Crysis Panorama with Microsoft ICE

This falls more under "digital art" than "game development", but the concept is actually meant to be used in a game, so I figured I might as well put it up here.

Below, you see a panorama I put together of an area in Crysis (one of my favorite games, and no, I didn't make the game), inside an alien structure. No real spoilers are shown, for those who haven't played the game - they advertised pretty well that there would be aliens, so if you've heard about the game, you've probably heard about the aliens. But anyway... The panorama was created in Microsoft ICE, a research tool I found. It's not allowed to be used for profit, unfortunately, and if I read the terms right, they can repost it or do whatever they like with it. Fine with me - I was only planning on using it for a game I was going to release for free. But click on the pic below - possibly right click and open the link in a new tab. Zoom in all the way and take a look.

Regretfully, this isn't actually full-size. Full resolution is 4608 by 686 pixels. For those who don't understand pixels that well, a pixel is the smallest area your screen is set to represent. Normally, a period (.) is one of these - unless you're using larger fonts.

If you zoom in closely (more closely, regretfully, than you can in the above image), you'll see that it's not quite as smooth as it appears. In fact, it's a bit blurry - pixelation issues, for example - meaning that fine lines are a bit more "blocky" than they ought to be. Part of that is my fault - I had the anti-aliasing turned off. For those who don't understand anti-aliasing:

For computers, it's a lot easier to make pixelated lines than straight ones - this is countered with anti-aliasing. It can also take up a ton of resources... And as I was taking the images in Crysis (the sandbox editor, actually) with the graphics set to full, I figured I could use turning the anti-aliasing off - I was getting only one frame every few seconds, which makes it very hard to turn right twenty degrees and take another screenshot.

Anyway... Here is one of the original Crysis screenshots that I took, before I put it into Microsoft ICE:

(zoom in the same way as before for greater detail)

And here is the same area after I stitched all 18 pictures together with Microsoft ICE:

(Again, zooming in is fun, please do so)

You'll notice that the edges seem a bit more pixelated, and the textures are a bit lower-quality. Other than that, it's about the same - and it stitched everything together perfectly without a single tear in the image - and it loops perfectly from the right side to the left. Microsoft ICE rocks.

I'm intending to use this type of image as a scrolling background for the game I'm working on - the faster you move forwards, the faster the background scrolls. Phrogram handles that very well. I'm not totally sure if I'm actually going to use this particular background or not - I didn't create the scene. It's actually part of the game, Crysis, itself - one of the different levels you play through in the campaign. If I do use it, you're likely to be dodging alien gunfire or something while you fly on this course. If not, enjoy it anyway - hopefully I won't get sued.