14 DAY TRIAL // We've just recently found out that Crysis will no longer be taking place in a tropical, jungle setting, but in the city of New York. And while the concrete jungle is not really what we'd expect from Crytek, chances are that we're not going to be disappointed. The first thing we feared was that the game would fall in line with the rest of the claustrophobic titles we always got, but the upside was that we'd have slightly higher framerates, due to the confined spaces. But it looks like an urban Crysis experience is going to be something that is going to blow our minds away.
Crytek programmer Marco Corbetta and 3D modeler Miragoli Gianluca, who doesn't seem to be part of Crytek, have been working on a new environment generator that would make urban settings infinitely more complex. The build is called a "Structure Procedural System" and the two have already put together a tech demo for it. The project uses a Modular and Procedural technology that allows elaborate designs without devouring system resources, which also promises to remove the "Locked Door Syndrome." Basically, every building in a generated city will be fully explorable, with detailed interiors and not just a square and textured polygon.
More so, these interiors are not only individually generated and modeled, but they are also destructible. Based on the PhysX, the system doesn't require any additional software or hardware. The end-result is that every piece of concrete in an entire city will be able to be torn down.
As for the truly amazing thing, the tech demo explains that, "Only the portions that are immediately needed are physicalized for collision detection and response. The use of this lazy generation scheme combined with a modular system and instancing, allows the use of only a fraction of the memory that the model of an entire interior and exterior city would otherwise require."
In other words, the environment isn't really destructible or prepared for any kind of physics interaction, until it's actually subjected to a force that interacts with it. In even simpler terms, the walls are seen by the computer as old-school generated dead-polygons until you shoot at them, when they change and become destructible items, so the processor doesn't have to handle an entire structure build from elaborate code, just the mere fraction you are aiming at.
The actual tech demo is posted below, and the size of the city, as well as the no-"Locked Door Syndrome," along with the technical concept and explanations make this a "Best Invention of 2010" candidate. Let's hope Crytek plans to use this technology for its urban, NYC-based Crysis 2.