In Alone in the Dark the fires take place predominantly inside and in linear experiences, often as a puzzle solving method, however Farcry the game is much more open and as such the fire operates in a different way. Rather than completely destroying everything it encounters it just temporarily destroys some and has little lasting effect, it is also on a much larger scale with whole swathes of jungle being burnt. They had to take into account different factors such as how it would spread to different terrain and the effects of wind.
Very helpfully one of the developers of the game has posted parts of their method on his website,
http://jflevesque.com/2012/12/06/far-cry-how-the-fire-burns-and-spreads/
The basis for his system is a grid that is generated in line with the ground and has "hp" values for each square dependant on what the square contains. By being next to a square or a number of squares that are on fire the hp value of adjacent squares are reduced constantly, and upon reaching 0 the fire spreads. Squares that are made of water or rock are invincible.
There is a lot of focus on sacrificing realism for simplicity and fun in his tutorial. Making the results easy to predict with a very simple control system meant that players could reliably employ the fire as a weapon against the enemies in game, where as a more realistic system that took longer for the fire to spread and did so in a more complex way would have been less rewarding to the players. The fire acts in its simplest form as an environmental hazard, leaving no lasting damage on structures or the environment, either as a technichal limitation or to stop the player destroying everything important in the game.
This is one of the most important things to be taken from the tutorial in my opinion, yes the results have to be comparable to real life, but making them interesting and fun in the game is more important, especially when it can be used as a weapon in the game like this.
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