air. Cloak allows you to turn invisible.

Different suit modes use different levels of energy. Armour mode only depletes energy when the player is damaged by bullets or explosions. Speed drains energy when the player sprints. Strength depletes energy when the user jumps, punches, or throws something. Cloak depletes energy at all times it is activated. The rate at which enegry depletes during cloak increases as the player increases their speed from standing, through walking, running and sprinting.

The nanosuit: http://www.incrysis.com/wiki/index.php/Nanosuit

In Crysis, the player is able to add modifications to their weapons on-the-fly. This means that attachments can be added to weapons such as:

• Silencer
• Flashlight
• Red Laser-Pointer
• Scopes
• Grenade Launcher
• Tranquilizer Dart
• Incediary Ammo

Weapons cannot have all attachments added to them. For example, a shotgun cannot shoot a tranquilizer dart.

Here is all the information on Crysis. It explains most of what I will be incorporating into my map. Please note that this information was written before Crysis was released. Most of it is accurate but some of it is not.

http://www.incrysis.com/wiki/index.php/Crysis_Weapons_and_Machinery

http://www.incrysis.com/wiki/index.php/Weapon_Customisation

http://www.incrysis.com/wiki/index.php/Alien_Weaponry_and_Vehicles

http://www.incrysis.com/wiki/index.php/Human_Vehicles

Crysis the Game

Crysis was released on November 14, 2007 by a German company called Crytek. Crytek's previous game FarCry (they like their Cry's) was realeased in 2004 to worldwide acclaim for its stunning graphics. Crysis was to be no different.

Even now, in 2010, Crysis is the second most realistic-looking game ever created. It comes second only to its expansion, Crysis Warhead.

Gamers generally say a computer can run a game at maximum settings when all the setting are set to the maximum (including Anti-Aliasing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti_aliasing ), the monitor is set to its maximum resolution, and the game is running at above the refresh rate of the monitor (most are 60Hz, or 60fps).

No computer available to the general public was able to run Crysis at maximum settings until 2010, almost three years after its realease. Even now, a custom-built computer with a cost of well over $2000 must be used to do this. A shop-bought computer would have to cost much more (closer to $8000) to be able to run Crysis at maximum settings. This is due to two factors: Crysis' amazingly realistic graphics and Crytek's poor optimisation of the game. (Optimisation is how efficient the code is, similar to how a car's engine can be efficient to use less fuel, increase performance and reduce polution).

Here is the tutorial site I will be using to learn new skills in the engine. It was created by the developers of the engine and game:

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

I am trying to create a map similar to the pre-release Crysis video that the developers produced in 2005. The video is is not the game itself, but is actually a computer-generated video to show people what they were trying to acheive. When Crysis was released in November 2007, it's level design was quite different to what they had been showing and I was a little disappointed. The reason I am creating this map is so I can play the game the way I had imagined it would be. Here is the YouTube like to the video. Please watch it on 480p for a higher quality:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmdnV1DS9Sk

Getting Started

I am going to get started on the map tomorrow but I can't incorporate lots of detail/realism into the map until I finish building my new gaming computer which should be done before the start of term 2.

Here are some screenshots of Crysis in-game, just to show the realism that can be attained. Please note that none of these screenshots are my own work.

New Project!