Installing Crysis & Tutorial:

I bought a copy of the Crysis game and installed it onto my mum's laptop. Luckily it installed successfully but as soon as I tried to launch CryEngine2 it would start up and then crash...So I tried numerous times unsucccessfully to run the program :( I then realised that I could change the resolution settings and made them a lot lower and then it worked...YAY! So I will have to deal with bad resolution until my new laptop arrives next week! Luckily it's only tutorials at this stage!...

TUTORIAL:

As we had already worked through "1. Creating a New Map" and "2. Vegetation" as a group in the studio session, I continued working on the rest of the tutorial at home. I found certain areas of the tutorial a bit hard to follow as it skipped certain steps and just expects you to know where those menu's or tools are within the program, but other than this it was very helpful in providing me with a basic knowledge of how the program works and functions. It was quite fun experimenting with the different tools and I especially enjoyed creating and modifying the terrain, vegetation and using the 'voxel' tools to create cliffs and caves. I found it quite amazing how much detail can be achieved with this software, although I couldn't really appreciate the reality of the program as I had to set my resolution settings so low to run the program. I found that that once you added lighting to the scene it made such a different and made the scene much more dynamic and realistic (from what I could tell). It was quite helpful that the layout of CryEngine2 was somewhat similar to 3dsMax as this made learning easier and more productive. I also found it really good how the site responds to certain element you create automatically such as the roads. All in all I found the tutorial quite helpful except for having to find your own way through some sections.