It makes computers cry. The (single-player) demo sure does, anyway. Amazing, amazing graphics, but awful framerates to match at High or Very High detail levels...
Am I so wrong for wanting to be able to play it at max settings on a six month old computer? It's playable at a mix of High and Very High (most settings on Very High except for a few that hurt the framerate the most) with no AA, but even then the framerate isn't exactly great. And I'm just using 1024x768.
Good:
- Awesome graphics! Best ever? Almost certainly.
- Large environments... this is an issue when you're running into rocks and stuff because of the framerate, and driving cars from inside them is suicidal, and it's not FULLY open -- you do have a path -- but they make it wide and varied enough that you usually don't feel too railed along... the level design is really well done, based on the demo level. The enemies also chase you for a while, so you can't let up your guard...
- Ingame maps, with both an onscreen minimap and of the whole area! They even mark enemies on them as well as objectives, and their threat level (not in the high difficulty though, of course).
- Plot seems good enough for a game of this type.
- Nice weapon variety
-You have a superpowered suit -- invisibility, super speed, super jumping... cool stuff.
- The enemies are North Korean and they speak with Korean accents or, in the hardest difficulty (which also minimizes your sight indicators) is Korean... nice touch.
Bad:
- Limited ammo -- are you supposed to avoid them all somehow? Just use the ammo you get off of the bodies, meaning you mostly fight with their guns? I did the latter...
- You can only hold a couple of guns of each type. More realistic, sure, but it's fun to be a walking arsenal... :D (you can carry two machine guns, several pistols, etc, so there is a decent amount you can hold at least)
- What's with every FPS these days having the Halo-style "stop moving and you heal" thing? Sure it makes things easier, but better? Not necessarily...
- The framerate (unless you turn the graphics way down) is bad with anything less than computers that won't be out for a year.
PC Gamer gave it a 98%, which ties it with Half-Life, Half-Life 2, and Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri for the highest scores they've ever given. Does it deserve it? I'm not sure... the game is good, sure, but it's the graphic engine that's the biggest star.
So I take it the korean enemies (Korea? Wow that's topical... in some decades...) talk about strategy and making it in Korean on hard robs of that eh?
That's all well and good except I wonder if they reversed it in the Korean version :D. It also gives the multilingual an edge. Incidentally, if they talk from a list of recorded possible statements, it shouldn't be hard to learn what they intend to do anyway.
You may have got your computer 6 months ago, but that's no real indicator of it's level of power. Still, you had a 8xxx geforce card and an Intel Core 2 plus a couple gigs of RAM right? Seriously I'd expect that machine to be capable of handling this task. The game must be intended for only the absolute top of the line, like Oblivion used to be. I gotta love that Moore's law. Well, sure we hit the roof but there's plenty of room at the bottom.
Quote:You may have got your computer 6 months ago, but that's no real indicator of it's level of power. Still, you had a 8xxx geforce card and an Intel Core 2 plus a couple gigs of RAM right? Seriously I'd expect that machine to be capable of handling this task. The game must be intended for only the absolute top of the line, like Oblivion used to be. I gotta love that Moore's law. Well, sure we hit the roof but there's plenty of room at the bottom.
$1900 computer six months ago, $2000 with shipping. Pentium Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.4Ghz), 2GB RAM, GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB; I know that there are now faster CPUs and graphics cards now, but it's still a quite nice system. The problem is, this computer pushes ANY computer that currently exists to the breaking point, as I said; "requires computers that won't exist for a year for max settings and decent framerates" was not an exaggeration. The question with Crysis is, how low framerates can you accept... (assuming that you have a computer powerful enough to run the thing at all, that is -- the system requirements are high)
Every so often a game comes along which pretty much requires hardware that doesn't exist yet to run well, and this is one of them. I'd say that it's easily the most impressive graphical work of the year... the trees, grass, and foliage is particularly spectacular (and system-hammering), as should probably be expected from Crytek, the makers of Far Cry.
If people could run Crysis with good framerates without an issue "how to tweak Crysis" threads and news stuff wouldn't be as popular as it is... and the game isn't even out yet, this is just the demo.
http://www.crymod.com/thread.php?threadid=10531
Quote:So I take it the korean enemies (Korea? Wow that's topical... in some decades...) talk about strategy and making it in Korean on hard robs of that eh?
That's all well and good except I wonder if they reversed it in the Korean version . It also gives the multilingual an edge. Incidentally, if they talk from a list of recorded possible statements, it shouldn't be hard to learn what they intend to do anyway.
