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Xiaopang
08-07-2009, 04:40 PM
Alright people, even though I have a pretty buff system and could enjoy the game quite well, I grew weary of all the bitching about the game's performance and I took a closer look at the cfg-file. I found a few options that you can't set in-game, but which have a tremendous impact on the workload that the game puts on your comp.

This is what my edited cfg does:

- Deactivation of physics calculations for cloth and fluids.

- Fur rendering, whatever that means, because I haven't seen any fur in the game.

- Postglow. Seems to be one of the visual filters.

- Resolution of 640x480. Ingame you can only set 800x600 as lowest resolution.

- Hitfx_lifetime set to 0 (from 18 ). Not really sure what that is, but it sounds like a decals option. Apparently it deactivates some effects during combat, which is nice, because that's basically when framerates take the biggest hit. I didn't see a difference in visual quality between the old settings and the new ones, though.

You can also deactivate the skybox, which creates an interesting effect. The game looks like it's being played at night (great in the outdoor scenes of the first level) and in parts it looks like it's a negative of the game. However, for some strange reason it seemed to put a little more workload on my machine instead of less, so I left the skybox in. After all, this is how the game was supposed to be enjoyed. Still, give it a try if you want to play the game again ;)

All other features have been set to minimum. After replacing the cfg you can modify the original values in the settings menu within the game. The above mentioned features will remain deactivated. For high-end cards that pour out crappy framerates, I suggest using this cfg and only raising the resolution. The same goes for people who still have some reserves left on weaker cards. Raising texture quality or turning on AA or AF result in little visual improvements, while having a massive impact on your performance. Changing the resolution has little impact, at least on my card.

Despite using shader 2.0 and no AA or AF, the game looks still very nice on higher resolutions. I tested this on my GTX260 @1680x1050. Originally I played the game at 1280x800 with all eye candy turned to
max. I had framerates of 15 (icy areas, especially outside) to 30 (mostly flashbacks and heated rooms). With this config my framerate now ranges between 45 and 100 fps while using a 50% higher resolution.

I also made screenshots to show off the difference in visual quality, which is really not that big. The screenshots were taken with minimum settings of my config.cfg and with everything maxed out. Both use a resolution of 1680x1050 on a Palit GTX260 SP216 Sonic. I also wrote down the average framerate that I had when taking the screenshot, so you have a frame of reference for the speed gain.

Dream Max 30FPS (with patch):

http://i214.photobucket.com/albums/cc273/Xiaopang999/Cryostasis-Dream-Max30fpspatched.png



Dream Max 30FPS (without patch):

http://i214.photobucket.com/albums/cc273/Xiaopang999/Cryostasis-Dream-Max30fps.png



Dream Min 50FPS (with patch):

http://i214.photobucket.com/albums/cc273/Xiaopang999/Cryostasis-Dream-Min50fpspatched.png



Dream Min 50FPS (without patch):

http://i214.photobucket.com/albums/cc273/Xiaopang999/Cryostasis-Dream-Min50fps.png



Forest Max 18FPS (without patch):

http://i214.photobucket.com/albums/cc273/Xiaopang999/Cryostasis-Forest-Max18fps.png



Forest Min 53FPS (without patch):

http://i214.photobucket.com/albums/cc273/Xiaopang999/Cryostasis-Forest-Min53fps.png



Heat Max 23FPS (with patch):

http://i214.photobucket.com/albums/cc273/Xiaopang999/Cryostasis-Heat1-Max23fpspatched.png



Heat Min 46FPS (with patch):

http://i214.photobucket.com/albums/cc273/Xiaopang999/Cryostasis-Heat1-Min46fpspatched.png



Heat Max 30FPS (with patch):

http://i214.photobucket.com/albums/cc273/Xiaopang999/Cryostasis-Heat2-Max30fpspatched.png



Heat Min 46FPS (with patch):

http://i214.photobucket.com/albums/cc273/Xiaopang999/Cryostasis-Heat2-Min46fpspatched.png


As you can see, the gain lies between 50 and 300%. The screenshots are also included with the patch, so you can examine them further fullscreen with your favorite picture viewer. By the way, the modded cfg works for patched and unpatched versions of the game. Download the mod here:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=AJO9IGRW

I also uploaded my savegames, created with the patched version, for those who don't want to update because it breaks their old saves. Since the game always autosaves at the same position and doesn't have a difficulty setting, your gaming experience shouldn't differ too much when resuming the game with my saves. I was very stingy with using ammo, because I mostly relied on the water gun, so you will have maxed out clips in most saves. Get the saves here:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=2U39I9RX


UPDATE: I made a second mod to furtther improve performance!

This time i modded the init.cfg resulting in major changes in graphics, physics and particle rendering:

- All small objects like barrels, cans and debris will be gone. However, they still seem to be rendered by the engine.
Consider this being the trade-off for using this mod. The game looks a lot "cleaner" this way, if not to say barren.

- Shattering icicles will only result in a single particle (originally there were 64!)

- The console has been activated

- The logos will not be played when you start the game

- Lighting has been reduced to a minimum

- The sun has been disabled. You should only recognize that in outdoor sections. Instead of
the sun's presence, you will now have an equally lit screen. This should eliminate another
light source and with it shadow rendering

- The sky detail has been minimized. Only good for outdoor sections.

- Water effects have been disabled. Water will now look like a transparent mass. Should give you
huge performance gains in flashbacks.

- Particle effects have been eliminated. They have been reduced to a single one, to be more correct.
Usually, the game renders thousands of them for each occasion (sparks, water dripping, water shooting,
icicle shattering). Particle usage is mostly the reason why many computers can't deal with the game.

- Several visual effects have been disabled.

The optimizations have one huge advantage for older cards: They almost completely eliminate physics rendering. On my rig, I only gained about 10% better performance constantly, which is not that much, because my gfx-card did all the physx work. I made a short testrun with cpu-rendered physics and could see no difference in performance compared to hardware rendering, so all you owners of mid-range cards will most likely profit tremendously from this mod. Even for owners with strong cards is still more to gain, at least temporarily. In scenes with usually heavy particle usage even strong systems slow down and this will be reduced to a minimum.

On the other hand, the visual quality is a lot worse. The ice melting process will be simplified to ice merely drying out. Also, you won't see any dripping water any more. The frost on the walls will look rather simple and will not show the beautifully bumpmapped structures it shows with the original init.cfg. However, many weaker systems have the most problems in icy areas, so this should help loads. Seemingly endless foggy areas might not look so endless anymore, because fog has been reduced to a minimum too.

There is one major drawback though: The init.cfg-settings seem to be stored in the savegames. This means that you will have to start the game over to profit from this mod. Some settings might be read dynamically from this file when you load a save, others like the number of icicle particles doesn't seem to get updated. You can give it a try anyway. Else, just start over. The game offers only 5 hours of playing time anyway, so you don't lose much time.

Refer to the included readme for more information! Download the mod here:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=YHWHDQV6


If you used the mods, then it would be great if you could post your system specs and the performance gains that you had by using the mods. Just one last word of caution. This mod has not been fully tested. I would have had to completely play through the game with it. Since I can play the game fine on high settings I don't see a reason for that, especially not in such a butchered way. So just be warned that you might get stuck in the game because of this mod. It's not likely, but it's possible. Depending on how quick I get feedback, I might fine tune the settings before moving on.



A few personal words regarding some of the stuff that pisses me off about what is going on in this and other forums regarding this game (and also others):

First of all, Nike-it, why do you suggest NOT installing the patch on systems that don't boast higher end cards?? Just because they can't make use of the new features due to lack of hardware-support for physx?? The patch fixes a myriad of critical and annoying bugs. Suggesting that lower spec comps should put up with that is just ridiculous. In fact, the patch has no negative impact performance-wise, because all the new physx-features get a new option in the settings dialog. Hence they can be deactivated and therefore weaker systems won't experience any more strain than they already do! So update people! This suggestion coming from a 1C official is rather disappointing. Same goes for the devs that don't seem to care about the idiotic rumors that are being passed around instead of clearing them up with a simple statement.

That brings me to the idiotic assumption that the game doesn't support multi-threading. An asinine claim that even made it into wikipedia until I took care of it! The game splits the load among the different cores. It even utilizes quad-core systems, which is quite nice. Just because the load doesn't go up to a hundred per cent doesn't mean that the game is badly optimized. It just means that your card is already busy doing other stuff and can't take more workload from your CPU! Try it with my config. Your workload will be much higher! The sole fact that people spilled out such an unproven bullshit is bad enough. It's even worse that they post screenshots that prove the exact opposite, misinterprete them and other - even less knowledgeable people - jump on the bandwagon and bash the game just so they have a scapegoat to blame for their lack of proper hardware. It also doesn't matter that your comp might handle Crysis, Fallout 3 or any other modern game with higher framerates. Those games all use different engines, shaders, physics, A.I., texture quality, renderers...the list goes on and on! If you are not capable of seeing which parts in Cryostasis are eating up your system's performance then just shut up instead of making a clown out of yourself!

A game that has no multithread-support only utilizes a single core. That's not the case with the game, neither patched nor unpatched! If you claim the opposite you're most likely having issues that are limited to your system, or you just measured it incorrectly...

A word to the noobs that spam forums across the internet asking, whether or not their hardware can run the game: It's called a playable demo! Download and test the performance on your system yourself! You're not buying a graphics card here! You can actually test the game without buying it! It even has a techdemo, so make use of that instead of looking like a fool!

New games have always been pushing the boundaries of hardware, always! It was this way ever since Doom came out and people realized that they had to invest a couple of thousand dollars for a 486, because the game just couldn't run on their crappy 386 anymore with all its visual glory. It was the same when Doom 3 came out and it was just the same when Crysis came out! People bitched massively back then, but do they still bitch now? No! Because recent mid-range hardware is capable of running the game quite well and that's because the systems got faster and not because the game was sped up with patches! Same with Cryostasis. Go get yourself a proper rig instead of whining! Most of you have an overprized console at home, or even two or more and if you can afford to buy games for 50 bucks or consoles for even hundreds of dollars, then you should be able to buy yourself a proper 3D-card. Got a high-end card and still got crappy framerates? Great! Learn how to set up a computer properly! Any monkey can assemble a computer today, but apparently only a few actually know how to set it up correctly, or even how to choose components that get the most out of the graphics card. But those are never the ones, who complain about stuff like: "Uh, I only get 30 frames in 1900x1200 with everything at max. This sucks!"

