Crytek have done amazing things with their realtime engine, particularly with the features in their editor. A large part of their business is centered around providing quality game content creation and editing tools so they have spent a lot of money and time getting this right. Some of the features are particularly interesting such as the realtime volumetric terrain editing. But overall although it is impressive and clearly easy to use (undoubtedly more so than TG2) it is also much less versatile than any of the non-game tools like Terragen, Vue, etc. It does not render "infinitely detailed" displacement and uses tiled, non-procedural textures for most of its visual quality, thus saving a lot of processing time and memory. It also operates on a finite sized area rather than a whole planet. There are many shortcuts taken that make possible what you see in Crysis. Some of it may be applicable to programs like Terragen 2 and you can be sure we're investigating these possibilities. But overall, although it may seem like a case of "why not just do that in TG2 - they've proven it's possible", unfortunately the differences in purpose and functional implementation mean it's not nearly as simple as that.
- Oshyan