Hah... no, the North Koreans don't even have the internet, much less Internetspeak. That'd be South Korea. You know, the friendly ones. :) That would have been funny though... they just say stuff about what they are doing, which gives you some hints about how you should respond. Obviously this is easier when they're speaking a language you can understand. :D
Screenshots... look at them, though it's more amazing in motion than still.
http://www.crysis-online.com/Media/Scree...ingame.php
Oh by the way. I'm not sure I get it. What do you mean by Crysis being aptly named. I know they went for an "extreme" spelling, like just short of spelling it "Krysis", but what do ya mean?
It's spelled "Crysis" because it's made by Crytek.
Dark Jaguar Wrote:Oh by the way. I'm not sure I get it. What do you mean by Crysis being aptly named. I know they went for an "extreme" spelling, like just short of spelling it "Krysis", but what do ya mean?
Erm...
Quote:Crysis is aptly named...
It makes computers cry.
wasn't clear enough for you?
Great Rumbler Wrote:It's spelled "Crysis" because it's made by Crytek.
Well if you want to be literal, yes, that's true... it's the sequel to Far Cry, pretty much.
So... as in the word "cry" is in there? Ah, I get it. I ain't laughing, but I get it.
You might find it funnier if you saw the kind of framerates this thing gets on just about any machine, if you turn up the graphics high enough... :)
Indeed I have. I've played the demo on my own machine. One thing though. The highest graphics settings are greyed out. So... yeah. Second highest is playable but only barely. It is only smooth when I set it at something nice and low.
I know why those highest graphics settings are greyed out though. They utilize features of DX10. Mind you, my graphics cards don't support DX10 features anyway even if I had Vista, but there it is.
The more I read about Vista though, the more I realize just how much I don't ever want to upgrade to it. It just removes way too much. I mean, DX10 has utterly removed hardware accelerated sound! That's nuts. Bioshock plays fine on my machine but I can imagine if I turned off the X-Fi acceleration I'd see a small dip in frame rates. I got that nice sound card for a reason MS! Meanwhile, Creative has been working with all sorts of game companies to show them how to code in hardware accelerated sound alongside DX10 support. It is just annoying to have to program like that instead of using the same layer for everything, and I have to wonder what methods Creative is showing them to use... The point of an abstraction layer, well one point among others, is backwards compatibility so long as that abstraction layer exists. That's why every single one of my old games that actually uses DirectX (or OpenGL actually) still works flawlessly in XP, and it's the pre-layer stuff often needs tweaking. Then again, if it's just coding for Creative's driver set then that could work too. Creative did murder every other sound card competitor in the early 1990's, so as long as their new drivers continue to support the old X-Fi calls these games will be as compatible as ever.
It's just annoying though that MS has flat out abandoned a lot of DX features that are really pretty useful. I mean it was one of the big advantages that DX had over OpenGL. GL was just for graphics (you had to get some seperate projects for audio support) but DX had that, audio, something called Direct Input so people didn't have to worry about controller input methods too much (well, actually they sort of did, but everything was still tied together in the same layer which made some things easier), and net access on top of all of that. I had hoped they would actually load it with even more support, DirectPhysics for example, not strip stuff out. Seriously, even if they needed to "streamline" it, deciding that their new sound system would be done ENTIRELY in software was nuts.
I can see a certain logic mind you. Most people don't have the X-Fi. Most people get these amazing computers with nice processors and graphics cards but a cheap SB16 clone for a sound card (are sound cards still that out of date, or do they do SBLive clones in most machines now?). By doing it in software, you can get the same effects as the latest X-Fi. The problem is that there's a performance cost. If you don't have a decent sound card, it's worth the cost, but if you DO have one? Well then you just wasted your money. What you have is a piece of hardware that COULD do that work itself, but instead is just sitting there forwarding the processed sound to your speakers. I think MS needs to rework DX. Their idea of software based sound is "sound" for the low end but I think they need to dynamically switch between software and hardware based depending on the user's hardware configuration. They could even use the software based stuff to EXPAND on X-Fi's capability alongside the board, rather than their current method of expanding by totally replacing the board.
Anyway, the worst offender from what I've been reading is that Vista's DX9 support (DirectX 9.0L I believe it's called, L for Light) is crippled in the same manner, removing, among other things, the existing audio layer that XP supported just fine. This kinda breaks some old game's support for the acceleration.
