Crytek was already struggling with the invention of the nanosuit, but Cevat Yerli and his team came up with something revolutionary in 2007!

PCGamer caught up with Cevat Yerli, CEO of Crytek. After Far Cry, the studio wanted to take the physics and visuals to a higher level. To do this, they needed a new engine to bring the visual complexity to life. The jungle, says Yerli, was perfected only after a team of researchers was sent out to document what it actually looked like. Then the studio dabbled with dynamic lighting, but got carried away.

“The new engine allowed us to do things like snow shaders, frozen shaders. Some of that work was really cool. The shader work that came out of that was sometimes mind-blowing. Video realism was about [how] things should look real in motion, as opposed to [in] screenshots. Video realism allowed us to study motion blur, depth of field, animation, physical reactions. The breakable trees came out of that, right? Where we said we need to have destructible vegetation. They took a gazillion photos and videos, and they studied the light interactions with the trees and the canopies for god rays and subsurface scattering… that soft, green translucency where the sun is behind [the leaf]. Subsurface scattering was a technology that existed in engines, but it was super slow. No one had done it at scale.

We simulated the trees for physics. We were bending them in different wind directions, and then eventually the light and shadows will all be in real time, all the way down to the subsurface scattering on the leaves. A tree has more technology built into it than the entire algorithm for rendering Far Cry. Even the eye had, like, shadows inside the eyeballs. Shadow maps [are] calculated for the face itself. So if the light was coming from a certain angle, the nose would cast a shadow,” Yerli said.

Yerli then went on to talk about the nanosuit. Crysis’ famous nanosuit was born because Crytek felt the character needed such a distinction. Yerli recalled that the game’s nanosuit-centric marketing attracted interest from unexpected places. When the game’s website was launched, he was invited to be a keynote speaker at a nanotechnology conference, and there he said, “It’s all fake, made up!

“This idea of a programmable suit came up. When you play Quake, you play in a different way than when you play Counter-Strike, and then I asked myself, ‘Can I put those play styles into a person, and then you choose what you want to do? We went through hundreds of concept art, and they all looked like Marvel [characters]. This muscle suit came out, with nanofibers that would then connect to your muscle tissue and synchronize with your movements,” Yerli added.

Those were bold times in the mid-2000s…

Source: PCGamer,