For the tutorial on how to make a "mass physics" video, it is in here but you must understand that in order to achieve the smoothness of those videos, you must render the scene frame by frame by using the method described here.

If you already know how to record with capture_frames then there are some guidelines futher below.

In Cryengine2, you can render each frame into an image file to be played back at 30fps or whatever framerate you want with "capture_frames", much similar to the "startmovie" command in the source engine if you're familiar with that.

This is useful for if you want to record something at a high graphical quality with smooth framerate but can't do so with things like FRAPS.

Please note: recording with capture_frames is a slow process and really isn't reccomended for recording gameplay, but instead things like cutscenes and high graphical things such as extremely detailed map flybys and masses of physical interactions.

Capturing Video:

First off, set all your graphics to full.

If you're gonna spend time and effort rendering a video you may aswell make it look pretty, so unless you're doing something specifically on low settings or if your PC can't handle it even at low frames, then get it all nice and sexy looking.

If you're on DX9 then this tweak can come in handy for maximum graphics.

Now when you're ready to record, put in these the console commands (without quotations and press ` that's to the left of number 1, above TAB to open the console):

"conrestricted 0" - makes most of the console commands work "fixedtime_step 0.033333" - sets the game speed to 30 frames per second.

Now, if you have the full version of Fraps, open the config box and go to the "Movies" tab. Tick "No sync", set the framerate to 30 and untick "Record Sound" as it won't be in sync and you'd just have a massive sound file which will make the file larger.

So your Fraps movies window should look a bit like this: <br/>

Ticking NoSync is important or you'll just have a laggy video.

If you don't have the full version of Fraps, then you can use the engine's own capturer:

"capture_frames 1" - starts capturing.

and to stop: "captureframes 0" - stops capturing. "fixedtime_step 0" - puts the game speed back to normal.

With this method there should be a series of image files in "CaptureOutput" in the Crysis folder, if not try this command: "escreenshot 1" and then try recording, supposedly taking a picture with that will make captureframes work, but it's not confirmed (so if you couldn't capture until you took a picture please say so as right now it's just a rumour).

With Fraps you should have a 30fps video that shows what you did completely smooth as if you had a super computer.

Rendering: If you recorded with capture_frames, you'll have a folder full of images.

Well, there's a free program called VirtualDub that will render the images into a video. There are plenty other programs too like Sony Vegas, but VirtualDub is free and easy to do this with.

Extract the downloaded .zip to a folder anywhere on your PC (no installation needed, the files just need to be all in the same folder somewhere), then run "auxsetup" and click "install handler".

Then run "VirtualDub.exe" to open the actual program.

Open "Frame000000" in the folder you captured to, making sure "automatically load linked segments" is ticked.

Press ctrl + R to change the framerate of the video if you wish to do so.

Then save as avi (press F7) anywhere you want.

<br/>

Then put your Avi in a video editor and try to make it more enjoyable by cutting out boring parts and maybe adding a song that fits.

Useful Stuff:

fixedtimestep 0.033333

This command slows or speeds up the game depending on your framerate, 0.033333 makes it so the game is at normal speed at 30 frames per second.

Lowering the number will make it slower and raising it will make it faster which means you can either change the speed of gameplay or the frames per second of the final video. For instance, 0.0166665 can be played back at 30fps to make it half speed, or played at 60fps to be normal gameplay speed and 0.066666 can be played back at 30fps to make it twice the speed, or played at 15fps to be normal gameplay speed.

If you're using Fraps to record, make sure you set the framerate as what you intend to have a video at or else you'll have to speed up or slow down the video in an editor.

r_DisplayInfo 0

Setting this to 0 will remove the white text that shows info like fps if you're in either developer mode or in the sandbox that can make your video a bit ugly.

cl_hud 0

You can remove your heads up display by changing this to 0, which can make your video look neater depending on what you're making.

r_NoDrawNear 1

This will make your weapon and hands invisible for if you don't want them showing.

e_particles 0

This will turn particle effects off, the reason you'd want to do that is because when a lot of objects are colliding with each other, the amount of dust particle effects is too intense for most graphics cards (if you get a super bright screen then this is a GPU overload).

capturefileformat

You can change the filetype of the images that are created with captureframes if you wish. I reccomend using "capturefile_format jpg" as the filesize is small but using tga will improve quality.

capture_folder

You can change the folder that the frames capture to, this is useful for recording multiple scenes as "capture_frames 1" will overwrite any existing files in the folder is set to.

