Overview

Ideally we would like to change nothing in order to ship CryENGINE 3 games in S3D. 99% of the time this will be the case, but below are some items that must change, and things that should be considered whenever making any new project.

The vast majority of these settings have recently been exposed to designers an artist through an interface in the CryENGINE 3 Sandbox.

It can be found under the display tab at the bottom in the sandbox rollup bar.

Stereo Rendering Methods (Stereo Mode)

• Dual Rendering
  The scene is rendered twice for the left and right eye, using an asymmetric frustum (off-center projection). This is the preferred mode for PC and when quality is more important than performance
  Status: Fully implemented.
• Post Stereo/ SSRS (Screen Space Re-Projection Stereo)
  The image for the second eye is extracted from the first eye by offsetting pixels based on the depth. This is the only mode affordable on consoles.
  Status: Fully implemented.

Stereo Output

Combining Rendering Methods with Output Modes

Ideally all methods would work with all output devices. However, a naive implementation creates quite a large amount of permutations that need to be maintained. A different approach is to split the stereo image generation from the actual output conditioning. This will sacrifice some performance and memory in some cases, especially on consoles. (images need to be copied to left and right buffers first, although they could be written directly to the framebuffer). The best approach is to deliberately limit the possible combinations (e.g. no dual rendering at all on consoles).

The Future for Stereo Experience Improvements

• Experiment with automatic adaption of convergence for close objects, similar to DOF.
• Experiment with limiting parallax.
• Check more tricks from the Sony GDC presentation.

Defining the variables for the CryENGINE3 Renderer