And if you're still having only a sub-par performance despite having the strongest card on the market, then get a sli, or crossfire system... After all, not all games limit themselves to the physical boundaries of modern hardware and you should all be thankful for that, because this is the milestone software that pushes graphics card development along. If games never raised the bar for graphics power, then we would still be stuck with Quake 1 graphics...

In the end, you have to ask yourself why you play the game. Is it because of the graphics, or the gameplay or because of the story? It should be the latter, because everything else is just superficial and meaningless anyway. Games like Quake or Half-Life 1 don't get played nowadays because their graphics look so "great". If you're in for the story then there's nothing to bitch about. Just to prove a point I actually beat the last four levels on my Radeon x1600 Pro, which is well below the specified minimum of an x1800. I didn't even use the above config for that extra boost. I just played the game at minimum settings at 640x480 and always had at least 25fps. So the game is well playable on 4 year old mid-range hardware (and didn't look too shabby on it by the way), so any bickering about the game's performance on your system is moot. It's not the game's features that should be tuned down just so that you can drool over some pointless framerates in this month, only to forget about it two days later, but rather your exaggerated expectations from your hardware should be lowered and with them your graphics settings... In a year, no one will care about you whiny folks any more, because all new cards will run the game with ease...in fact, they do already...

Personally, I think that all those bitchy haters only downloaded the game illegally anyway. As a real buyer, you're usually aware of what your system can run and you usually use the demos to get a clear picture first. If you're a pirate, you don't care about demos and just download the stuff, just to find out that your cheapass rig doesn't cut it any more...

shaq
08-10-2009, 06:37 AM
Thanks for the config. I have a i7 920 @3.9 and 260 SLI and the falling icicles dropped the FPS to 8! I can't believe they set it that way. If my rig won't play it they shouldn't have released it.

Are you going to do a higher end config? Putting everything off and at 1 seems a bit drastic. I am going to mess with the numbers and see how high I can put everything and still have it be playable. Thanks for showing which numbers to edit. And I'm glad they made the game so moddable.

waynen12
08-10-2009, 09:03 AM
That brings me to the idiotic assumption that the game doesn't support multi-threading. An asinine claim that even made it into wikipedia until I took care of it! The game splits the load among the different cores. It even utilizes quad-core systems, which is quite nice. Just because the load doesn't go up to a hundred per cent doesn't mean that the game is badly optimized. It just means that your card is already busy doing other stuff and can't take more workload from your CPU! Try it with my config. Your workload will be much higher! The sole fact that people spilled out such an unproven bullshit is bad enough. It's even worse that they post screenshots that prove the exact opposite, misinterprete them and other - even less knowledgeable people - jump on the bandwagon and bash the game just so they have a scapegoat to blame for their lack of proper hardware. It also doesn't matter that your comp might handle Crysis, Fallout 3 or any other modern game with higher framerates. Those games all use different engines, shaders, physics, A.I., texture quality, renderers...the list goes on and on! If you are not capable of seeing which parts in Cryostasis are eating up your system's performance then just shut up instead of making a clown out of yourself!

Just want to point out that Nike-it stated that the game doesn't have multi core support and that there were no plans to change this a few months ago (before the patch) on this board.


Good work, I'll try it out. I have a AMD phenom 9600 with an 8800GT, 4GB ram.
I bought the game in early March just after the Euro release.
I did notice some improvements when I installed the patch a while back. The biggest difference was the removal of an annoying bug that threw up c++ runtime errors every time I loaded a map.

Xiaopang
08-10-2009, 10:48 PM
thanks you guys, so my work wasn't in vain.

Thanks for the config. I have a i7 920 @3.9 and 260 SLI and the falling icicles dropped the FPS to 8! I can't believe they set it that way. If my rig won't play it they shouldn't have released it.

sorry to break it to you, but your system is not the scale to measure a game's fitness for the market. as i wrote already, it runs on 4 year old mid-range hardware. if you put too much load on your system, it's not the devver's fault. just because a game gives you the possibility to throw in tons of processing-heavy features does not mean that you have to use them all. no one could do it with crysis either when it came out....

anyway, as i already mentioned, i run the game on a single gtx260. i have an amd 4200+ x2 and my mainboard doesn't even support pcie 2.0, yet my framerates never dropped below 25fps when the icicles shattered. i just tried it again with a fresh install without any mods. my system has been up and running for over 10 hours and i have tons of apps running in the background, yet a stable result. your case sounds like the many i heard over and over again. someone has a beefy system and thinks he automatically can max out everything (i assume you did, didn't you?). the fact that this is not the case does not mean that the game is bad or unplayable, it just means it's ahead of its time and you're demanding too much from your hardware. honestly i doubt that you gave much thought to the settings that you used in the game. well, read on. your solution is just around the corner. btw, i don't try to sound like an asshole, but the idea of scrapping a game just because you can't play it maxed out goes against all logic. now, if you couldn't play it with everything turned down on a high-end system that would be different...


Are you going to do a higher end config? Putting everything off and at 1 seems a bit drastic. I am going to mess with the numbers and see how high I can put everything and still have it be playable. Thanks for showing which numbers to edit. And I'm glad they made the game so moddable.

well, you can use the first mod. that one is pretty high end. it's also the one that i used to make the above screenshots to compare the visual impact. as you can see it's pretty much unnoticable.

the second mod was only thought as an experiment to get max fps for those who might need it. actually, i had a guy in mind with a mobile x1300 and shared ram who wanted to play the game. don't know on which forum i saw him asking about whether he could run it or not, but i targeted these extreme cases with that mod.


Just want to point out that Nike-it stated that the game doesn't have multi core support and that there were no plans to change this a few months ago (before the patch) on this board.

thanks for the heads up, didn't know that. however, i can clear that as being a false information. just tried the game again with an unpatched european version and both of my cores were nearly maxed out. whether he had received wrong info that was only valid for the much older russian version, or whether he was just wrong i don't know, but remember that this info comes from the same guy who suggested not to install the patch on lower spec systems. a proper advice would have been how to disable the new workload that the patch introduced via cfg instead of telling people not to update. also, some of his posts seem to imply that he has no direct access to the devs and that he has to wait himself like everybody else until infos come through. after all, as a forum admin for the publisher he doesn't even belong to the same company as those who actually made the game.



I did notice some improvements when I installed the patch a while back. The biggest difference was the removal of an annoying bug that threw up c++ runtime errors every time I loaded a map.

great then. i also noticed quite a few bugs before applying the patch. just more reasons to update.

just today i wrote an exhausting tutorial on the in-game settings that the game offers, which brings me back to shaq. this should help optimizing your settings to the point of excellent playability. if not, you can always post your settings and i'll try to help you with the process. anyway, here's the excerpt:

Xiaopang
08-10-2009, 10:48 PM
Resolution

If you have a really weak system, then set this to minimum.

If you have an LCD, set the resolution a notch below your maximum resolution, e.g. for 1680x1050 native that would be 1600x1024 if your monitor supports it, else resort to 1280x800. If you set a resolution other than your monitor's native one, then it will perform resizing. The result is very similar to using Antialiasing. Of course the image isn't as sharp as using the native resolution, but this is minimal and your graphics card can focus on more important things.

For CRTs this does not apply. Choose a resolution that you consider detailed enough, or even your monitor's native resolution if your computer can handle it.



Aspect Ratio

Cryostasis allows you to set an aspect ratio for all resolutions. This way you can enjoy widescreen gaming even with low-res 4:3 resolutions. No performance impact.



Vsync

Forces your graphics card to wait until your monitor is ready for the next frame. This not just limits the maximum framerate to your monitor's refresh rate, but it also slows down your graphics card due to the artificial delays. Quite an impact on performance for the more or less often appearance of frame tearing. Deactivate it if possible!



Gamma Correction

Usually no need to meddle with this, unless you find the picture to bright or dark. No impact on performance.



Shader Model

The shader model is a specification that defines the complexity of graphical calculations. It has a massive impact on performance, but also on visual quality. In case of Cryostasis, a lower shading model results in differently looking visuals. However, as with all judgement calls, visual improvements lie in the eye of the beholder. I couldn't really say that the SM 2.0 visuals looked worse than the 4.0 ones, even though they looked different. In fact, the difference was rather minor. Playing the game with SM 2.0 gives you a very nice performance boost of up to 100%.



Hardware Physics

If your hardware supports Physx rendering (Nvidia Geforce 8xxx family and up), then activate this to get a massive performance boost of up to 300%



Advanced Physics

Applies Physx rendering to many of the smaller objects. Huge impact on performance with no gain in visual quality!

The physics in the game seem rather unrealistic, e.g. you walk against a barrel and kick it through half the room. Same goes for many other objects, so deactivating this option saves your comp a great deal of work without much change in gameplay, or how often do you plan on bumping into objects? There aren't that many anyway. Basic physics stay activated, so you will still see icicles break realistically and this is what you will see most times in the game anyway.



Texture resolution

Use this setting carefully. Many people only think about the quality they can achieve with it, but don't forget that high res textures also eat up more VRAM. I Suggest setting it only to high if you have at least 896MB of VRAM.

Even if you set it to low, the game will still use high-res textures in some occasions, for example for enemies. So keep that in mind.



Normal maps

This feature's task is to improve shadow quality without raising the polygon count



Specular Maps

Sets the quality of specular rendering. Reflections on shiny textures change realistically according to player's location and point of view. Performance impact can range from minor to big, depending on your hardware's ability to support this feature natively. Considering a nice balance between visual quality and performance, you can turn set this feature to low. Even though the game makes use of multiple light sources per scene, the effect is not visible enough due to the similar looking lighting in many areas.



Shadows

Enables shadows. Setting it to high can drain up to 25% of your framerate compared to not using it at all, depending on the level and your hardware. Using medium halves the performance drain.

