The point of this project was to see what kind of fidelity was possible in the Crytek engine while shooting for a reasonable frame rate on a min spec machine of: 3.20 Ghz P4, 1G RAM, GeForce 6800.

The initial village took about a week to build then the tower in the last few shots took three days because once I’d finished it I decided that I wasn’t happy having all the UV’s be 1 to 1 as a walking player would never get close enough to the tower’s upper levels to see the lower fidelity maps. This way I could get a higher resolution down around the base of the tower where a player would be standing.

In this final shot you can see how I set up my occluders and audio volumes.

During the course of this project I delved into almost all aspects of level creation in the Crytek engine; modifying terrain and voxel volumes, adding terrain materials, creating VFX, adding SFX volumes, creating linked animations, playing with Cryteks wonderful (to me at least) system for defining which items show up at different system spec settings, visibility culling (occluders, cells, and portals), LOD’s (the tower has three), vegetation creation and painting, Time of Day, materials set-up, adding first and third person weapons (huge pain, but it always is), rivers and roads, editing some of the system spec cfg files, and lastly playing with the track view to set up in-game events.

All in all, this was pretty damn fun, and I’m now a big fan of this engine. I just wish lights weren’t such a big frame rate hit.