Pics zu X-ISLE

[DavidWa]

In der Gamestar schreiben sie (da sind die Pics auch abgebildet), dass die Wassereffekte die schönsten sind, die es je in einem Spiel zu sehen gab.

 

[Joe Musashi]

Original geschrieben von DavidWa
In der Gamestar schreiben sie (da sind die Pics auch abgebildet), dass die Wassereffekte die schönsten sind, die es je in einem Spiel zu sehen gab.

die gamestar gibt einem formel 1 2002 auch 89 % und damit einen mehr als gp4 , die haben echt den schuss nicht mehr gehört aber was solls , wenn man sich die rechstlichen ea wertungen anschaut da sieht man ja von welcher firma wohl einmal im monat nen netter scheck ins haus trudelt , auf deren aussagen und tests würd ich keinen pfifferling geben

 

[Supersonic]

ign preview

Far Cry
Last year's amazing NVIDIA tech demo is next year's amazing game.





June 05, 2002 - If you follow the hardware side of the industry you probably saw the Nvidia tech demos a year ago last February. There were a batch of demos used to showcase the recently launched GeForce 3, from Aquanox to 4x4 Evo to Neverwinter Nights. Retentive readers will recall a jungle level that featured a dinosaur. Well the team behind the demo is turning the impressive engine used for the demo into what promises to be an even more impressive game.
The folks in question are from Crytek and the game is called Far Cry (formerly known as X-isle. I met with game designer Tony Davis and programmer Marco Corbetta in a closed-door session at E3 this year and was totally blown away. Ubi Soft's producer Jean-Bernard Jacon was also on hand to answer some questions and walk me through a bit of the game.

Jean-Bernard describes the game as a mix of HALO and Half-Life, although the comparison to the former is probably a bit more on the mark in that it takes place largely out-of-doors in a team-based tactical shooter format. In terms of approach, it's a bit more sophisticated than Serious Sam but not as unforgiving as something like Ghost Recon. Your characters are just a bit faster and just a bit tougher than the Ghosts.

The story is relatively straightforward...at least the parts the team was willing to share are. You play as a boat skipper who's been hired to lead a group of tourists on a three-hour cruise. There's the millionaire, his wife, the movie star...wait, that's not right. I've got the wrong notes in front of me. These are the nightly notes Tal takes while watching Gilligan's Island. Mine are here somewhere....

Ah, okay, you're still a skipper but you've been hired to take a journalist to a remote island. We don't want to spoil too much of the story but let's just say that things soon turn to crap, and you'll find yourself fighting off highly trained squads of enemy soldiers as you progress from island to island. And the team hints that, by the end of the game, you'll be facing enemies who aren't quite human. And since the demo of the technology featured dinosaurs...

The game's set only ten or fifteen years into the future so the weapons will be fairly familiar. The ubiquitous MP5 is as predictable a choice as it is a welcome one. The Hornady FP 90 makes a nice sidearm for the more restricted areas of the levels while the M3 Jackhammer shotgun acts a nice surprise when rounding corners. And as no future game would be complete without a kick-ass rocket launcher, one has been included for your homicidal tendencies. But even with the more fanciful weapons, every effort has been made to incorporate real ballistics (or at least real-seeming ballistics).

From a tactical standpoint, there are many options. Jean-Bernard and Tony explained a few of the more insidious tricks. The game offers players the chance to send up smoke signals as beacons to your teammates as well as your enemies. This
way you can attract enemies to a particular location and ambush them en route. You can even set up a remotely firing weapon in the hopes that your enemies will be drawn to the fire. While they're investigating the noise, you just creep up behind them and...WHAM! Instant bragging rights.

CryTek's using their proprietary (and unusually named) CryEngine to create the game's fantastic visuals. Waves, sand and vegetation are all rendered as realistically as almost anything we've ever seen, even in this early stage. All of the game's 3D objects cast real time shadows so you'll even see your own character's shadow cast on your weapon in front of you. Lightmaps will even be specific for particular substances such as metal, wood, and plastic.

Better yet, the high visual detail increases the tactical sophistication of the game. There's actually grass all over the levels (the grassy parts at least) and the grass responds to the environment. It sways in the wind and can even be trampled by players. You can even use the cues from the vegetation to spot your enemies. Bushes rustle a bit as players move through them and the game's animals (birds and such) will scatter when surprised.

Far Cry boasts incredibly large levels also. Each level is contained within a square 4 kilometers on a side. The engine itself is capable of displaying 500,000 polygons at once but most scenes only use about 200,000. While most of the action takes place outside, there are some indoor locations as well and the game switches seamlessly between indoor and outdoor areas.

And where most games limit the draw depth (the distance at which objects in the environment aren't rendered any more) to 250-300 meters, Far Cry extends the range to a full kilometer (half a mile for you challenged types). This allows for a much easier strategic appraisal of the environmental objects. You can also now snipe people at much more realistic levels now. Tony showed us a little sniping from the top of a mountain all the way down to a beach far below.

Naturally those large levels and the extensive viewing distances will require a lot of processing power. But CryTek's using some inventive technology to keep things reasonable. The new polybump technology (which is currently being used only in this title and Doom III) takes high-quality models and reduces them in terms of polygon count with no reduction in quality. Impossible, you say? That's what we thought too. Just take a look at the difference in detail between the 250,000 poly model and the 1500 poly model in the screenshots to the right.

The game's due out in the first half of next year for the PC. Although this is the version of the game the team is focusing on, they haven't ruled out porting the title to other platforms including the PS2 and Xbox. Since the title has been developed around the GeForce 3 architecture, the Xbox seems a pretty sure bet to us.

Keep an eye out for even more information soon as I stole the producer's wallet and am currently ransoming it for an early build of the game. Who says we can't play dirty every now and then?