Crysis experimentings

TheCenturion · 28 Jan 2011 at 19:03

Hi guys,

Over the weekend, I'll be testing out a few Crysis mods/tweaks. This is for me to tweak my game to make it look as good as possible, and also I'll give a quick verdict on each mod as to whether it's worth getting or not.

Verdict

Note: Make sure you have the latest version of Crysis (patch 1.2) You'll know if you have it because there'll be a 'mods' tab in your main menu

I'm finally done

I've tried a whole load of different mods. The first number represents the visual benefit, 5 being highest, 1 no change. 2nd number represents the performance impact, 5 being a big performance increase, 1 being a huge decrease, 3 being no change.

Vanilla Crysis looks great. But if you're going to be playing it, please sacrifice 15-20 mins of your life to make it look amazing! Vanilla crysis simply doesn't fulfill the potential of the engine. There's 3 main places that the game falls down.

1. Lighting - realistic lighting is something that is distinctly lacking in crysis, yet when it's done correctly it can make it look so real. There's loads of different TOD configs (TimeOfDay), so just go out and try them! I would recommend real lifesis, it's just stunning.

2. Textures Certain textures in the game just aren't up to scratch. Need to grab the hi res foliage mod. If you have lots of Ram and/or GPU ram, then also get Rygel's texture mod, which adds some really great hi res textures.

3. Optimisation Let's face it: Crysis runs like a dog

. Just grab yourself a config and it'll boost your framerates nicely. Should also improve visuals too. If you can run very high with reasonable fps, just grab yourself the extreme quality config. If you simply can't run very high, then there's plenty of other configs out there for lower spec systems.

If you've got the above, and still have a bit of system power to play with, then consider getting other mods as well.

I would recommend the extreme quality mod, but it changes gameplay very significantly, it's something that you'd probably want to play with after you've completed the game. I'll certainly be playing the whole game again with this mod as it's unlike anything I've ever experienced before.

I'm signing off now, my target is to make the best crysis screenshots I can

Here's a list of the mods I'll be trying out:

Rygel's Texture pack 4 2
Hi def foliage 5 3
Hi res grass 2 3
Custom Nano suit 3 3
Global ambient lighting 3 3
Extreme Quality Mod 4 2
Extreme quality config 3 4
Natural Mod 3 3
CCC Config 5 2
Real Lifesis 5 3
Xtreme particle chaos 4 3

It won't be very in depth or anything as I've just got the weekend, but I'll load each mod individually and play around on Contact for a while. Then I'll load up the best mods together and see how they turn out.

If anyone wants me to try a few more, just post them here and I'll see what I can do

Hi res foliage
Great little mod, I would absolutely recommended. Really improves on the vanilla foliage, making it thoroughly much more visually pleasant. And comes with no fps drop at all. Not the best screenshot though I admit.

Hi res grass
From my quick use of this texture, doesn't really seem to add much. Will update if I see a change

Extreme Quality Mod

Undecided on this one. It's great visually, and changes gameplay significantly. For me, the gameplay change makes the game rather unplayable, due to disabling the suit and the use of hitbox. However, I will certainly be looking into the maps that have been made that have this mod preloaded on them (eg: Amazonia). The best part is the TOD change it makes, it's stunning imo. The natural mod will have to do a lot to compete with this!

The first pic is vanilla, the second is the full eqm mod, and the third is just the colour correction part of the mod, which looks better than vanilla, but not as good as the whole thing. The pictures are a tad lacking in quality, but that's because I had to resize them

CCC Config with Ultima Rage TOD
In my opinion, this is a great config for crysis. I used the ultra high end config, and whilst it resulted in a performance drop from vanilla, it just looks a lot better. However, for some reason Crysis isn't letting me take high res screens of the lighting, so I have to use lower res screens here. The TOD mod so far is a little red

But I'll probably continue with it to see whether it looks different later on.

Real Lifesis

This rocks! Amazing TOD config. I just love it, you can't argue with this can you?

