Good lord, the Physics in crysis is absurd (video included)

[Non Sequor]

naznatips said:

Well in pure physics I'd say it's theoretically possible, but there are a lot of other processes in Crysis handled by the GPU and CPU that the consoles can't handle. Also, I say theoretically, because we haven't seen anything close. LBP has great physics, but they are only in a VERY small area, whereas in Crysis there is actual WIND. Yes, wind that effects the entire island, spreads fire, determines the direction trees fall, moves the grass etc.

One thing that they can't handle is the AI. The AI on the entire island is constantly interacting. Console games tend to have an AI "bubble" where the AI begins interacting when you get within a certain range of them, but in Crysis the AI doesn't stop. If you attack a camp you can be 2 miles away and that camp will still be hunting you and rebuilding.

Also as you said as well the GPU's are clearly far more limited than current PC GPUs. Btw, I'd just like to point out that Crysis itself isn't that good a game. In fact, it's pretty average for an FPS. It's just made some amazing technology breakthroughs.

 There are some tricks you can do to accomplish the bubbleless AI without doing full simulation of all entities on the island every second. These are things that I can come up with off the top of my head.

Using an appropriate scheduling system with priority inversely proportional to each entity's distance from the player you can set it up where more distant entities only have their states updated less frequently. All of the nearby entities can be simulated at full speed while more distant entities may only get ticks once every 30s or longer and do 30s of moving or reconstruction during their tick.

Another option is to use the bubble approach but save information about the most important aspects of the distant entities and then generate the new state when the distant entities come into the bubble. For the camps example, the important states would be things like the damage to the buildings and when the damage was done, how many enemies are left at the camp, the radius around the camp in which the enemies are searching for you (this should spread out after an alert and then begin to decay if they fail to find you for a period of time). When you come back to the camp, the enemies can be assigned to random positions within the radius and the buildings can be repaired based on the time since they were destroyed and the number of repairers working on them.