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Saturday, 27 October 2007

Crysis demo [alfa]


Filled with anticipation i download and install, it starts up. I then realise its EA and developed by someone as well, i dont know who, my brain goes blank. The reason i dont know who is because my mind is RAPED by an endless avalance of unstoppable fucking logovideos. After about an hour of abuse the actual game starts and a menu system is presented to me, "Woooo" i thought, lets change the keys! "Space" would be nice to use for secondary fire, lets get it done!

Except instead of changing the keybinding i get a warning, you know the most annoying thing EVAH, the kind that says the key is already in use. Mildly annoyed i click ok, i really do wanna change it. Then that fucking box comes up yet again, and again. FOR THE SAME FUCKING KEY!!! DIE YOU USELESS FUCKIGN TWATS DIE, DIE IN PAINS THAT WOULD LURE MEL GIBSON WITH A CAMERA TO YOUR HOUSE YOU FUCKING PLACEHOLDERS FOR PROPER HUMANS DIE DIE DIE!!!

I quit. Of course another fucking ad one cant close down gets thrown in my face. And just to add insult to injury there is no uninstall shortcut.

Why were these people not on the top floor of WTC on 9/11? Why?


  1. So, if one can get past the absolutely over the top indulgences that Crysis have afforded themselves at the beginning of this (and it is some wait) one actually gets to the game itself.

    Well if you have the kit, this is a visually very impressive first level. Dunno how it'll scale but there is more than a degree of suspicion the game is a graphics whore in my book. No doubt more to come. Anyway here in 8800 gtx land, level of detail in the surroundings is a new level for a pc game and it's got a healthy dollop of 'you're there' feel to it. From the gameplay so far, the suit is quite nice (cloak mode / extra high jump etc) but I haven't seen much to suggest it is anything other in gameplay terms, Farcry mk 2. This is not necessarily a bad thing, while simultaneously not a reason to celebrate, but I do mightily fear the introduction of the Mutant Jizz Underwater Demons (TM) (strange flourescent spunk-squid seen in some of vids) and certainly will not be unfurling the 'Best Game Evah' banner any time soon as yet.

    However its obviously been extensively refined and feels pretty polished and I'm liking the atmosphere so far. Worth a play if you can go and make some tea while it congratulates itself before you are allowed to get to the game.


  2. Ok an hour or more into this again, I'm going to upgrade this to getting towards cracking imho. There's some ace stuff here. You should play the demo and get into the mini-island assaults and stuff. The graphics are off the hook on top end stuff sure but there's some pretty neet gameplay here in terms of multiple lines of attack according to how you use the suit and stuff. Liking this more and more. Best SP demo (who knows about the game) in a while - not to be sniffed at - you've downloaded a lot worse ;)



  3. I'll echo that. Firstly, it's unfair I think to say Crytek added all that monstrous bullshit to the demo. Unskippable lame corporate spinny logos and the ultra-pathetic ever present demo test in the top right of the screen. Let's be honest, this is all EA's doing. They're corporate scumbag fuckscrotes that do not have anything like our interests at heart.

    Anyway, obligatory EA hatred out the way... Crysis is pretty good! I saw some video footage previously and decided it was shit but no, it looks fucking great, it plays very nicely and the mechanics of everything seem pretty solid. The suit stuff is as Am says quite tactical, gives you options. Stuff needs to be shot too much in order to die, just like the original Farcry shite, but that's about the biggest criticism I can come up with. I'd definately play it. I had a real sense of basically just knocking about a luscious landscape finding things, workout out how to take on bad guys and I'm exactly no where in the game yet. There's all those monsters and phat weapons later...

    The graphics deserves special mention. My gaming rig Beast is a 3.5GHz Core2 Duo with an 8800GTX graphics card. And I basically slapped it up to 1920x1200 res and hit auto detect. It then auto configured everything for very high. Cool! So I go into the game and, I swear, we're talking about 2-3 frames a second. I shit you not. It's broken, really. Because it's not like we're talking about next-year's hardware. There's simply not going to be any machine that manages to play the game in this res with everything on 'very high' and get solid double digit frame rates. The only reason those very high settings are there, it strikes me, is to make pretty screenshots.