Extreme Quality Config

This is another great config. Looks better than vanilla. Switching to very high makes an immediately noticeable fps drop. Also a drop in visuals. To be honest, the performance drop is more noticeable than the visual drop. Still an amazing config, great for anyone who wants higher fps and better visuals than very high.

Xtreme particle chaos

This is quite a cool mod. Adds particles, makes smoke more prominent etc. It's quite difficult to screenshot most of this, so I've only been able to get the blood effect. It is called 'extreme' and so the particles are slightly exaggerated. It's not realistic, but it's a cool mod that you have to try.

Rygel's Texture Pack

Nice textures, however, I didn't use the foliage ones, as the high res foliage is much superior. As it's an extra gig of textures, there is a noticeable performance drop.

Nano Suit Ultra Customizable

Loads of options, nice and hi res, looks great

Natural Mod

It's nice. Doesn't change the standard TOD substantially, but it does contain a few lighting fixes .

scubes · 28 Jan 2011 at 19:08

class mate let me how you get on and the fps hit you get with these mods if any...

Gashman · 28 Jan 2011 at 19:22

found the Natural Mod really overrated personally, though it didn't affect framerates too much. another recommendation, DIY config. get the full list of command variables in cryengine2:

http://www.tweakguides.com/Crysis_9.html

top of the page, highlighted. most of them can be activated whilst the game is running so you can immediately see their effect, like SSAO, HDR, etc. can all be done on the fly by typing into the console things like r_HDRLevel 0.65, so you can do it by trail and error. though its worth noting for some reason i discovered that r_Glow 1 and r_SSAO 1 don't work together, you get weird shiny, glowing leaves and stuff, would recommend avoiding using those two together, think SSAO makes the biggest difference visually anyways!

TheCenturion · 28 Jan 2011 at 19:25

Yeah, I thought about making a custom config, as there doesn't seem to be a config where everyone has turned everything to absolute max. But time is at a premium this weekend, so I'll see if I have time to do that too

ssmacc · 28 Jan 2011 at 19:43

Do all these work with the Steam version? Not tried any of the mods but would like to (new 6950 to test)

Thanks

TheCenturion · 28 Jan 2011 at 21:39

Updated with hi res foliage mod

AlexTrickle · 28 Jan 2011 at 21:46

Could you list your specs so we know whether we could manage these etc?

TheCenturion · 28 Jan 2011 at 21:49

Oh sorry

i7 930 @ 4ghz
6gb ddr3
gtx 480
res: 1920x1080

Settings: Very high, obviously apart from when using a custom config

Just tried the custom config and visually it's a lot better, and my fps went from mid 30's to 50!

'Wes · 28 Jan 2011 at 21:55

I'll keep an eye on this, thanks for the effort.

TheCenturion · 29 Jan 2011 at 13:32

Updated with the extreme quality mod

Fledge · 29 Jan 2011 at 13:53

The shadows in your 4th pic look amazing!
So what would you recommend I use if I wanted the best possible aesthetics with minimal fps loss?
Also, do you know of a mod that alters smoke so it doesn't maim framerates?

TheCenturion · 29 Jan 2011 at 14:10

Fledge said:
The shadows in your 4th pic look amazing!
So what would you recommend I use if I wanted the best possible aesthetics with minimal fps loss?
Also, do you know of a mod that alters smoke so it doesn't maim framerates?

Thanks mate

If you want to improve graphics and improve performance, then a custom config is the way to go. I may make my own one at some point, but the one that I'm testing at the moment is the extreme quality config by Jmanrob

http://www.crymod.com/thread.php?threadid=31242

Here's another one that's supposed to be quite good.

http://www.crymod.com/filebase.php?fileid=491&lim=0

Also, I reckon I'll give the CCC config a playaround too and see if that's any good.

The configs visuals and also as I've said above improve fps quite a bit too.