The loss of shadows is manageable in my opinion. The game uses static shadowing for textures, so you will still see shadows on the walls. You'll just lacking dynamic shadows, so deactivate this feature if you need a mighty performance boost for a reasonable trade in visual quality.



Motion Blur

Self-explanatory. Didn't realize any impact on performance with it enabled.



Camera Motion Blur

Same as above.



Water Reflections

A very nice looking, but subtle effect. Disabling it is good for a 15% increase in performance in water-heavy areas. Due to the subtlety of this effect, I suggest deactivating it if you struggle with your framerate. Turning it off will not disable light reflections on the water, but only reflections of the ceiling.



Water Caustics

Calculates spots of light on objects near water by calculating the reflective abilities of water. Might cause up to 25% of performance loss in water-heavy areas with complex lighting. Deactivating it does not mean that you can't see reflections of light sources in the water any more, but only that the reflection of these reflections on other objects are not calculated any more.


Anisotropic Filt.

Applies filters to textures to further improve their quality. The effect is hardly visible. In fact, I could only see a difference by taking screenshots and comparing them to each other. Strangely enough, at low resolutions the effect seems to be the strongest while having no real impact on performance, while performance went down a good 10% on high resolutions without any noticable difference. Results on your hardware might vary.

Make sure to check out whether you can see a difference with this option. If not, then turn it off. It eats VRAM like a fat lady eats candy and might very well be a reason for crashes if you run out of RAM.



Antialiasing

Smooths out jaggies. This option is tricky. On my system I only recognized a 5% impact on performance, but the result might vary greatly for other setups.

Keep the following in mind: Antialiasing gets rid of jaggies by going mainly through two procedures, raising the pixel count for edges and blurring them. Especially the latter can be seen very clearly in Cryostasis. You can have that for free by using the resizing algorithms of your LCD-screen. Also, the pixel count is usually sufficient on high resolutions. On 1680x1050 the jaggies are so fine that they are not noticable unless you're looking for them. Even turning on AA doesn't have any effect on them any more. Consider this when using this option. I've seen people complaining about not being able to play this game at 1920x1200 with max AA. The idea itself is asinine, as a higher pixel count doesn't do anything than put extra stress on the graphics card without any noticable change in smoothness. Also, don't forget that AA means smoothing by blurring. Apart from the fact that your picture loses sharpness along the edges, Cryostasis already uses motion blurring, which also covers up the aliasing effect.

People who can only run the game in low resolutions will profit noticably from antialiasing. Those, who can run the game in high resolutions should rather turn it off for the sake of quality, or rather use the LCD-trick. Check out my above screenies. The min shots had no AA applied, while the others had it activated. Can you see a difference?

shaq
08-11-2009, 02:55 AM
Thanks for the info. I only meant that they should have used lower settings in the init.cfg so high-end hardware could run it today. If the physx fluid settings were left at 10-20,000 it would be 5 years before high-end hardware could run it, maybe longer. I just set mine at 200 and icicles at 400 with a count of 4 and it runs really nice. That way I get all the advanced effects and the framerate stays above 30 and most of the time above 45. I do leave off AA, AF and set shadows to medium and everything else maxed at 1080p.

This game also supports 3D Vision. Can you imagine having all settings maxed with 20,000 particles on the screen and in 3D? lol This game will be great for benchmarking for at least 5-6 years unless another game comes along that uses this much physx, since the physx can be turned up to such high levels in the config.

A lot of the time all 4 cores ARE loaded in this game, but it could be because of Windows 7 balancing the loads and not the game. It does have that d.threading variable in the init.cfg so that might make it use more cores. When I played it a few months ago I don't think it loaded all 4. The patch may have added that variable. It would take a reinstall to find out.

And Supersampling requires a HIGHER resolution than your monitor's native resolution. It will downscale the higher resolution that your video card is outputting. Think of it as stuffing more pixels into less area which reduces aliasing. I used to use a 720P TV for gaming and I set the games res at 1600x900 and most of the jaggies were gone. It was much much better than setting it to 1280x720.

EDIT: For some reason the water cannon doesn't work. I hear the water running but when I push the button nothing happens. Did you experience this when you were messing around with the config?

Xiaopang
08-11-2009, 10:36 AM
well, i don't agree with you that the particle count was set too high. as said already, i ran the game on an x1600 and also had no prob on my gtx 260 despite those settings. you just have to balance the workload for the card by lowering other settings. i have no doubt that the programmers knew exactly which values they needed to make effects like using the water gun and splattering water look good. i also don't agree that the game will max out cards for 5 years to come, considering that the 3d-market is only 13 years old and how far cards have come along in the last 5 years, the increase in processing power we will experience will be massive. if rumors are true, then with the release of the gtx 300 series this game will just be one among many again. check out crysis. it can be run smoothly on today's hardware, e.g. gtx 260, 280 etc. but these are already a year old, so crysis' hunger for massive 3D-power could be satisfied after only a year. also, let's not forget that you can go up to quad-sli, which would make any game playable at 5 Megapixel resolutions, but why do we have the technology if there is no game that would profit from it, because all can be maxed out with single cards already?

i do agree that modding the physx value holds much potential for future benchmarking, but i doubt it will improve the visuals much. at certain levels, the particles would overlay so much, so that you wouldn't see a difference to a value were overlay is minimized. hmmm, you kind of gave me an idea right now. let's see what happens if i crank those values up to a million lol

i also think that it's great if developers do not limit their games to the cards that are available at release. this gives some headroom for the future, to experience even better visuals in a year or two. if i have the option between playing a toned down game, or a game that i can tone down myself with the chance of cranking it up for future hardware, then i'll always route for the latter. one example i'm thinking of right now is silent hill 3. even though the game came out in 2003, it supports texture rendering up to 4096x4096, something that no computer back then could have handled, but thanks to that ability, people could pump out better visuals over the years. compare that to highly anticipated titles like half-life 2. it only used texture sizes of 256x256 because cards back then couldn't handle more. so even if you play the game at high resolutions it doesn't look much better.

i don't really know much about 3D vision, but if it is comparable to the old shutter technology then there shouldn't be a problem.

if all your 4 cores are maxed out then this is a good thing, because you can get the maximum out of your cards. i don't know what version of the game you have, but as i already said, the european one is multicore capable right out of the box and the american is even newer, so it must be too. if there's a version that's not multi-threaded, then it might be the russian one, but i doubt it. the fact that they released the first patch so quickly with SO many bugfixes makes me doubt that they also implemented multithreading, because that would have required a rewrite of most parts of the code. no way that they pulled that off within only a couple of months.

as for windows balancing the load, that only applies to threads. if an application is not multi-core compatible as it is described in lay terms, it only uses a single thread and these can never be split among cores. windows will assign apps to different cores according to their workload and it will limit them to that core if they only support a single thread, but it can't split that thread among several cores. you can't drive on 2 streets with the same car at the same time.

the threading option in the cfg seems to be a remnant of the early days of the game. to me it looks like they needed a flag to force the game into a single thread mode for single-core cpus that didn't support hyperthreading. playing with that option did nothing for me, so i think it's inactive

i might have been not accurate enough with my usage of supersampling. what i tried to say was, that the result is similar to it, while a different technique is applied, that of course is not comparable to supersampling. thanks for the correction. i'll straighten it out.

btw, are you running the game on xp or vista? x86 or x64? could you do me a favor and upload a 1080p screenshot? i'd like to examine the jaggies. some games, like stalker, don't show any improvements at certain resolutions any more. i'd like to know if this is the case with cryostasis too.

i have no experience with sli, but can't you define a card as physx-exclusive so that it will do all the physics rendering, while the other one just handles the graphics? if that's the case, did you try it with and without that setting? i'm interested in knowing which would be more efficient.

shaq
08-12-2009, 01:07 AM
I definitely agree that a game should be scalable for future hardware. I didn't try to put all the settings way down to run the physx since I set games at the native resolution of my monitor. Plus I think PhysX effects are better as icing on the cake and not the cake itself. You don't think they could have at least allowed a low, medium, high settings for the advanced PhysX? We can configure resolutions, textures, effects etc but nothing for the advanced stuff just on or off.

Crysis is still too slow for my liking even with SLI. I think GT300 SLI will be enough to run it right. And right after that Crysis 2 will be out with DX11 effects and then we will be waiting for GT400. lol

There is a benchmark built in that I haven't tried yet, but you should be able to up the particle values and run it. I assume it is the same benchmark that came out last year.

3D vision basically cuts your FPS in half because it renders everything twice. That's why I said it would be awhile before we could run that with all the effects turned on.

And I mentioned Windows 7 rebalancing because if you have DCS:Blackshark it only uses one core if you run it under XP. But if you use Vista/7 and set the affinity to use all 4 cores it will increase FPS by 50% even though it is not multithreaded. Setting the affinity to all 4 cores in XP doesn't help at all.

And for some reason I can not turn SLI off for this game in the drivers. I turned it off in Nhancer too and even deleted the profile but SLI stays on. lol If I totally disable SLI it will run on one card but the other one goes into low power 3D and stays there. So if it were calculating PhysX it would slow it down because the memory is at 100MhZ. In the Batman demo you can disable SLI in the profile and it does give a 10FPS boost using 1 card for graphics and 1 for PhysX over using SLI. I guess the drivers are still not mature enough for SLI and PhysX. It must not distribute the load efficiently.

Any idea why the water cannon will not work? Does it work for you when you lowered the fluidwater number? I will try starting a new game or something. I have played about half way through and only 1 flashback scene ran very badly..14 FPS with the lowered values. Everything else is good so far and you get to see all the bursted pipes and steam they added in the patch.

