Monday 31 August 2009

GDC Europe 2009

Cevat Yerli

At the Games Developer Conference (GDC) 2009 held in Cologne, Germany, 17th - 19th August, Cevat Yerli, CEO and founder of Crytek, gave a keynote speech, on "The Future of Gaming Graphics'.

The main points of his speech were that he did not expect graphics to get any better than they are right now, until 2012, as advances were geared to Console lifecycles. He did, however, give us a taste of what is coming between now and then, by unveiling the CryEngine 3. Yerli admitted that he had used Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within as Crytek's benchmark for the CryEngine 3.

The new engine will form the bedrock of the company's games until 2012. During a demo of a special version of Crysis, built on CryEngine 3, Yerli demonstrated a 7km view distance, 3D volumetric clouds, parallax occlusion mapping and soft particles.

See the Crysis 2 teaser trailer here.

However, not everything was looking rosy for Crytek. Germany's proposed ban on violent Action games prompted Yerli to announce that if the ban was passed by the German Bundestag (Parliament) then he would consider moving his operations to another state.

Rock