As for smoke, I'm not sure. I reckon if you get a custom config it will improve overall framerates and therefore improve framerates during scenes with lots of smoke

Nibbles · 29 Jan 2011 at 14:13

they really did nail some spectacular water effects with the cryengine farycry was excellent for water physics too. shame most games dont get it quite as right.

although:- Halo 3 made a pretty good attempt for a console

Deific · 29 Jan 2011 at 14:13

btw what did you do to remove the slow motion?

TheCenturion · 29 Jan 2011 at 14:30

Deific said:
btw what did you do to remove the slow motion?

Hi mate, what I did was to open the eqm .xml in the flowgraph editor without loading a map, then search for nano suit. It should give a few results which say 'nano suit removal'. I just deleted these nodes in the flowgraph.

However, this still kept slowmotion active, so what I did was to find the node for slow motion, and change the 'input' from mouse 3 to something else.

This is similar to a post that I read on the cry mod forums.

EDIT: Dammit, I'm trying to take screenshots to show lighting effects, but they all just keep coming out ****ed up

Deific · 29 Jan 2011 at 15:52

ah okay.

looks like I was wrong about the colour correction too, much easier to see there is a difference when looking at comparison shots.

TheCenturion · 29 Jan 2011 at 23:55

Sorely tempted to try RELI2, the sequel to realifesis. Supposed to be one of the best TOD configurations. Only thing stopping me is that supposed it messes up the end of the game. Ah hell, I may as well go for it, I'm only on Contact

Gashman · 30 Jan 2011 at 03:12

just posted similar in another thread, the single biggest limiting factor i have noticed in crysis is foliage, its just not upto the standard of the rest of the game. no matter what i do, how i decorate it, using high resolution texture packs, etc. nothing seems to fix the fact that the trees are shockingly jaggy. since cryengine2 hates anti-aliasing as well, that seems to do nothing really noticable to them either, the only convincing shots i have seen are those with transparency AA enabled, like this one:

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=66582&stc=1&d=1193866174

it seems to do the best all round job at smoothing out the jagged leaves and what not on the palms, still doesn't do perfect job mind. only thing i have managed to do to get the jaggedness to a minimum is blurring, similar to the in-game cutscenes, where blurring is used to soften the surroundings. works to pretty good effect but makes the whole game well, blurry and thats not to everyones taste.

TheCenturion · 30 Jan 2011 at 13:02

Gashman said:
just posted similar in another thread, the single biggest limiting factor i have noticed in crysis is foliage, its just not upto the standard of the rest of the game. no matter what i do, how i decorate it, using high resolution texture packs, etc. nothing seems to fix the fact that the trees are shockingly jaggy. since cryengine2 hates anti-aliasing as well, that seems to do nothing really noticable to them either, the only convincing shots i have seen are those with transparency AA enabled, like this one:

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=66582&stc=1&d=1193866174

it seems to do the best all round job at smoothing out the jagged leaves and what not on the palms, still doesn't do perfect job mind. only thing i have managed to do to get the jaggedness to a minimum is blurring, similar to the in-game cutscenes, where blurring is used to soften the surroundings. works to pretty good effect but makes the whole game well, blurry and thats not to everyones taste.

Hi mate. The foliage looks have decent on mine. I tend to play with 8xqAA, but I'll give it a try with EdgeAA.
For some reason, I cannot for the life of the me work it out, but I can't take screenshots that have any sort of lighting in them. They just turn out messed up. But I'll do my best.

The first shot is Edge AA (r_UseEdgeAA = 1), the second is 8xqAA

Gashman · 30 Jan 2011 at 13:57

the first shot with edge AA looks better, because the leaves on the trees aren't as un-naturally sharp as those with normal AA, as far as i know thats because cryengine2 seriously dislikes traditional AA for some reason! thats why i prefer playing with real lifesis more than any other config, because it blurs the foliage, getting rid of all those undesirables!

also give r_EdgeAA = 2 a try, seems to give me better results.