    So surely my rig, more or less your default high-end gaming rig spec wise, would play with everything on high? Well, not even that. I'd say I eventually settled on something from 15-25fps which was a combination of medium and very high. Textures very high etc. Most things on medium. What we've got here is something that looks great, no mistake, but it doesn't look remotely tuned to run on anything anyone actually owns. And sure, it looks good. But it doesn't look *that* good. It strikes me there's a real game here, so what it needs is an engine that runs so you can play the game and enjoy it. There's far too much wanking off in the graphics programming department here, vaugely reminscent of the UT3 demo eh?

    The menu system for settings is a bit of a mess but it's all there and at least they didn't throw the whole thing away and bring in some retarded vegetative console menu system like they did on the UT3 demo.

    I'm pleased that Crysis looks cool. I'll probably buy it if I can stomach giving the Evil Ones any of my money. So it's a bit of a result that a game which I'd pretty much written off looks like it might be a good fun romp.


  4. About the framerate - my core 2 is just running at 2.8 and I have an 8800gtx so I should be seeing a bit worse performance than you. Thing is I did what you did, hit auto-detect at 1920x1280 and watched the intro section in the plane crawl along at a couple of frames per second. Fucking hell, I thought, that's a bit stiff. So I went back in and manually changed all the settings to high across the board but set physics to medium.

    It now runs at perfectly good frame-rate with those settings. Smooth, atmospheric, 1080p gaming looking pretty damn good. However I don't get an option to have 'very high' on anything - it's a whited out option. Odd. Last couple of things - I think they may have chucked a lot of detail into that opening scene with high poly versions of your team mates to impress. So if you haven't played yet I'd say don't take your cue just from that parachute in and play the game for a bit. Oh and check it didn't switch on anti-aliasing which is off by default. At high rez it's irrelevant but that really is a killer given the amount of foliage on screen. Oh and lastly lastly, props to Crysis for having a game where you can fuck about with the graphics settings and it goes straight back into the game without falling over or black screening you for 30 seconds while it works it all out.


  5. Haven't seen it explicitly stated yet but trawling round the forums my hunch is that 'very high' is vista-only.....


  6. I suspect it's DX10, so Vista and a DX10 video card. I have vista, but a GF7950GT and the vhigh option is greyed out.


  7. Bit more trawling around and there are a couple of bat files in the bin32 directory which give you some demos you can run for cpu and gpu. I'm averaging 22fps with everything on high which is what the game thinks my setting should be. It runs a lot better than 22fps would suggest so hmmmmm. On medium this would rise to 35fps average. Given that this is a 8800gtx, I think this game is going to cause some headaches lower down the scale. Switching in and out various options like shadow quality down from high to medium with everything else left on high might buy you a couple of fps but that's about it.

    Second thing that the cpu benchmark shows which I hadn't found out yet in the demo due to not having enough grenades or the rocket launcher is that the guard buildings are fully deformable in that it just repeatedly blows the living crap out of a shack and it very nicely falls apart down to a pile of corrugated iron and bricks.

    BTW, don't let the benchmark demos loop and feel encouraged by your average fps. There is an initial white out of an area of cloud as you freefall which adds a lot to average fps.


  8. You are part of the problem.


  9. Since the clocks went back and the missus was in bed having been out late, I did a bit of fucking about with crysis this morning as you can see.

    Bizarre finding (maybe it's not bizarre and someone will explain it to me) - the more I overclocked my cpu the worse the framerate on the demos became. It is native 2.4ghz. At 3 ghz I was down to 20fps average, at 2.8 something like 21. At native, I got the best.

    Secondly, having loaded the nvidia forceware 169.01 that came out in sync with the demo I couldn't see any difference. Perhaps a bit sharper and something to do with the motion blur. But fuck all to do with framerate. So I then put a bit of a clock on my gpu and pushing the gpu from 576 and memory at 900 to 620 and memory at 960, I got a 20% framerate improvement up to 26fps average with everything on high.

    I suddenly feel 14 again *8)


  10. I've got the engine running at 30fps in that benchmark with settings ranging from medium to very high. Medium just for water quality, shadow quality and post processing. Very high for texture quality, object quality and sound quality. Rest high. It's acceptable frame rate and it looks good. Yeah, I installed the NVIDIA betas and didn't notice a difference either.