This is on top of things such as what ABF notes. Namely, the lack of full screen DOS support. This actually stems from one important thing, specifically that Vista has no support for DOS based screen modes, so it can't do any of the old DOS resolutions, thus it can't do any full screen DOS.
Oh, let's see, what else. Ah yes, Vista 64-bit lacks support for 16-bit apps. I understand what's going on there, and they did find a way to get proper 32 bit support in there, but my question is if they had 32 bit support, couldn't they boot strap 16 bit support INTO that 32 bit support, since that's how they got 16 bit apps working in 32 bit mode to begin with? I'm not expecting it to be resident in memory the entire time, but rather just a subsystem that can be put into resident memory only when one attempts to load a 16 bit app. That said, I don't know how difficult coding such "on the fly" loading would be in an OS, as I have zero OS coding experience.
I understand MS wants to move on and not have an OS crippled by legacy any more, but they can make a new OS not really designed for legacy and at the same time still program legacy solutions that can be loaded only when needed, can't they?
I'll also note a few hardware incompatibilities, like no ISA slot support any more, but I expected that, and the one stickler I had (no Game Port support) can actually be resolved by installing a legacy driver. Further, they lack the old help system software, but that too can be installed into Vista for viewing old help file documents. These are examples of what they can do to add support for things, optional components.
This isn't just me the classic gamer wanting a "universal gaming machine", though that is a big part of it. These sorts of incompatibilities actually matter to companies that want to upgrade whole sets of networked computers.
As it stands, here's the thing. Should MS ever make a DX10 package for XP (maybe Service Pack 3 could rework the XP core enough that it could support it), I will see no reason at all to upgrade to Vista.
Quote:The more I read about Vista though, the more I realize just how much I don't ever want to upgrade to it. It just removes way too much. I mean, DX10 has utterly removed hardware accelerated sound! That's nuts. Bioshock plays fine on my machine but I can imagine if I turned off the X-Fi acceleration I'd see a small dip in frame rates. I got that nice sound card for a reason MS! Meanwhile, Creative has been working with all sorts of game companies to show them how to code in hardware accelerated sound alongside DX10 support. It is just annoying to have to program like that instead of using the same layer for everything, and I have to wonder what methods Creative is showing them to use... The point of an abstraction layer, well one point among others, is backwards compatibility so long as that abstraction layer exists. That's why every single one of my old games that actually uses DirectX (or OpenGL actually) still works flawlessly in XP, and it's the pre-layer stuff often needs tweaking. Then again, if it's just coding for Creative's driver set then that could work too. Creative did murder every other sound card competitor in the early 1990's, so as long as their new drivers continue to support the old X-Fi calls these games will be as compatible as ever.
The loss of hardware EAX is a pain. The main replacements are OpenAL (the audio equivalent of OpenGL) for new games, which works fine in Vista, and for legacy support a Creative app called ALchemy, which does EAX emulation (EAX to OpenAL or whatever) for certain games Creative has programmed it to support. This means that some games are indeed stuck without hardware sound acceleration support, but some, at least, do still have it.
... oh yeah, did I mention that I have an X-Fi card in this PC? I thought that a real sound card was essential, and Creative is the only place that makes them these days...
Quote:Indeed I have. I've played the demo on my own machine. One thing though. The highest graphics settings are greyed out. So... yeah. Second highest is playable but only barely. It is only smooth when I set it at something nice and low.
I know why those highest graphics settings are greyed out though. They utilize features of DX10. Mind you, my graphics cards don't support DX10 features anyway even if I had Vista, but there it is.
I've got a DX10 card of course so I can set it to max, but the framerate is bad and it's not THAT different... I've seen comparison shots and there are some small differences for sure, but yeah, High does look quite nice.
Quote:This is on top of things such as what ABF notes. Namely, the lack of full screen DOS support. This actually stems from one important thing, specifically that Vista has no support for DOS based screen modes, so it can't do any of the old DOS resolutions, thus it can't do any full screen DOS.
This one's the one thing I really miss outside of a few minor program incompatibilities. It's so, SO frusterating, because windowed DOS runs fine (or at least as fine as it ran in XP, that is; it's not near-perfect like Win9x, of course), but as soon as a program tries to go fullscreen... "not allowed".
