Crysis Demo

[Asher]

Why is the suit new? Half-Life and Halo both use suits as well, with special powers.

[Solver]

This one is more special. It makes Koreans scream in surprise

[Quillan]

The only new thing about the suit is the selectable abilities. The HEV suit in Half Life 1/2 gives you armor, an energy shield, and a flashlight. In HL2 it gives you a zoom effect. It does this all the time. The Spartan armor in Halo gives you the energy shield and allows for some of your superhuman abilities, but nothing changes there. This one gives you the choice of 4 abilities, but you can only have one up at a time, so it's a bit of a tactical choice.

Aside from that, it's Far Cry with better graphics. Although if you're not capable of running it at the high/very high settings, I can't help but wonder if Far Cry doesn't look better.

[Asher]

It also has a special power that disrupts your enemy's pathfinding skills, apparently.

[Solver]

I don't see the Crysis AI as being particularly poor. It has some pathfinding problems, but that's true of almost any FPS. It's not that horrid given the open-endedness and the sheer amount of places you can get to.

And yes, maxed out Far Cry looks better than Crysis on Medium. I am hoping for better balanced gameplay here, though.

[Solver]

Really, though, I wonder if the engine is just poor or what? Unreal engine 3 looks great, games on that engine also look very good on Medium and run much better.

[ZEE]

sorry to interrupt

Solver please check your PM's. thanks...

[Asher]

Originally posted by Solver
Really, though, I wonder if the engine is just poor or what? Unreal engine 3 looks great, games on that engine also look very good on Medium and run much better.

Yes. It's not that difficult to make a game that looks SWEET in screenshots or on systems that come out 3 years from now. It IS difficult to make the game look SWEET and still be playable.

Basically, with DX9/10, it's trivial to make gorgeous looking game. You can do anything you want with the shaders now. The real challenge is to do them in a way that is incredibly quick. Unreal Engine 3 does this in spades, id software's engines usually do this well, and Valve's Source does this well. And why shouldn't they -- they make money by licensing them out.

For Crysis, Crytek (the developers) have gone on record as seeing themselves as peers of the John Carmack (id) and Tim Sweeney (Epic/Unreal). I think, now that we have seen the demo, that is not the case. Carmack and Sweeney tweak and optimize the hell out of every cycle they can get. If they have to spend 2 weeks to reduce a shader from taking 120 cycles to 110, they do it. All these little things pay off huge when you put them all together.

It's the little details like that that are abundantly lacking from Crysis. Sure, it looks great when on full settings on hardware you can buy for $900 2 years from now, but until it can look great and be efficient enough to be usable by most people, they're going to continue to be 2nd-tier engine developers.

To me, Unreal Engine 3.0 is the engine to beat today and Crytek's engine has not done it.

[Solver]

Is iD a good example? They use OpenGL in the first place, so the development process has to differ significantly from Valve/Crytek/Epic. Carmack's an algorithm genius, though.

Some parts in Crytek2 just surprise me, though. Not decreasing poly counts on far-away object. No loading - the demo is long enough and with a big enough area, looks like it's all loaded at once. And no view distance setting. In Oblivion (and Morrowind in its time) it's arguably the most effective way of getting extra FPS.

Still... I guess for a fair comparison we'd need to see a game that looks just as good as Crysis maxed out. Crysis on max looks better than Bioshock, it'd seem. I just want to see what performance other (future) games of Crysis-quality maxed visuals can pull off.

Granted, Crytek's defense of this is fairly simple. They say that the engine is intended for DX10 and next-gen hardware, such as GeForce 9.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Solver
Is iD a good example? They use OpenGL in the first place, so the development process has to differ significantly from Valve/Crytek/Epic. Carmack's an algorithm genius, though.

I don't know if OpenGL vs DX has any bearing on this at all.

Granted, Crytek's defense of this is fairly simple. They say that the engine is intended for DX10 and next-gen hardware, such as GeForce 9.

That's no defense at ALL. It was first demoed last year on an X1900XTX.

It's intended for DX10, fine. There are DX10 cards out now. I have one. Performance still sucks.

It looks like they simply have an inefficient engine, and rather than spending money to fix it and delaying their game, they're spinning it like "Crytek is SO AWESOME, only hardware from the FUTURE can play it properly". Do you buy that?

[Solver]

That's no defense at ALL. It was first demoed last year on an X1900XTX.

I remember reading a couple of journalists saying that it ran like crap at the first press showings. That's bad, even though the game was obviously unoptimized and with lots of debug info at the time.

Before the demo, I thought that they have some defense. Now, admittedly, I'm much less willing to buy what they're saying. The engine apparently lacks some basic optimization, such as decreased detail on distant objects. And on medium settings, it looks worse than other games while still running worse. That's what's annoying me, you'd expect medium-setting Crysis to have graphics comparable to medium-setting Bioshock or Episode 2.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Asher
For Crysis, Crytek (the developers) have gone on record as seeing themselves as peers of the John Carmack (id) and Tim Sweeney (Epic/Unreal). I think, now that we have seen the demo, that is not the case. Carmack and Sweeney tweak and optimize the hell out of every cycle they can get. If they have to spend 2 weeks to reduce a shader from taking 120 cycles to 110, they do it. All these little things pay off huge when you put them all together.

fastInvSqrt anyone?

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Asher
It looks like they simply have an inefficient engine, and rather than spending money to fix it and delaying their game, they're spinning it like "Crytek is SO AWESOME, only hardware from the FUTURE can play it properly". Do you buy that?

As I said earlier, I think there's definately some of the latter may be a deliberate strategy.

[Solver]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker


fastInvSqrt anyone?

Sadly, Carmack isn't the one who wrote it

[Asher]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker


fastInvSqrt anyone?

Actually, Crytek2 may be using that still. Which is about 10x slower than using the SSE2 instruction for the same thing.