Check this out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kufpPwho9Ec&NR=1

Xiaopang
08-13-2009, 01:10 AM
You don't think they could have at least allowed a low, medium, high settings for the advanced PhysX? We can configure resolutions, textures, effects etc but nothing for the advanced stuff just on or off.

yeah, actually i'm quite disappointed about the few features you can configure, while the configs allow you to personalize your gaming experience so well. i also thought about using profiles for the physics settings, so yes, i absolutely agree they should have built in a controlling option. at least they could have included seperated control over cloth and fluid rendering. that already has a great impact on the performance


Crysis is still too slow for my liking even with SLI. I think GT300 SLI will be enough to run it right. And right after that Crysis 2 will be out with DX11 effects and then we will be waiting for GT400. lol

lol is that already in the making? on second thought it must be. how could they stop with such a successful franchise... so far i only played crysis for a few minutes and i had 30+ fps on max res with everything maxed out, but i heard that performance goes way down when the game shows its icy side. according to what i read, the gtx300 are supposed to have twice as many stream processors, so the performance boost must be tremendous. those should be capable of competing against sli-setups...imagine a sli, or even tripple sli system with those...but i guess you're right. once crysis 2 comes out, it will dwarf that processing power lol



There is a benchmark built in that I haven't tried yet, but you should be able to up the particle values and run it. I assume it is the same benchmark that came out last year.

yeah, i have seen the benchmark folder too, but i haven't meddled with it yet. also kind of weak that the devs didn't include direct access to it. far cry 2 does it and that's certainly no disadvantage



3D vision basically cuts your FPS in half because it renders everything twice. That's why I said it would be awhile before we could run that with all the effects turned on.

so it is like the shutter effect. guess nvidia just re-labeled it with a fancy name. i wouldn't mind trying it. with my first mod i get 40-70 fps, which would be enough even if cut in half



And I mentioned Windows 7 rebalancing because if you have DCS:Blackshark it only uses one core if you run it under XP. But if you use Vista/7 and set the affinity to use all 4 cores it will increase FPS by 50% even though it is not multithreaded. Setting the affinity to all 4 cores in XP doesn't help at all.

i don't know this game, but it certainly is multithreaded, or else it wouldn't be able to utilize more than a single core. xp has a massive limitation in form of a missing descriptor variable that was introduced with vista and that defines how many cpu-cores the system has. there have been quite a few software titles reported that suffered from not being able to recognize more than one core due to this shortcoming. after all, just one more reason not to use an 8 year old operating system on modern hardware. but just to get back to the supposed multithreading-capabilities of windows 7. it is impossible to cut a single thread into small enough portions to spread them among cpu-cores. windows 7 has improved multithreading support. apparently the multithreading performance is much higher than in vista due to optimized thread handling, so may be this also played a role when running blackshark on it.



And for some reason I can not turn SLI off for this game in the drivers. I turned it off in Nhancer too and even deleted the profile but SLI stays on. lol If I totally disable SLI it will run on one card but the other one goes into low power 3D and stays there. So if it were calculating PhysX it would slow it down because the memory is at 100MhZ. In the Batman demo you can disable SLI in the profile and it does give a 10FPS boost using 1 card for graphics and 1 for PhysX over using SLI. I guess the drivers are still not mature enough for SLI and PhysX. It must not distribute the load efficiently.

very interesting! thanks for the info on that one. btw, batman demo? i have seen batman files and wondered already, but i haven't looked into it. guess, i was too busy playing the real game lol



Any idea why the water cannon will not work? Does it work for you when you lowered the fluidwater number? I will try starting a new game or something. I have played about half way through and only 1 flashback scene ran very badly..14 FPS with the lowered values. Everything else is good so far and you get to see all the bursted pipes and steam they added in the patch.

oh i gotta try it with your lowered values first. i only experienced two states so far: either it worked nicely with advanced physics enabled, or it only pumped out a measly stream of pixel-thin water when i deactivated it.

btw, great video. i missed quite some of those effects, like the water gushing through the open door (no wonder if you try not to drown), or the water coming out of the pipes. the video also showed impressively that the effects still not look very believable on a strong system, i mean, the way the water flooded the room, or the way water fountains are created when something falls into water. also, i never realized that shards of ice fall down when you shoot an enemy. why does that happen anyway? are they frozen? if so, why don't they shatter into a million pieces? (or rather 20000 lol). THAT would have been a cool effect worth having, but no... considering all this, i could have done without all these unrealistically looking effects. shading, caustic, normal and specular mapping were already impressive enough for me.

shaq
08-13-2009, 03:58 AM
I reinstalled the game and lowered the res to 1600x900, dropped the water reflections and caustic and left the default physx values and it actually runs pretty well. Reflections and caustic while running at 1080p cut my FPS in half. Re: the values I had before are good for icicles, bullets and the sparks. I didn't notice much of an increase in visual quality with them at default. Water definitely needs to be higher than 200 though. There is so much water at 20,000. It's like a waterfall in a few places. lol I would leave the icicle count at 16 and particles at 300 as well as bullets and sparks with water up as high as you can. I am tempted to put all the settings down and run 1,000,000 water. lol I bet that would be awesome. I imagine there is a limit to the game engine at some point though. I haven't gotten to the water cannon yet but I imagine it won't work when the water count is below a certain number. It wouldn't work at 2000 either.

Have you looked to see if the AI can be adjusted? A lot of places in the game are really easy and I wanted to make it harder. Some of them won't chase you they just keep doing somersaults. lol

Crysis 2 is supposed to be out next year with their new engine: Cryengine 3. It will be for consoles too so hopefully it won't be cut down to the console level. At 1920 res Crysis really starts to slow down...1680 isn't too bad. 1 GT300 might be enough for it...I hope so anyway...but with AA it will slow it down a lot. Especially since it needs a 2GB card for high resolutions and AA.

The new batman demo arkham asylum has breakable objects, steam and cloth physx but no water yet at least. Here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vINH6Z9kqgI&feature=related

Xiaopang
08-13-2009, 03:27 PM
I reinstalled the game and lowered the res to 1600x900, dropped the water reflections and caustic and left the default physx values and it actually runs pretty well. Reflections and caustic while running at 1080p cut my FPS in half.

interesting. i wonder how the performance cuts on your sli-system compare to mine with those settings. it seems that water reflections and caustics seemed to have a bigger impact on your setup, but this might have also been due to the resolution.

as far as your particle values go, i'm just re-installing the game and will check them out. they seem reasonable to me. 1 icicle count is a little bit too few lol, but 16 sounds alright



I am tempted to put all the settings down and run 1,000,000 water. lol I bet that would be awesome. I imagine there is a limit to the game engine at some point though.

lol i'll beat you to it and will post a screenshot. i also think that there will be a limit, but it will most likely only be set by the the datatype.


Have you looked to see if the AI can be adjusted? A lot of places in the game are really easy and I wanted to make it harder. Some of them won't chase you they just keep doing somersaults. lol

indeed i have, but not very thoroughly, so i wasn't able to dig something up. an AI tweak would certainly be nice. imagine a hundred monsters charging at you and all you have would be your mosin, or even worse, your lock with the chain lol...it would be necrovision all over again :D



Crysis 2 is supposed to be out next year with their new engine: Cryengine 3. It will be for consoles too so hopefully it won't be cut down to the console level.


yeah, i also hope they won't use the console as a reference, but knowing crytech, they certainly won't limit themselves to that. the console versions of crysis were cut down compared to the pc-versions, so i think there is little reason to fear that for crysis 2 suddenly consoles would be the reference hardware.



Especially since it needs a 2GB card for high resolutions and AA.


ah damn, i should have opted for that 1792MB card then... too bad that using sli doesn't add to your memory count.

that batman demo looked awesome! THOSE physics look nice and well implemented and not so cheap and unrealistic as in cryostasis. tearable cloth, dynamic paper, destroyable objects...sweet... now why do all icicles in cryostasis shatter the same way? last time i checked, real ones break off in one piece and only break into a few pieces when hitting the ground...if at all...let alone shattering... if the physics in cryostasis looked as believable as those as in batman then most people wouldn't have so many issues, because those physics use a whole less processing power while looking more realistic

Xiaopang
08-13-2009, 08:56 PM
alright, i tested the particle settings for water and as i already wrote in my very first post, those are limited to newly started games. you can't just mod them and load a save in the later game, which is a shame. anyway, here are two screenshots:

normal particle settings:

http://i214.photobucket.com/albums/cc273/Xiaopang999/low.jpg


particle count for all particle settings raised by factor of 10:

http://i214.photobucket.com/albums/cc273/Xiaopang999/high.jpg


update: half the particle count for each particle flag

http://i214.photobucket.com/albums/cc273/Xiaopang999/half.png


there is little, or even no difference between both pics. it looks like the particle count is capped. in fact, the framerate showed no impact by the values, even though i restarted the game after using them. i assume that the values are capped at 32768, which might be still too low to see no difference to 20,000. using like 300 or 400 made it look like a mix of turned off advanced physics and with the same feature enabled, showing the normal thin water streams with only very few of the "big" water bubbles coming through the door. i guess i'll experiment with other values now. may be lowering the count to 10,000 or even 5,000 would already be enough for no visible difference

shaq
08-13-2009, 09:01 PM
You should be able to have a high icicle count but lower particle count if you think that is more realistic. I would leave the particles at least 50 so you can see the ice particles on the baddies. They are frozen but not solid it seems. It would be cool if they shattered though, but I don't think they could walk if they were that cold. lol

I wanted a few of them to chase you and maybe knock you down and stuff but that would require new animations I imagine.

1,000,000 water should fill the whole floor and get up to your waist! LOL

Have you tried the cinematic mod for halk life 2? I just installed it and 64 bit Windows 7 RC and it is great what they did with it.

Batman is nice and I am getting that on release day for sure. I do like the water in Cryostasis though. I believe before the patch that the locker doors didn't even move. I'm glad they made it. It's much more immersive now with the extra effects.

LOL you beat me to the reply. I was hoping the particles could go higher than that. I guess we will be able to max out this game quicker than I thought. Unless it is limited in one of the scripts somewhere.

Xiaopang
08-13-2009, 10:29 PM
You should be able to have a high icicle count but lower particle count if you think that is more realistic.

oh not at all. i found your value of 16 to be perfect. it looked much more realistic that way. i wished the game would allow for more dynamic icicle shattering = real physics. it's alright that they shatter a lot when you open
an icy door, but if you punch them, they should shatter a lot less due to the pressure that concentrates only on a tiny spot...oh well...