However you can put "capture_frames 999" with 999 being whatever number you want the recording to start at if you want to keep two recordings in the same folder.

To find out what frame the recording is upto, while you're capturing, type capture_frames and press TAB, it'll show its current value.

TAB

Pressing TAB when you've written something will bring a list of all commands that start with what you've written, aswell as displaying their current setting.

For instance: pressing TAB with "capture" will bring this:

capturefileformat=jpg [ ] capturefolder=CaptureOutput [ ] captureframes=0 [ ]

?

Typing a command with "?" as the variable will give its usage and a short description on what the command does (not all commands have one though).

For example: "e_screenshot ?"

"Make s screenshot combined up of multiple rendered frames (negative values for multiple frames, positive for a a single frame) 1 highres 2 360 degree panorama 3 Map top-down view

see: escreenshotwidth, escreenshotheight, escreenshotquality, escreenshotmapcenterx, escreenshotmapcentery, escreenshotmapsize, escreenshotsminslices, escreenshotdebug"

e_screenshot -1

This will take a high quality, screenshot at whatever resolution you choose at every frame, similar to capture_frames. The drawback being it takes a long time for each screenshot and you can be waiting several minutes for a few seconds of footage even if there's nothing happening in game, it's only really reccomended for if you want to take a high quality screenshot of something moving and don't want to time it wrong, rendering a small clip will give you the option to choose which frame you like the most out of the series of pictures taken.

Also note, the HUD, HUD effects, motion blur and depth of field set by the flowgraph aren't shown in "e_screenshots" and things like water splashes and the frozen HUD effect on your visor can come out all wrong.

However, depth of field set by the time of day and from aiming are shown in e_sreenshots.

Developer Mode

To enable the things like pressing F1 to go into third person, F3 to fly and , to pause physics etcetera in the game rather than the sandbox editor (they work in sandbox at default), you can enable developer mode by making a shortcut to Crysis, right clicking and opening properties, then putting "-devmode" at the end of the Crysis shortcut target line as so:

<br/>

Remember, r_displayinfo 0 will remove the white text that shows when you're in developer mode.

Mass Physics

If you're here wondering how I did this:

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaHS-y_mapQ[/media] (by the way the song is Pretty Pet by Aberdeen City)

Then here's how:

Sandbox Editor:

The sandbox editor is an absolute must have for Crysis and is half of what you're paying for, the installation file for it is in the Sandbox 2 folder on the DVD or if you have the EADM version, it should be downloadable like how Crysis was.

The Sandbox Editor launcher should then be in the Bin32/64 folder of the Crysis one after you've installed it (both DVD and EADM versions).

For info on how to use the editor in general (like how to make maps), look elsewhere for a tutorial.

DO NOT ASK HERE!

The Box Man

I didn't make the large robot/man looking structure from the crates, "poomuckel" from the Crymod forums did and you can download it from his "Physis" map's thread on page 4, it's not his actual map and so you should check that out too!

Spawning Objects

To spawn the crate used to make up that and the other structures in the original mass physics video, go to "Archtype Entity", Props, Storage/Local/Goods and double click or drag "civilboxa" to the perspective window after loading a map, but you should try out a load of different objects to make it more interesting.

Copying Objects

Drag a box over a group of objects with left click, or ctrl + left click to select or deselect objects individually and then press ctrl + C to clone the objects so that you can quickly create large structures rather than placing each object independently, which would take a long time for large structures.

Making Objects Fly

The structures break apart like they do in the mass physics video because of an invisible tornado.

They spontaneously break apart because I froze physics with the comma key (,) as soon as I switched to game, then pressed it again when I was ready to unfreeze them.

Tornadoes are found in "Entities" under Enviroment and once placed you can change various settings like how big it is and how fast it spins, if even at all.

To make it push outwards rather than draw in objects, change "AttractionImpulse" to a minus number and to make it invisible, change "ViewDistRatio" to 0.

Another way to make it invisible will be to have e_particles set to 0.

sysphysicsCPU 0

Supposedly this calculates physics interactions on the GPU but what it does for rendering is limits the framerate to the physics framerate, which is really handy for rendering a video of lots of objects colliding and such, as seen in the comparison at the start of the video.