I downloaded and played the demo version of Crysis by Electronic Arts. At the beginning, it was night and the sky full of stars. My first surprise is they actually looked like stars, having different brightnesses and colors, and a little diffuse even. When I got to a clearing I could see that they were correctly placed in constellations--I saw Lyra, Hercules, and Corona Borealis right off. (I didn't think of trying to use the binoculars to see if M13 was there!).

Todd

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

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personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

Interesting. Is this a shooting game and if so, how did you get away long enough to look at the stars?

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Intro scene, I'd bet. Before the actual shooting.

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I'll have to look closer at the stars. Crysis was bundled with my video card. It is a fun game with impressive graphics. You play a fellow in a powersuit that gives various abilities. During the mission, there is a day/night cycle, and there are times you aren't shooting (sometimes you're trying to move around the enemy) so there would be plenty of time to look at the stars.

It's interesting watching the evolution of these games. The graphics detail in this game is much better than other games I've played. There were some great "wow" scenes in this one (that's where you sit back and just look at the game world).

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In Silent Hunter III (an excellent WW2 submarine simulator)it is possible to navigate by the stars. When surfaced, I should add.

Although not accurate to real stars, as it's set in a fantasy world, I think the best game world I've ever seen is in Oblivion on my PS3. Totally immersive, you can explore it all completely freely and it's stunning to look at.

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It's a shooting game (with aliens!!!!), but there are breaks as you walk from grouping of enemies to grouping of enemies. Especially since the North Korean soldiers in the game, I found, had short attention spans--if you run a few feet into the brush, they forget you are there till they see you again. (And though they speak Korean--or at least gibberish passing for Korean--mostly, when they see you, they suddenly announce "there he is", etc., in English). But the stars were right at least!

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

yes, the graphics detail is great! Individual leaves on bushes too. You can walk through the green brush, but not twigs. It helps to have a high-end graphics card and crank up the "level of detail" to max.

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

I didn't know that about Silent Hunter III! I'll have to relate this information to Herr Kaleun asap!

IIRC, the Gamespot review I read for the game said that the Korean soldiers crying out in English upon spotting you only happens in normal difficulty. It's a gameplay device intended to help you realize you've been spotted. In the tougher difficulty, they will no longer speak in English, even after they spot you.

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Maybe it's meant to represent a main character who knows a few words of Korean; at least enough to recognize that he's in trouble. Not that soldiers running at your location and shouting to each other shouldn't tell you all you need to know.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Here's the passage from the Gamespot review I was thinking of:

Definitely

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Although Crysis soes sound like a beautiful game, I'm afraid I'm not too impressed that it includes a realistic sky. It should be pretty much trivial for the designers to find a set of images of the stars, and map it onto the game sky. Slightly more impressive to get it aligned in the correct way (so you can navigate by Polaris, for instance), have it rotate at the correct speed for however fast in-game time runs, and put a realistic, phase-changing moon.

What did impress me was that apparently you can shoot branches, so they drop on the heads of your enemies!

Now what would I would like to see (maybe has been done) is that a game set on a variety of different planets through the galaxy features a different night sky on each... correctly calculated for the position of the planet.

Yeah, like in Silent Hunter III.
I will concede that that sounds pretty cool.
Like, say, in Elite II: Frontier or Frontier: First Encounters you mean? (to a certain extent anyway, mainly within system)

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I don't play a lot of video games, but an article in PopSci said that Crysis was specifically designed to be realistic, and the sun actually moves throught the game!
Impressive, as the official digital reconstructions of ancient sites are colored shapes with little detail. Why don't these designers work together?

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I want to go back to the moon.
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"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

It isn't a game, but Celestia can do that. The night sky is as accurate as the data from Hippachos; so the sky from Tau Ceti is subtly different to that from Sol, while the sky from Betelgeuse is very different.

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I was going to mention those games. They are still on my PC after years and i stil play em.

All the Silent Hunter games have been pretty good for night skies. The only thing i miss about the 2 recent ones is the sub doesnt seem to have sunrise and sunset times on charts like the 1st one did. I could sneak into a harbour and pop up knowing it was dark using those.

Oblivion has a good fantasy night sky as mentioned but credit must also go to Morrowind. Its also one of those games where you can just sit and admire the world around you for a while.

As an avid FPS gamer I can confirm Crysis as a great game, I have put 'Timeslip' on my dear santa list this also look like another good game.


David

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OMG, there are games that actually allow you to plan an attack to be at night?

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I want to go back to the moon.
I don't care which rocket you use, whichever one you pick, I'll like it, I swear.
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

Yep. Id sail to near my target harbur and submerge. Slowly and quietly moving in by day and then once as near as i dared id wait for night fall. Once it got truly dark it would be up to the surface, flank speed and torpedos all over the place. hopefully sinking a lot of ships and then retreat before daybreak came.

You can still do this on Silent Hunter 3 and 4 but the first one had a chart of the days sunrise and sunset times which helped a lot.