I would leave the particles at least 50 so you can see the ice particles on the baddies. They are frozen but not solid it seems. It would be cool if they shattered though, but I don't think they could walk if they were that cold. lol

lol wouldn't it be funnier that way? i'd also vouch for a freezing feature in the game. imagine using the water gun to water the walkway, it would freeze over and the enemy slips and shatters to a million pieces

but to come back to the particle value. the first time i beat the game, i played it unmodified and i didn't even recognize the particles. may be i had advanced physics disabled, but i only saw them for the first time in the video you posted.



I wanted a few of them to chase you and maybe knock you down and stuff but that would require new animations I imagine.

why would you ever want them to chase me? what did i ever do to you? lol

actually i think the animations are already sufficient for that. they can walk and run. they take also cover if i remember correctly, so all's good. someone has just to modify the spawn numbers and they should charge automatically.


1,000,000 water should fill the whole floor and get up to your waist! LOL

lol not if you're an experienced drinker. don't forget, you play a russian in the game ;)



Have you tried the cinematic mod for halk life 2? I just installed it and 64 bit Windows 7 RC and it is great what they did with it.

of course! i'm a huge fan of it! actually, it was that mod that raised my awareness for high-res textures and also my disappointment in the original game, because it didn't contain any. i also think that this mod is one of the few redeeming things about the game that would make people play it even today. i know it did that for me.

is your windows 7 still timebombed, or is there already a patch? :P
that's the only thing that keeps me from upgrading. i read that it was benched to be quite a notch faster than vista, so it should be great for gaming, especially for such power hogs as cryostasis



Batman is nice and I am getting that on release day for sure. I do like the water in Cryostasis though. I believe before the patch that the locker doors didn't even move. I'm glad they made it. It's much more immersive now with the extra effects.

you wanna tell me that you don't have the RC of batman yet? :D

i do think the water in cryostasis is a two-edged sword. standing in a room with melting ice and seeing the water dripping from the ceiling looks just fantastic. on the other hand, the water of the water gun, or any concentrated stream of water for that matter looks just unrealistic. it's even more obvious in the video that you posted, where you can see how the water shoots in batches through the open hatches. i haven't played the game unpatched so i don't know if they patched the open hatches in, but it is possible, seeing how big the patch is and how many files are being updated. those can't be all scripts. they can't weigh in that heavily.



LOL you beat me to the reply. I was hoping the particles could go higher than that. I guess we will be able to max out this game quicker than I thought. Unless it is limited in one of the scripts somewhere.

possible! although variable handling should be hardcoded directly into the executable. that doesn't mean that it's not possible to hack it, but considering how weak the effects look reality-wise, i don't think it would be worth the effort.

shaq
08-13-2009, 11:35 PM
oh not at all. i found your value of 16 to be perfect. it looked much more realistic that way. i wished the game would allow for more dynamic icicle shattering = real physics. it's alright that they shatter a lot when you open
an icy door, but if you punch them, they should shatter a lot less due to the pressure that concentrates only on a tiny spot...oh well...

I'm sure you could do some scripting and make that happen. lol


lol wouldn't it be funnier that way? i'd also vouch for a freezing feature in the game. imagine using the water gun to water the walkway, it would freeze over and the enemy slips and shatters to a million pieces

but to come back to the particle value. the first time i beat the game, i played it unmodified and i didn't even recognize the particles. may be i had advanced physics disabled, but i only saw them for the first time in the video you posted.


How does that water cannon work anyway? If they are already frozen it must be hot water that comes out and melts them. Maybe that is boiling water that makes the sound when you have the water cannon in your hand. lol So it wouldn't freeze the ground unfortunately. I beat the game before the patch came out and it was missing a lot of the effects that were in the benchmark last year. There weren't any blue sparks and a lot less water was in the game. I believe only on the walls and none dripping from the ceiling and none from any of the pipes. Also the locker doors weren't movable and none of the extra cans and barrels. I don't think you could even knock the barrels and shovels off of the wall. So it is much better now than before.


actually i think the animations are already sufficient for that. they can walk and run. they take also cover if i remember correctly, so all's good. someone has just to modify the spawn numbers and they should charge automatically.

Each enemy has a different strategy. One of them does somersaults and keeps going for cover. Most of the others chase after you. One of us needs to see if we can add more enemies at least to add more tension to the game. It should be definitely possible to decrease the players health to make it harder and maybe less damage per shot.


of course! i'm a huge fan of it! actually, it was that mod that raised my awareness for high-res textures and also my disappointment in the original game, because it didn't contain any. i also think that this mod is one of the few redeeming things about the game that would make people play it even today. i know it did that for me.

is your windows 7 still timebombed, or is there already a patch? :P
that's the only thing that keeps me from upgrading. i read that it was benched to be quite a notch faster than vista, so it should be great for gaming, especially for such power hogs as cryostasis

Did you get CM10? I downloaded all 10+GB of it the last two days. lol There is a beta3 patch on top of the 9GB base file. I don't see why you need 64-bit Windows though as I only see it use up to 450MB so far. I already preordered it for $50 so I just use the RC. ;) I got it since I only have XP and Windows 7 has DX10 and 11 so I had to get it. And $50 is crazy cheap for an OS.




you wanna tell me that you don't have the RC of batman yet? :D

i do think the water in cryostasis is a two-edged sword. standing in a room with melting ice and seeing the water dripping from the ceiling looks just fantastic. on the other hand, the water of the water gun, or any concentrated stream of water for that matter looks just unrealistic. it's even more obvious in the video that you posted, where you can see how the water shoots in batches through the open hatches. i haven't played the game unpatched so i don't know if they patched the open hatches in, but it is possible, seeing how big the patch is and how many files are being updated. those can't be all scripts. they can't weigh in that heavily.

There is an RC of Batman? Where? Where? It's still a month away, but Wolfenstein will be out next week. I have to get that one. And don't get me started on next year. About 20-30 really good games are scheduled to come out. lol It will be almost as good as 2004 was for gaming.




possible! although variable handling should be hardcoded directly into the executable. that doesn't mean that it's not possible to hack it, but considering how weak the effects look reality-wise, i don't think it would be worth the effort.

I actually like the water though. Have you tried it at 20,000 through the whole game? I am halfway through and I am liking it. There may be a hard limit to the overall number of particle effects and it could be determined by the engine itself. Did you try lowering everything else before you upped the water value? It might make a difference.

Xiaopang
08-14-2009, 12:16 AM
How does that water cannon work anyway? If they are already frozen it must be hot water that comes out and melts them. Maybe that is boiling water that makes the sound when you have the water cannon in your hand. lol So it wouldn't freeze the ground unfortunately.

yeah it must be hot water and it's a very powerful weapon. i constantly switched to it once i got used to the low range. i also thought it would shoot cold water and found that rather odd, considering that all the enemies crave the cold, but then someone actually wrote it was hot... that makes sense, since you can also see steam rise up when it's being used. also, since it's sooo cold in there, the water would cool down and freeze quickly ;) you know the outcome of that famous experiment where you put equal amounts of boiling water and ice together? what will happen?



I beat the game before the patch came out and it was missing a lot of the effects that were in the benchmark last year. There weren't any blue sparks and a lot less water was in the game. I believe only on the walls and none dripping from the ceiling and none from any of the pipes. Also the locker doors weren't movable and none of the extra cans and barrels. I don't think you could even knock the barrels and shovels off of the wall. So it is much better now than before.

wow, how limited. great patch then!




One of us needs to see if we can add more enemies at least to add more tension to the game. It should be definitely possible to decrease the players health to make it harder and maybe less damage per shot.

i think the player's health is fine. meddling with that might also throw the game off balance in sections that are designed that you barely make it through alive. for example the outside areas, where your health can drop to zero quickly. i also think that the power of the shots are fine. after all it takes 3 bullets to even a simple servant down. just upping the numbers of enemies should be enough to keep the game interesting. the more important question is, whether or not the enemies could deal with the cramped space if suddenly like 5 or more would gang up on the player. they might get stuck




Did you get CM10? I downloaded all 10+GB of it the last two days. lol There is a beta3 patch on top of the 9GB base file.

oh no. somehow i never had the urge to mess with it. i'm not much of a mod fan unless it comes to the cinematic mod.



I don't see why you need 64-bit Windows though as I only see it use up to 450MB so far. I already preordered it for $50 so I just use the RC. ;) I got it since I only have XP and Windows 7 has DX10 and 11 so I had to get it. And $50 is crazy cheap for an OS.

yeah, that is really cheap. may be even the cheapest windows there ever was (and most likely will be). as for 64bit, ram consumption has little to do with that. the memory allocation limitation is limited to single applications or services. windows itself uses dozens, with explorer being the biggest. yet, it rarely gets over 200MB, so there is enough headroom for that. 64 bit operating systems have other strengths, e.g. you can utilize the full power of your 64bit cpu, meaning that windows can access additional hardware supported features, instead of emulating those through software, or not being able to utilize them at all. using a 32bit OS on a 64bit cpu forces it into 32bit mode and making it deactive its 64bit enhancements. it's like driving a car. using 32bit would equal driving in town. you'd disable the 4th and 5th gear, because you can't drive that fast anyway (in this case technology limits your speed and not the law lol). 64bit would be driving on a highway which would allow you to use your full potential and full speed. other important features are practically getting rid of the limitation of memory paging, because each page can now be up to 18TB in size, while in XP those were limited to 4MB. if you load a game like cryostasis in xp and it eats 1gb of ram, then that gb will be split to 250 pages and handling those is much slower than accessing only 1 big page with all the data in it. but enough for that...microsoft released a many thousand pages thick document that lists all of vistas new features, of which many include performance enhancements for 64bit architecture. no way to give an even slightly comprehensive list here... only consider this: always update, because newer software can usually make the best use of newer hardware




There is an RC of Batman? Where? Where? It's still a month away, but Wolfenstein will be out next week. I have to get that one. And don't get me started on next year. About 20-30 really good games are scheduled to come out. lol It will be almost as good as 2004 was for gaming.

just kidding ;) i once saw a video of wolfenstein a year ago and it looked only merely better than return to castle wolfenstein. i hope that was just an early beta and the game gives me a good reason for having a high-end gfx-card




I actually like the water though. Have you tried it at 20,000 through the whole game? I am halfway through and I am liking it. There may be a hard limit to the overall number of particle effects and it could be determined by the engine itself. Did you try lowering everything else before you upped the water value? It might make a difference.

oh yes, as i said earlier, i beat the game unmodified first. but i also remember using lower shader settings through half the game. btw, i uploaded another pic with half the particle count (check the post above). the pic looks like there wouldn't be much of a difference, but it looked a lot worse animated. you could clearly see those thin sparks, that are only present when you deactivate advanced physics.

there is a way to modify values in ram. i guess this would be the only way to reliably check for a cap. having to re-start the game after changing the values is just too tedious. the alternative would be to use a level cheat to directly jump into a water-heavy level.

shaq
08-14-2009, 02:28 AM
okay. It looks like the bullets, sparks and icicles can be lowered to 200 or so but the water needs to be at 20,000. It really is hard to notice the difference between high default particles and at 200. If you showed them side by side you may notice but in game it was very hard to tell. There are still a bunch of them. And when you have a heavy scene with bullets, water and sparks happening it should give higher frame rates. You can go to the console and switch levels "map bios***" to test the settings and use "giveall" to get all the weapons. It doesn't take long that way.

