If you don’t know what Crysis is you have probably been living under a rock for the past year; it is the biggest shooter in years. The graphics are like nothing else–but the physics are where it really shines; you can cut trees in half with bullets and leaves actually move around when they are shot at! Coming from the same studio that made Far Cry, it is to be expected that the lighting looks a little on the overly colorful, slightly fake side. It’s not really a problem, it still looks fantastic, but if you want that extra little bit of realism keep reading! I’m going to walk you through the Sandbox Editor that comes with the demo.

Let’s start with the lighting; lower graphics settings get rather cartoony looking. The above screenshot is apparently evening–doesn’t exactly look it, does it? How about now?

First, you’ve got the demo installed. Now go go to this folder on your computer C:/Program Files/Electronic Arts/Crytek/Crysis SP Demo/Sandbox2 Installer/ and then run the installer file located there. After the installation has completed go to C:/Program Files/Electronic Arts/Crytek/Crysis SP Demo/ and then, depending on whether you are running a 64 bit operating system or not, select the Bin32 or Bin 64 folder (If you don’t know how many bits your operating system is, it’s probably 32.) and run the Editor.exe file. You might also want to make a shortcut to it by right clicking on it, selecting copy and then, on the desktop, right clicking and selecting Paste Shortcut.

Now that the program is open select File, select Open and then go into the island folder and select island.cry. After it has gone through all the various loading procedures click the terrain menu at the top and select Time Of Day. A window will pop up with a menu on the side–select Import From File and use this file (Thanks to Seith from SeithCG.com). Poof! The lighting is now automagically much better looking!

If you like, you can play around with the graph things in the miiddle of that window to make your own tweaks. As you can probably see though; there is quite a bit you can do to the light and you could mess it up pretty bad if you don’t know what you are doing. Good thing you can just open the file again if you mess up the settings!

Now the lighting looks fantastic…what now? How about we play with the water a bit? Don’t you think the water in Crysis is a little too eerily transparent green looking? I’m not sure whether to think those boats out there are dumping toxic sludge or that the ocean has a really great water filter. Here’s what it used to look like;

A little to green, I think. How about now?

It’s quite easy changing the basic ocean appearance. In the Rollup Bar on the right of the screen click the second tab with the green icon on it, then click environment and a bunch of settings will be displayed below. Under ocean, try changing the FogColor value to something a little more blue, I used 31,75,105. Now try and change the FogColorMultiplier and FogDensity a bit. Water is usually much more murky, so I moved the Density up to 0.3, but that makes the color quite a bit darker, which is where the FogColorMultiplier comes in. I moved it up to 0.25 and voila! Nice, pretty and real looking water!

Now that you’ve made Crysis look even better in the Editor you need go to File and Save it and then select File and Export To Engine, or the game itself will stay the same as it was before!

PS: While you are messing about with the spiffy Sandbox Editor, you might want to check out the Tornado. They make everything very, very dangerous…and yes; that is the ground at the top left of the screen.

Behold! 57 Hummers exploding in fiery mayhem!