Quote:Oh, let's see, what else. Ah yes, Vista 64-bit lacks support for 16-bit apps. I understand what's going on there, and they did find a way to get proper 32 bit support in there, but my question is if they had 32 bit support, couldn't they boot strap 16 bit support INTO that 32 bit support, since that's how they got 16 bit apps working in 32 bit mode to begin with? I'm not expecting it to be resident in memory the entire time, but rather just a subsystem that can be put into resident memory only when one attempts to load a 16 bit app. That said, I don't know how difficult coding such "on the fly" loading would be in an OS, as I have zero OS coding experience.
64-bit computing already has to emulate 32-bit stuff, pretty much... I can understand why they'd leave out 16-bit stuff, being as unimportant as it is for most people. I never even thought of getting Vista 64-bit though, of course, due to the massive incompatibilities with ... well, anything not written specifically for 64-bit OSes... I think that Vista 64-bit is right now what Windows NT or 2000 was in the late '90s -- an OS with a specific purpose that has not been tooled for the general public yet. It took XP to do that to the NT core, by adding in a lot of Win9x and DOS compatibility; Vista x64 isn't at that point yet.
32-bit does have limitations, such as that 32-bit Windows can't see more than 2GB of RAM at a time per program, and often not more than 2GB at all, so putting in more than 2GB into a system with a 32-bit OS might not be worth it, a limit which is beginning to matter, but even so, 64-bit computing has a long way to go to catch up to 32-bit systems...
Quote:I'll also note a few hardware incompatibilities, like no ISA slot support any more, but I expected that, and the one stickler I had (no Game Port support) can actually be resolved by installing a legacy driver. Further, they lack the old help system software, but that too can be installed into Vista for viewing old help file documents. These are examples of what they can do to add support for things, optional components.
ISA is irrelevent, they stopped putting those card slots on computers in the '90s... I have heard about the gameport thing though, and as you say, because you can fix the problem, it's not a major issue, given that there is a way to add in gameport support into Vista if you have a card with a gameport on it (Modern Creative soundcards do not, only their older ones or old dedicated gameport cards do). Finding a way to get a soundcard or something with a gameport on it functioning in Vista while simultaneously using another soundcard, a much newer one (X-Fi for instance), as your main soundcard, seems like it'd be the main challenge, not getting that gameport to work once you manage to resolve those difficulties. Of course, the other option is simply to buy new USB gamepads and joysticks...
Of course in addition to getting rid of gameports Creative also dropped their DOS SB16 emulation drivers that allowed DOS programs to think that your SBLive! or whatever was a SB16, meaning that even if DOS DID work in Vista you'd probably have no sound (or joystick, without the gameport joystick support, given that DOS can't see USB as far as I know)... Microsoft and Creative both have a hand in the death of native DOS support, and a new Windows XP system with a modern Creative card won't be much better for native DOS support than a Vista system, really... unless there's an emulator that fixes this sound problem for DOS games in XP on systems without a Creative card that has built-in DOS SB16 support?
Well the thing is, NT based systems don't really allow direct access to the hardware layer. That's part of the whole directx thing. It's better that way but since sound card support pretty much requires direct access in the old DOS games (hence why old setup programs needed so much technical info about your sound card back then) you end up with no sound in DOS games. In other words, I actually understand and support the lack of legacy there. These days I actually run a lot of my DOS games in DosBox. It isn't perfect, but it is really starting to narrow in on perfect.
64 bit computing, yeah I will need to update to that eventually. The thing is 32 bit processors could run 16 bit processes just fine. They were tooled to do that. 64 bit can do 32 bit but it isn't really emulation. Rather the only thing it needs to do is add dummy data alongside it to fake a 64 bit program. There used to be issues with 32 bit apps but from what I understand compatibility issues with old 32 bit applications at least are pretty much resolved. I only say that 16 bit support should remain, since a lot of 32 bit apps still use 16 bit installers, a lot of no longer supported but still needed apps.
Quote:These days I actually run a lot of my DOS games in DosBox. It isn't perfect, but it is really starting to narrow in on perfect.
I already complained about how far DOSBox was from perfect in a bunch of DOS games in one of my Vista threads so I won't here. If DOSBox was a near-perfect emulator I wouldn't mind nearly so much about the loss of DOS, that's for sure...
Quote:Well the thing is, NT based systems don't really allow direct access to the hardware layer. That's part of the whole directx thing. It's better that way but since sound card support pretty much requires direct access in the old DOS games (hence why old setup programs needed so much technical info about your sound card back then) you end up with no sound in DOS games.
So essentially, you agree that on the DOS point Vista's change didn't actually matter much because modern XP machines can't run DOS games anyway, thanks to sound card and gameport issues?