And for adding enemies it would be better to add an extra one or two. That way some could go for cover and the rest chase after you. It depends on how the scripts are written. You might be able to change them per level or even per room. I wonder if there is a console command for spawning enemies?

I was referring to Cinematic Mod 10 above. I'm not sure if you understood. It is 10GB download and uncompressed it is 17.5GB! I had to move a couple of games out of Steam for it. You have to leave everything in the same directory for Steam to work unfortunately. I don't want to keep buying larger hard drives for Steam. lol If you buy from D2D, GamersGate, EBGames etc. you can install wherever you want.

Xiaopang
08-14-2009, 08:30 AM
thanks for the console commands! i'm gonna try that right away! your idea for the enemy spawning is nice. i checked out the level scripts and found two commands that look useful: AddCharacter and AddThisCharacter. They might be used for spawning. i'll try that out. I doubt there is a console command for spawning, because that would require you to specify the level and the spawning location. that and much more information is being loaded through the level script. too complex for a console command if you ask me. would also not be helpful at all. after all, the game doesn't throw enemies dynamically at the player, but always uses the same enemies in the same locations, so there's little point in a command to make them re-spawn. quicksave would be all you need to test the spawning



I was referring to Cinematic Mod 10 above. I'm not sure if you understood. It is 10GB download and uncompressed it is 17.5GB!

silly me...i misinterpreted that as an abbreviation for gary's mod...
as for the size, wow! the last time i used it was cinematic mod 4 and that was may be 2 years ago....6 versions in that time...incredible, but i wonder why the installation is so big? did the author crank up the resolution again?

i had cinematic mod 4 for both hl2 and episode 1 combined into a single directory to cancel out dupes and compressed both games with the mod down to 3GB...i had planned to wait until episode 2 is released to add it into that package and burn it on dvd...i guess i can start over now lol

sounds like steam limits you quite a lot. i only used it once, so i don't have a point of reference, but good to know!
I had problems using mods with steam. may be it's me, but i only got cinematic mod to work after using the non-steam version of hl2, so i'm not that much of a steam fan at all.


Update: Alright I checked out your sparks values. 200 doesn't look that much different from the original value. It seems this is not the number of sparks, but rather the lifetime of them. I thought the amount of sparks was just the same, but they didn't bounce around that long. Anyway, 200 looks more realistic to me and i like it. I also set it to 100 for a try and that would be even more realistic, because many sparks didn't even reach the ground. However, 200 looks nicer.

I also experimented with the fluidbulletshells (10) and fluidicicles (100) and i couldn't point out the difference to the original values with either weapon. I thought the fluidicicles defined the amount of water particles that would be generated for the water gun. When I swing the gun back and forth in a rapid fashion I can see the stream break up into smaller water batches. I thought raising the value might keep it more consistent in those cases, but that didn't work. If you look on the ground while using the water gun, you can see the particles flowing away, so may be this also defines just the lifetime of this effect. I hadn't checked that out though. This might also explain why raising the water particle count of 20.000 doesn't result in more particles. the values for these effects seem to be stored in other scripts. of course, lowering the value would kill off many particles early on before you would even get to see them and thats why it looked like that value would influence the particle count directly. Anyway...I still don't know what the fluidbulletshells variable does. I thought it might have an impact on the watergun's bullet, or the shells that the other guns throw out during shooting, but I couldn't see a difference to the original value. Any idea?

Also, could you try something? Whenever I deactivate anisotropic filtering before starting a game, I don't get to see the prologue. Does that happen to you too? Which kind of version of the game are you playing, US or European?

Btw, using the give watergun cheat also gives you all weapons + the watergun, which you don't get with give all
Funny stuff: use the give watergun cheat during mental echoes, especially in the first level. It's kind of fun to watergun your huskies while they drag your sled. You can't kill them though. Also cool: in those outdoor mental echoes and in the very beginning of the first level before you open the hatch into the ship, all your weapons have a snow and ice encrusted texture. I can't remember having seen that while playing the game for the first time. Kind of makes it look like a deterioration effect from Far Cry 2. Another interesting thing that happened while using the water gun in a mental echo was that my arms and the gun from the mental echo were transported to the real world and floated in the air. The game resets your weapon slots after each mental echo (at least in the first level), so I was surprised to move after the end of an echo and not seeing my hands move with me. It also looks funny in the echo where you work your way up to the ship. When you have a weapon ready during the standup animation, you get to see 3 hands: two that push you up and one that holds the weapon :P

gunhaver
08-14-2009, 10:51 PM
I need help. Whenever I add the content.cfg to the directory the game wont start. Any known solution to this? I really want to get in to this game but the frame-rate is unbearable on my above par system.

Xiaopang
08-15-2009, 12:44 AM
i assume you mean config.cfg and i also assume the original cfg works. try the following: open the modified config.cfg and set "@p.hardware" to 0. that's the only option that should be able to screw up your game. please report back if this actually worked out. if it didn't the only idea i'd have would be to change each value back to the original one and try the game after each change until you find the culprit that prevents your game from starting. would also be nice if you posted what kind of graphics card you use. could you also be more specific what exactly happens when you start a game? do you see an error message? could you make a screenshot?

gunhaver
08-15-2009, 01:20 AM
i assume you mean config.cfg and i also assume the original cfg works. try the following: open the modified config.cfg and set "@p.hardware" to 0. that's the only option that should be able to screw up your game. please report back if this actually worked out. if it didn't the only idea i'd have would be to change each value back to the original one and try the game after each change until you find the culprit that prevents your game from starting. would also be nice if you posted what kind of graphics card you use. could you also be more specific what exactly happens when you start a game? do you see an error message? could you make a screenshot?

Well I went into config.cfg and as it turned out, the only problem was that the resolution was set too high for my monitor to handle. Great mod by the way! You should get a Nobel prize for this.

allen25
08-15-2009, 03:31 AM
Thanks for the config. I have a i7 920 @3.9 and 260 SLI and the falling icicles dropped the FPS to 8! I can't believe they set it that way. If my rig won't play it they shouldn't have released it. Are you going to do a higher end config? Putting everything off and at 1 seems a bit drastic. I am going to mess with the numbers and see how high I can put everything and still have it be playable. Thanks for showing which numbers to edit. And I'm glad they made the game so moddable.

shaq
08-15-2009, 04:15 AM
thanks for the console commands! i'm gonna try that right away! your idea for the enemy spawning is nice. i checked out the level scripts and found two commands that look useful: AddCharacter and AddThisCharacter. They might be used for spawning. i'll try that out. I doubt there is a console command for spawning, because that would require you to specify the level and the spawning location. that and much more information is being loaded through the level script. too complex for a console command if you ask me. would also not be helpful at all. after all, the game doesn't throw enemies dynamically at the player, but always uses the same enemies in the same locations, so there's little point in a command to make them re-spawn. quicksave would be all you need to test the spawning

I was wondering if you could spawn in the console just to test it out. It would spawn them in the same room when you typed the command. Hopefully one of those commands will work for adding enemies. Are they specified per room on the level scripts? I haven't counted but there might be 30-40 rooms per level including echoes. lol It would take an afternoon to modify the whole game.

Maybe you could make a water grenade weapon while you're at it? lol That's my idea for a new weapon. Maybe a water balloon would work better? lol




silly me...i misinterpreted that as an abbreviation for gary's mod...as for the size, wow! the last time i used it was cinematic mod 4 and that was may be 2 years ago....6 versions in that time...incredible, but i wonder why the installation is so big? did the author crank up the resolution again?

i had cinematic mod 4 for both hl2 and episode 1 combined into a single directory to cancel out dupes and compressed both games with the mod down to 3GB...i had planned to wait until episode 2 is released to add it into that package and burn it on dvd...i guess i can start over now lol

sounds like steam limits you quite a lot. i only used it once, so i don't have a point of reference, but good to know!
I had problems using mods with steam. may be it's me, but i only got cinematic mod to work after using the non-steam version of hl2, so i'm not that much of a steam fan at all.

I think with 5 on up it required a 64 bit OS. I just downloaded Win 7 RC x64 so I could try it out. I think you can still get it until next week. It might take you that long to get 10 though. lol There aren't many places to dl it yet. I got it off a torrent and it took over a day to get it. Almost all the textures are high-res and it includes mods for all three now (HL2 and EP1 and EP2). Wait you mean you were waiting for episode 3 right? When that comes out it will be up to 12-13 and will be about 22GB. lol


Update: Alright I checked out your sparks values. 200 doesn't look that much different from the original value. It seems this is not the number of sparks, but rather the lifetime of them. I thought the amount of sparks was just the same, but they didn't bounce around that long. Anyway, 200 looks more realistic to me and i like it. I also set it to 100 for a try and that would be even more realistic, because many sparks didn't even reach the ground. However, 200 looks nicer.

