Why I'm Unhappy with Crysis

It doesn't take a genius to know why I'm unhappy with Crysis. This is supposed to be technical achievement of the year. Well, I'm having trouble seeing it. This is my computer running Unreal Tournament 3. (both details settings at 4, post processing at Vivid - 30fps - which I believe is the fps limiter kicking in)

(Click on the thumbnail to see the whole picture. A note? UT3's default for my computers made the game look really really bad. Most games do that when they autodetect my settings - funnily enough, I didn't expect to have to turn up the settings up to 4 to find the REAL optimal settings that it should've found to begin with.)

This is my computer running Call of Duty 4 - practically default (optimal settings from autodetect), besides my turning up the anistropic filtering and resolution up from 1024*768 - runs at 30fps - also fps limiter, if I'm not wrong.

(Click on the thumbnail to see the whole picture. Second screen is from multiplayer. I haven't played far enough to get to the outdoors section yet - but I've already played it on the XBox 360.)

This is my computer running Crysis. (been tweaked till the moon turns orange - it's as smooth as it gets after tweaking everything - optimal defaults look horrible)

(Playable settings - roughly 21-30fps)

(Slightly higher quality settings - roughly 12-16fps)

(Click on the thumbnail to see the whole picture.)

The screenshots are taken after I have adjusted every possible setting in the normal menu - yes, I know nowadays you can tweak the .INI file down to every detail, but if the game doesn't have the option in the menu, I figure I'm better off not tweaking it. Everything is running at 1024 by 768. Everything I have tweaked to achieve a general 30-40 frames per second - no point turning everything up if I can't play it that way.

If you can see from the screenshots above - yes, my biggest complaint is simple. Crysis graphics may look nice if you can turn everything up - but if you can't, you are left with crap. I don't mind if the lighting is less realistic, the trees look like any other lousy trees, but it's another thing when objects which most games have no problem rendering nicely start looking worse than games running on (I'll stress) identical hardware. My computer is far from crap, and while it can't do crazy 1680 by 1050 at 30fps, it can sure as hell pull through (and look good while it's at it) at 1024 by 768. As much as people are calling it beautiful and such - im my opinion, the ability to downscale is huge, especially since the gameplay is relatively weak. While people might call my computer weak, it sure as hell ain't a pushover - and I'm as sure as hell Crysis could use some massive optimisations.

(And yes, despite what Crytek says, Crysis should run fine on a console if they worked hard enough to optimize their work. Realize the Bioshock PC does look better than it's XBox 360 counterpart - I'm quite sure console owners wouldn't mind it looking worse as long as they can play it. Of course, there's the issue of gameplay - but Crysis feels very much like a console game to me - just eats a lot of virtual memory for some reason.)

It is a bad comparison since I am comparing leaves to lack of any greenery whatsoever, but what about the normal objects? Even on my crappy computer, non-tree objects deserve more attention than none.

A New Website Section Upcoming?

I'm considering adding a new section to my website, which actually has been just this blog for sometime now. It has just been a blog for so long, since I think just the blog is kind of insufficient. I have been experimenting with several content management systems for what must be several months now. Considering my interest is in video games, I think what I'll do is add a games site that's to my taste. I still honestly haven't found a CMS that'll work towards my needs, so I believe I'll very likely be hacking what's already available to suit my needs. I suppose you can expect it to come up by June this year. (I'm working on another unrelated project, so I'm being a little more liberal with my estimation. Chances are a skeleton will be up before the end of this month, but I don't think it'll come close to my actual idea until June 2008 or later.)

Messed Up Sleep Times

Oh well, my sleeping time is messed up again - now it's 5am. o_O

Onwards

I did a small trial with Movable Type 4.01 today. While I must agree that it has its merits, especially since the frontline site is separate from the CGI scripts, those scripts were what made me want to move from Blogger to begin with. However, it is very viable for a site with a larger traffic load - but I don't even draw enough traffic to justify using it.

Talking about Direction

Reading this post and the question posed by Chewxy was rather intriguing to me then, and still intriguing to me now. A few months ago, I posed my friends this simple yet profound question - where do you see all of us 5 years from now and 10 years from now. When I was 15, I joined and qualified for the finals of a national youth programming competition, the DGX DCC 2001. It's no longer being held now, sadly. I obviously didn't win, but it was somewhat interesting what most people who were 1 year or 2 years older than us had for ideas to submit for their finals. I'd argue what I submitted was particularly childish now and probably the most incomplete, but I think it's more than likely all of us thought similarly.

Now, six years later, I'm doing actuarial science - something I didn't even remotely know about then. I'm still no closer to completing Sword Fantasy than I was five years ago. I'm not using anything I learned in school in daily classes besides my mathematics and even whatever use of that is reduced to what I would consider a negligible amount.

My programming never really took off until two years ago. In the span of two years, I've learned more than six programming and scripting languages (C, C++, Java, R, MATLAB and Lua - I don't consider Warcraft 3's JASS to count, neither do I count PHP or C#), gotten familiar with all 3 major operating systems (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux), finished more games than I have in the two years before that, and made a Warcraft 3 custom map (which I chose not to release because of a similar item already out). And I'm not in any computer programming class, software engineering class. The one class I did attend was for fun and for a free high distinction - as well as reassurance that I would probably be bored if I tried to go the programming way for a degree.

My brain is still trying to recover from the two years of stagnation at HELP. I have still been unable to access it completely - I'm hoping the course will get harder and switch my brain back on. My memorization functions are still greatly limited (as evidenced by my poor performance in Corporate Finance). I certainly hope that it will recover by next year. It feels funny knowing that you are capable of more, but your brain refuses to go that extra mile.