3D Vision Blog

Good news coming from EA about the upcoming First Person Shooter Crysis 2 that is expected to be available by the end of the year. During a press conference at E3 Expo Electronic Arts has announced that the game will support Stereoscopic 3D mode not only on the PC, but also in its console version available for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 and this probably means native S3D support built-in the game engine, as Xbox 360 still does not offer any official Stereo 3D support on console level, unlike the PS3 and PC. Unfortinately still not a lot of details are being disclosed, but we’ll probably get more details with the game nearing its official release date that still hasn’t been announced yet…

“At Crytek, we always strive to raise the technology bar. As the 3D revolution sweeps movies and television, we are excited to bring Crysis 2 to 3D, making it the first big action game to be available in true stereoscopic 3D,” said Cevat Yerli, CEO and President of Crytek. “The 3D experience represents a quantum leap in interactive entertainment. With all of the same story and action seen in the 2D version of the game, the 3D version adds another dimension of intensity and immersion to the action.”

Whether played in 3D or standard 2D, Crysis 2 drops players into a devastated New York in the midst of an attack by a frightening alien species. The alien enemies are armed with deadly weaponry and exceptional sensory abilities that test players’ skill and push them to the limit. These terrifying invaders stalk the streets of New York, leaving the streets in chaos and the skyline in flaming ruin. Surrounded by catastrophic destruction, players harness the superhuman abilities of the Nanosuit to level the playing field, becoming the ultimate weapon on a mission to save New York.

Now, considering the fact that first Crysis games was one of the most demanding titles for your hardware when it was first released, so we can expect to get the same from Crysis 2 too, especially when played in stereo 3D mode. And when talking about that I’m referencing the PC version of the game, as with the console versions it will most likely be a bit stripped down from advanced graphical effects and features in order to be able to provide good performance even in stereo 3D mode. So you better start thinking about upgrading your PCs CPU and GPU from now if they are not yet up to date… ;)

FMX 2010 will be taking place next week between May 04 and May 07 in Stutgart, Germany. The FMX Conference on Animation, Effects, Games and Interactive Media is a European conference on the creation, production and distribution of digital entertainment and interactive visualization in design, industry and research taking place each year. And this year (15th in a row) stereo 3D will be among the more important topics at the conference, so if you are visiting FMX you should not miss the interesting panels about S3D there.

Tuesday and Wednesday next week at FMX will be focused on 3D in movies, there will be a screening of the movie Alice in Wonderland (shot in 2D and converted in 3D). There will be panels about the shooting of 3D video and about the conversion of 2D content to 3D. And Thursday and Friday are probably going to be the more interesting as the panels then will be targeted at gaming in 3D. Neil Schneider, President & CEO of MTBS and Executive Director of The S-3D Gaming Alliance will be talking about the quality expectation needs of consumers and measurable ways that S-3D games can be tested and reviewed by media and customer alike. He will showcase the new M3GA initiative and share some other ideas that are currently being worked out. Andrew Oliver, Co-Founder and CTO of Blitz Games Studios, will talk about stereoscopic 3D console gaming. Blitz is one of the largest independent game developers in the world who has just celebrated their 20th anniversary. Most recently, they have earned their due as being the first game developer to put out a console title on XBOX 360 and PS3 that supports modern stereoscopic 3D solutions (Invincible Tiger: The Legend of Han Tao). Thursday will finish with Samuel Gateau, a member of the Content & Technology Engineering group at NVIDIA. Over the course of two hours, Sam will detail the required techniques for game developers to get the best results out of NVIDIA’s GeForce 3D Vision solution. On Friday Jens Schöbel, Technical Designer for Crytek will talk about their game engine’s use of stereoscopic 3D…

But if you are in Canada, then next week is also going to be interesting for you as GDC Canada 2010 will be taking place in Vancouver on May 6-7th. The Game Developers Conference Canada is a forum for Canadian developers to share best practices for fostering excellence and quality games within their region and distributed globally. And although not so focused on stereo 3D, there are still going to be some interesting panels covering that aspect of gaming, so you may consider visiting them.

Habib Zargarpour, Creative Director for Microsoft Game Studios, and advisory board member for The S-3D Gaming Alliance will have a 1 hour panel called “Stereo-3D Gaming: What Are We Waiting For?” on Thursday. And on Friday you should not miss the 1 hour session with David Coombes (SCEA) and Anton Mikhailov (SCEA) titled “Stereoscopic 3D for the PlayStation3 and Introducing PlayStation Move Motion Controller” that will explain the Stereoscopic 3D strategy taken by Sony Computer Entertainment.

- To see the full schedule for the FMX 2010 conference in Germany…
- To see the full schedule for the Game Developers Conference in Canada…

Crytek has just announced some very interesting news. It seems that the company is planning to show their CryENGINE 3 in stereoscopic 3D (S-3D) at this year’s GDC expo in San Francisco (11–13 March). It is interesting to note that this actually appears to be the first announcement about something S-3D to be showcased during GDC this year, as I was beginning to wonder if suddenly everyone forgot about Stereoscopic 3D. Lets hope that there will be much more to be seen during GDC in terms of Stereo 3D support, after all the developers need to be aware of the advantages that S-3D can bring into gaming along with how to properly implement game graphics and effects.

But back to the CryENGINE 3, one of the key features of the new engine is the “LiveCreate” feature, which will also be showcased at GDC, and what it does is to allow designers to work with a single editor, but see and play the results in real-time on the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. With CryENGINE 3, scalability across multiple platforms is a revolutionary development to enable the creation of truly great-looking games – regardless of the target platform. Hopefully this will help a lot to stop seeing some crappy port of a game for one or another platform, especially if other developers adopt similar approach to their game engines.

“After the successful introduction of CryENGINE 3 at last year’s GDC, we are really excited to show the latest version of our all-in-one game development solution this year in stereoscopic 3D. Over the past few years, S-3D technology has emerged as one of the key trends both in movies and games. With CryENGINE 3, developers will have the ability to create their content in 3D on all platforms. There are basically no longer any limits to a designer’s creativity. CryENGINE 3 features many innovations to accelerate development, cut production costs and ensure teams are able to maximize their own creativity without delays,” says Carl Jones, Director of Global Business Development CryENGINE.

It is worth to note that CryENGINE 3 seems to support Stereoscopic 3D natively and does not require additional drivers, or at least that is what Crytek demonstrated during Siggraph 2009 with the engine. And then again even before Siggraph, during GDC 2009, Cytek has also demonstrated working Stereoscopic 3D support with CryENGINE 2 on iZ3D display. Maybe it is about time for Crytek to become a bit more serious and active about S-3D and join an organization like The S3DGA, as there are still not a lot of game engines designed to support stereo 3D gaming. And while the Stereoscopic 3D support in CryENGINE 3 seems to be for PC only at the moment, with PS3 going to be 3D-ready soon and because of the LiveCreate feature of the engine we might see console S3D support too, and not only limited to PS3, but on Xbox 360 too. Still nothing official about stereoscopic 3D support for consoles coming from Crytek…