I also experimented with the fluidbulletshells (10) and fluidicicles (100) and i couldn't point out the difference to the original values with either weapon. I thought the fluidicicles defined the amount of water particles that would be generated for the water gun. When I swing the gun back and forth in a rapid fashion I can see the stream break up into smaller water batches. I thought raising the value might keep it more consistent in those cases, but that didn't work. If you look on the ground while using the water gun, you can see the particles flowing away, so may be this also defines just the lifetime of this effect. I hadn't checked that out though. This might also explain why raising the water particle count of 20.000 doesn't result in more particles. the values for these effects seem to be stored in other scripts. of course, lowering the value would kill off many particles early on before you would even get to see them and thats why it looked like that value would influence the particle count directly. Anyway...I still don't know what the fluidbulletshells variable does. I thought it might have an impact on the watergun's bullet, or the shells that the other guns throw out during shooting, but I couldn't see a difference to the original value. Any idea?

I believe the number in the init.cfg is the total number at one time. So as new sparks/bullets/icicles/water appear the old ones have to disappear to keep it under the maximum value. That would explain why they don't spread along the floor. Have you tried raising any of the sparks to 20000? That could be interesting. lol There must be a way to determine the maximum values for each setting somewhere. It might even be in the nvidia drivers for all I know. I assumed the bullets value was for the spent bullet casing physx. If so it would only affect the ppsh, but it might be for the water cannon too. If both look the same with reduced values then it can be lowered to 200 or less. Try a really low value and shoot the ppsh and see if there are less casings. I don't think I even noticed if the casings stay on the floor after shooting.

Also, could you try something? Whenever I deactivate anisotropic filtering before starting a game, I don't get to see the prologue. Does that happen to you too? Which kind of version of the game are you playing, US or European?

Btw, using the give watergun cheat also gives you all weapons + the watergun, which you don't get with give all
Funny stuff: use the give watergun cheat during mental echoes, especially in the first level. It's kind of fun to watergun your huskies while they drag your sled. You can't kill them though. Also cool: in those outdoor mental echoes and in the very beginning of the first level before you open the hatch into the ship, all your weapons have a snow and ice encrusted texture. I can't remember having seen that while playing the game for the first time. Kind of makes it look like a deterioration effect from Far Cry 2. Another interesting thing that happened while using the water gun in a mental echo was that my arms and the gun from the mental echo were transported to the real world and floated in the air. The game resets your weapon slots after each mental echo (at least in the first level), so I was surprised to move after the end of an echo and not seeing my hands move with me. It also looks funny in the echo where you work your way up to the ship. When you have a weapon ready during the standup animation, you get to see 3 hands: two that push you up and one that holds the weapon :P

You mean the movie when you start a new game? I leave AF off and when I start a new game the movie starts and then I hit esc to skip it. lol At least I do that while I am testing the new numbers. I have US version but they should all be the same. In yours do you have Chronos spinning around on the main menu? lol just kidding Yeah I noticed about the giveall.

With spawning new enemies I don't know how that would affect the pacing of the game. Is there a way for enemies to open doors? Just imagine you just shot two baddies and you take a breath and relax and then BOOM! the door opens just as you were getting ready to walk out. lol I'm pretty sure that is possible. Or even open up the door behind you as you are leaving. It would make the game much better and more intense. Right now it is kind of like Doom 3 where only a couple of enemies are on the screen at one time. Or like on the movie screen when the boss pops out, maybe they could just appear in front or behind you.

Xiaopang
08-15-2009, 09:55 AM
Well I went into config.cfg and as it turned out, the only problem was that the resolution was set too high for my monitor to handle. Great mod by the way! You should get a Nobel prize for this.

thank you, but a nobel prize for that little work would be too much. i'd settle for money instead lol

thanks for figuring the problem out. i totally forgot to change the resolution to a lower value before distribution. oh well, it's always the obvious that gets overlooked


Are they specified per room on the level scripts? I haven't counted but there might be 30-40 rooms per level including echoes. lol It would take an afternoon to modify the whole game.

well, it's not that easy. the level scripts are nothing more than a conglomerate of procedure calls. those have to contain the enemy numbers and spawning positions. i had only glaced over that by the time i wrote that, so i still don't know




Maybe you could make a water grenade weapon while you're at it? lol That's my idea for a new weapon. Maybe a water balloon would work better? lol


lol may be i could make nesterov use an icicle as a weapon? may be i could also use them regain his health by eating them? i like your weapon idea, but it wouldn't go well with the storyline of the game (ok, same goes for the watergun, but that's a bit more believable)

are you sure there are that many rooms per level? i think a level rather has less than 20 of them and only the fewest even have enemies in them.



I think with 5 on up it required a 64 bit OS. I just downloaded Win 7 RC x64 so I could try it out. I think you can still get it until next week. It might take you that long to get 10 though. lol There aren't many places to dl it yet. I got it off a torrent and it took over a day to get it. Almost all the textures are high-res and it includes mods for all three now (HL2 and EP1 and EP2). Wait you mean you were waiting for episode 3 right? When that comes out it will be up to 12-13 and will be about 22GB. lol

yeah i meant ep 3. i just checked the whole thing out. the last official release was 9.5, which you can grab at filefront. 10 is still beta and will still see quite some changes before its final release. i won't get it yet, because according to a news site, the final version will feature an alyx-model that is closer to the hl2-original. the same news site also offered a http-download of the beta, so i have no urge to get it now (or hdd space lol). i guess i will wait till ep3 comes out and download cm then. it will see massive changes, because i think ep 3 will use new engine features and fakefactory always ported those to the older hl2 versions.



I believe the number in the init.cfg is the total number at one time. So as new sparks/bullets/icicles/water appear the old ones have to disappear to keep it under the maximum value.

i thought that at first too, but i'm not so sure any more. i made some tests with the fluid bullet value. i raised it to 100.000 with interesting results. it eliminated the water gun's range and set it to zero. it also caused the gun to spill out a constant water stream, even if you don't use it. it poured out so much water that it covered the floor that i was walking on. in other words, it turned the gun into a fawcett lol. i made a screenshot:


http://i214.photobucket.com/albums/cc273/Xiaopang999/Cryostasis2009-08-1411-26-56-31.png

the amount of water is hard to see, but it surpasses that of the gun in regular mode.


one thing's for sure. there is no limitation in the drivers. it wouldn't make any sense. the driver's task is to give programmers access to the hardware. it's up to them to decide how they want to use it. take furmark for example. simple graphics, yet highly straining benchmark. then take fluidmark which is the equivalent for physics. the les sources of a card you use (polygon count for example), the more you have for other tasks (physics) so any limitation would kill the hardware's efficiency by forcing a balance. this would also make the drivers incompatible to new hardware, or overclocked regular models.



You mean the movie when you start a new game? I leave AF off and when I start a new game the movie starts and then I hit esc to skip it.

exactly, but before you see that movie there is a black screen with a hermann hesse citation. it seems that the american version has a bug that prevents this message from showing when you have AF turned off. in the european one, this bug doesn't seem to exist. there's also an epilogue, so if you missed those, you should check the beginning and the ending with AF turned on



of the game. Is there a way for enemies to open doors? Just imagine you just shot two baddies and you take a breath and relax and then BOOM! the door opens just as you were getting ready to walk out. lol I'm pretty sure that is possible. Or even open up the door behind you as you are leaving. It would make the game much better and more intense. Right now it is kind of like Doom 3 where only a couple of enemies are on the screen at one time. Or like on the movie screen when the boss pops out, maybe they could just appear in front or behind you.

true, the enemy spawning is much like in doom 3. i doubt that they are programmed to open doors, because the spawning is always triggered when you are pretty close to them. you could try to run away and see if they follow you, but in the few cases where i wanted to track back, i found doors locked that just had granted me access, so there...

speaking of intense games, try dark messiah of might and magic. there the enemies not just charge at you, but also follow you throughout the levels, up ladders and so on. there is basically no save location. pretty refreshing and quite surprising if you don't know about that. assassin's creed is similar, but less intense.

shaq
08-15-2009, 09:38 PM
You did 100000 or 100.000? So the bullet value does affect the water cannon? I thought it did because I lowered it to 2500 and it seemed to shoot out less water so I put it back to 10000. That's kinda funny that it leaks out like that. I think the water cannon is overpowered so if it leaked a little that would be good. It would force you to find icicles. If you could make it leak while still being able to shoot it that is. Maybe less ammo per icicle would be a better idea though.

I thought the drivers might limit the amount of total particles at once. And drivers are easily updated. I haven't really seen any physx demos/games that can max out a 260 as most people say a 9600gt is fine for everything. And it could be the physx drivers that is doing it. Because why can't we do 1000000 particles or even 10000000 particles and have a physx benchmark? That fluidmark never seems to work for me as I always get a black screen.

I see the opening quote fine with AF off. Maybe it's when you have it on and then turn it off right before you start a new game?

They must open doors somehow because remember on that echo where he is shooting the rifle and he goes into the room and runs out of ammo? If nothing else it might be possible to leave some of the doors open in the game and the ai could go though them then? Dark Messiah or Ass. Creed aren't as creepy so you lose out on the atmosphere. And in Doom 3 they do chase you and open doors at least. There are scripts for that game to make any enemies spawn spontaneously so it might be possible in theis game too.

Xiaopang
08-16-2009, 09:24 AM
You did 100000 or 100.000? So the bullet value does affect the water cannon? I thought it did because I lowered it to 2500 and it seemed to shoot out less water so I put it back to 10000.

i used 100.000. the strange thing is, i also lowered the value significantly and couldn't see any difference, that's why i wasn't sure that it would really influence the water cannon.



That's kinda funny that it leaks out like that. I think the water cannon is overpowered so if it leaked a little that would be good. It would force you to find icicles. If you could make it leak while still being able to shoot it that is. Maybe less ammo per icicle would be a better idea though

well, that's how it originally works. you stop shooting and there's still a little stream of water still shooting out until it dies down. kind of like unplugging a running pump. so the value might only be used for the leakage, but what i don't understand is why it disables your range and effectively sets it to zero.