    Major props for being able to tweak the engine settings and just be able to go back in as you say. Also alt-tabbing works, albiet in a slightly weird way where it turns game into window but hey it works. Kind of disappointed after all this talk of fancy engine stuff that it appears to be a single threaded game though.


  11. CPU demo is interesting. I got near on 40FPS with physics set on high and 30FPS with physics set on very high. Didn't really notice a difference...


  12. Read me is definitely referring to it as a multi-threaded game with optimisation. Are you seeing that as a lack of activity in the second core?

    Update: This faq off incrysis tends to suggest that it is optimised and actually they are even pimping a quad core for it. Answers are apparently from intel...


  13. I've just installed this. I hit the "autodetect best settings". It reported it had selected "Very Highest" or some such in the little box popup thing. I hit the island. I shot a North Korean. Its dark. The water/sea is the best I've ever seen in a game. I shall report more when I've played more but right now.... *wow*


  14. Right, I have played more. I have switched off a GPS jammer, and I have shot people from a distance, driven a jeep, then another jeep, then some sort of utility truck, then watched trees fall over...

    The game is awesome to look at. The foliage alone is worth the price of admission, the motion blur stuff is lovely, and did I mention the foliage? its like being in FRICKIN' 'NAM MAN!... I expect.

    The primary weapon you get given is utter shit... perhaps the uber suit could come with a weapon stabilisation setting? It'd be handy. Anyhow, its just rubbish, so thank goodness you can nick various bits of tat off the those you've just helped to kark it. All the while hoping the AI will just give you 5 minutes peace so you can spend awhile looking around and running through the undergrowth like a kid kicking autumn leaves.

    I just question, yes, already, whether there is anything truly new about this game other than the visuals. Right now it just feels like a fairly standard bang-bang game...


  15. Yeah the Asian AK knock-off is basically as good as your high tech SCAR. Only you've actually got ammo for the AK as well. Both guns require you shoot an enemy for five minutes to kill them. The SCAR has a silencer though. BUt that means you have to shoot each bad guy for seven minutes and use all your ammo.

    Cervat Yerli claimed that Crysis is CPU bound on a 'balanced' system. If the game is truly multi-core enabled then he must be finding something like two to four times as work for the CPU to do than any other game. Most games are dramatically GPU limited, not CPU. Maybe he's relying on the physics which, as I said, on very high used up a spectacular amount of additional CPU for no real benefit.

    As I said, I think there's a fair bit of vanity coding going on with this game.

  16. The weapons are just ludicrous. Here's some example of how ludicrous: You have to kill a bunch of people before you can switch off the GPS jammer. I engaged cloak and moved into position. There was an enemy dude 10 feet in front of me, but between us, was a fishing net. I could clearly see him through the fishing net. I could however not kill him. Red dot on the head, double tap, he remains standing behind the fishing net and raises the alarm. Two enemy dudes come charging along to take me out. The foliage being what it is, it can actually be quite a challenge to spot them, but since they ended up on the pathway, it was easy enough. I went prone. I lined up the shot. Red dot in the centre of the head. Double tap... the guy just shouts that he's under fire, and kneels down. It took upwards of 10 rounds to put this guy on the ground and then the same to off his compadre. Either my bullets are made of playdoh or the North Koreans have genetically engineered themselves to be bullet proof, or, Crytek have a seriously stupid idea of how bullets are supposed to interact with people. PRACE YO BETS! I jump in a HumVee type thing with a GPMG strapped to the cupola and drive off. A load of people then try and attack me on the beach, the window spiders then shatters (this was cool and not something you see very often in games) and I open up with the machine gun... I may as well have been firing strings of spaghetti. I got them, and not because of my Gimpy equipped Hummer, but inspite of. Bizarre.I can't comment on the CPU core issue at this point as I really haven't looked. I can say however that the game appears to use the Ageia Physx board I have in my rig - although there is nothing that suggests the game supports it on any literature I've seen. Essentially, as soon as Crysis kicks off, the board's fan fires up and this blue light fills the case (no windows, so I had to take the side off to see)... which means its doing something. Quite what, I've no idea.


  17. It would seem that the issue whereby you need Vista to select very high options is basically an artificially manufacturered scenario by the developers. More bullshit. Sigh.