I thought the drivers might limit the amount of total particles at once. And drivers are easily updated. I haven't really seen any physx demos/games that can max out a 260 as most people say a 9600gt is fine for everything. And it could be the physx drivers that is doing it. Because why can't we do 1000000 particles or even 10000000 particles and have a physx benchmark? That fluidmark never seems to work for me as I always get a black screen.


hey hey, for me too. strange. well, there is no driver limitation. would be like assuming that there's a limitation for polygon count, or frame rate. and if there was and you would hit the wall, then what? that wouldn't just screw up the visuals, but might actually make a game unplayable. think about a puzzle where you'd have to fill a tank with the water gun to raise its weight and make it crash through a weakened structure. this would also be a saleskiller. who wants to buy a limited graphics card?



I see the opening quote fine with AF off. Maybe it's when you have it on and then turn it off right before you start a new game?

hmm, no. i had that directly after installing the game by using original settings and everything. strange



They must open doors somehow because remember on that echo where he is shooting the rifle and he goes into the room and runs out of ammo? If nothing else it might be possible to leave some of the doors open in the game and the ai could go though them then?

that's an interesting idea! i had forgotten about that mental echo. the thing is, that this character was not the standard enemy, but a special character, so it's likely that this door-opening ability is limited to his script. it would have to be ported. also his actions were scripted, while you'd have to extend the script of an enemy to give him the choice to open doors. leaving them open might work




Dark Messiah or Ass. Creed aren't as creepy so you lose out on the atmosphere. And in Doom 3 they do chase you and open doors at least. There are scripts for that game to make any enemies spawn spontaneously so it might be possible in theis game too.

yeah, may be. funny that you think cryostasis is creepier than dark messiah. i found the latter way creepier with its orks, gloomy cave and big ass spiders. especially if you played it stealthily ( i just played it 3 weeks ago, so my memory is pretty fresh). i didn't find cryostasis creepy at all, because you know what to expect right from the start: walk through 5 empty rooms, find a switch, kill an enemy, find the exit. next level: start over. also the enemies were too weak and too few to really put pressure on you. if i died because they surprised me, then i knew better the next time and i could always heal after battle, so was little tension when i wandered through the game. in dark messiah however, i despised going through spider lairs, having to use up my valuable health potions. the necropolis was just amazing and those huge cyclopses.... dark messiah was waaaaaaay creepier lol

shaq
08-16-2009, 11:07 PM
Maybe I should reinstall Dark Mesiah then as I never finished it. lol I got bored a couple of hours into the game and quit.

I think Cryostasis is creepier especially with the axe. It has weight to it and feels like you are actually using it. Another idea for a mod would be just using the axe and take the guns away from the AI or only drop very few rounds for the guns. I think if there were more enemies though it would be more fun especially if someone could get them to open the doors. I think you would find it creepy then. lol And a bunch of the enemies spawn right in front of you after some of the echoes so spawning should be possible.

Xiaopang
08-17-2009, 12:24 AM
ah i see. well, if dark messiah bored you, then it most likely is not for you. i found it to be a great first person action adventure that had a cool and very varied fighting system, especially since you can use your own style of fighting, be it magic, force or sneakiness. throw in great level design and stunning visuals and you get a pretty unique medieval game. actually, i only wanted to see how the graphics would look maxed out on my gtx and ended up beating it and i didn't regret it. still looks great despite its age.

i like your idea with the axe. that wouldn't need a mod though, as all you'd have to do is just limit yourself to that weapon. and i agree, more flexible and mobile enemies add a lot of creepiness to a game. that's why dark messiah ranks way higher on my list in that regard. i remember how it surprised me when i attacked an enemy from a tower, just to find him climb up a ladder to kill me. others jumped huge gaps to get to me in other parts, so cryostasis sure would profit from it. today i outsmarted cryostasis' ai, which lead me to believe that it would take a lot more than just to open doors and spawn more enemies. remember the start of level 2? you run down a ladder and get a mental echo, where an engineer is being attacked by a servant. the servant then attacks you in your time. i ran back and up the ladder, having to crouch to get past some icicles, while this guy just ran through them. i dropped down and ran as far into the level as i could without taking the next weapon (the valve). i just stayed around the corner next to the valve. i heard the servant coming, but he never got to me. when i risked a peek, he was standing there, his back being turned to me, staring at the stairs...i attacked him from behind and he didn't even react, other then falling down dead. so my conclusion is, that the ai is really limited. enemies spawn directly ahead of you and apparently the ai is limited to send an attack order to the enemy. once they lose you, that seems to render them useless, so there would have to be a lot more work done to make them chase you, or even gang up on you in an intelligent fashion, for example like in stalker.

harhol
08-17-2009, 11:22 PM
Many thanks for the mods Xiaopang, especially the second one. Previously I could only get an average of around 20 fps (even on the lowest settings with your config mod), but since trying the init mod I can play the game at a comfortable 35fps average.

I've played the first two areas so far and haven't encountered any problems. For some reason I get the best performance on Shader 4.0, which is handy as it means I can play at 800x600 without black horizontal borders.

Anyway, thanks again. Hopefully one day I can play this at max settings with all the fancy effects turned on....

:grin:

[Core 2 Duo @ 2.8 Ghz // 4GB RAM // ATI Radeon HD 4650]

shaq
08-19-2009, 12:07 AM
ah i see. well, if dark messiah bored you, then it most likely is not for you. i found it to be a great first person action adventure that had a cool and very varied fighting system, especially since you can use your own style of fighting, be it magic, force or sneakiness. throw in great level design and stunning visuals and you get a pretty unique medieval game. actually, i only wanted to see how the graphics would look maxed out on my gtx and ended up beating it and i didn't regret it. still looks great despite its age.

i like your idea with the axe. that wouldn't need a mod though, as all you'd have to do is just limit yourself to that weapon. and i agree, more flexible and mobile enemies add a lot of creepiness to a game. that's why dark messiah ranks way higher on my list in that regard. i remember how it surprised me when i attacked an enemy from a tower, just to find him climb up a ladder to kill me. others jumped huge gaps to get to me in other parts, so cryostasis sure would profit from it. today i outsmarted cryostasis' ai, which lead me to believe that it would take a lot more than just to open doors and spawn more enemies. remember the start of level 2? you run down a ladder and get a mental echo, where an engineer is being attacked by a servant. the servant then attacks you in your time. i ran back and up the ladder, having to crouch to get past some icicles, while this guy just ran through them. i dropped down and ran as far into the level as i could without taking the next weapon (the valve). i just stayed around the corner next to the valve. i heard the servant coming, but he never got to me. when i risked a peek, he was standing there, his back being turned to me, staring at the stairs...i attacked him from behind and he didn't even react, other then falling down dead. so my conclusion is, that the ai is really limited. enemies spawn directly ahead of you and apparently the ai is limited to send an attack order to the enemy. once they lose you, that seems to render them useless, so there would have to be a lot more work done to make them chase you, or even gang up on you in an intelligent fashion, for example like in stalker.

But if some of the enemies have guns it wouldn't be good just using the axe. You don't bring an axe to a gun fight. LOL

I think the AI needs to see you before they will chase. Have you ever managed to get to the next room after they see you and see if they follow? There are a couple of times in the game where there are two enemies or more at once and they all go after you. Are scripts between games similar? Maybe it would be possible to copy some scripting over from a game with better AI? If nothing else just doubling the amount of enemies at once would suffice, but I thought it would be awesome if they opened the doors on you. As you approach the door you see the handle move and hear the creaking of it opening. It could be the boss, the welder dude or the spider. And as you run back to get ready another one approaches from the door behind you. lol

I just ordered a GTX 295 because of the great Bing cashback offer so I will try the game with the 295 for graphics and a 260 for PhysX. Maybe I can run it at 1080p with caustics and reflections back on. If not the GT300 should and I get 90 days to step up to it.

koolband
09-22-2009, 12:43 AM
Alright, so if I wanted to use this mod, all I have to do is download the file on the link you put, but then what?
thanks

wiss83
10-01-2009, 09:43 PM
"Replace the init.cfg inside your Cryostasis\Data\Scripts directory with the one from this package.
Back up your original first! This is crucial! Editing the init.cfg can result in bugs such as:

- falling through the ground/passing through textures

- not being able to go through hatches, e.g. the very first one in the game

- not being able to jump over chasms...."

(taken from the mod readme file)

homes513
01-13-2011, 06:59 PM
I think your mod affected my game more than it should. It works great of course it boosted my fps by 50. The problem is that i think it took out an item needed to pass a certain part. The part of the game im talking about is when the character is in a mental echo. Its where you in a scuba suit and some mutant drags the character out of the water and cuts it open with an axe. I cant get passed this part because the point where you have to take the axe to kill the guy the axe just disappears. Im not able to pass the game now :(

Artas1984
01-19-2011, 09:34 PM
So this mod strips lots of things to improve the performance. But...

In my experience the only thing, that really puts the frame rates down is shadows. I set my all settings to minimum with shadows disabled, and then set all settings to maximum with shadows also disabled - got almost the same frame rates no matter the AA, effects or resolution!!!

Then i turned on maximum with shadows enabled, and then maximum with shadows disabled - the frames went sky high when no shadows were turned on. I was testing on GTX 280.

coolestbaby
05-01-2011, 12:58 PM
Thanks Xiaopang very much! dont want to roll over the game for another 4hs :grin:

chungpe84s
08-29-2011, 07:32 AM
i'll appreciate it.

queen-latifah
01-09-2012, 12:59 PM
http://www.webcam-steamate.com/cookies/35/b/happy.gif

I bought this game fro $3 over the holiday's and just tried playing it on my new SB rig clocked at 4.5ghz and my GTX470 OC'ed to 800mhz core and its still like as slide show when anything is happening.

I think its the physics. I normally don't post complaints like this but I guess for $3 I should be happy I'm just surprised a game that game out several years ago plays like this....

radicalR
03-13-2012, 04:24 PM
Is it possible that someone could re-upload this mod since most computers still can't play this game as-is (and that megaupload was shut down)?

Wixmef
04-04-2012, 09:55 PM
Bump!

Could someone please reupload this? And I also direly need the savegames he provided but I can't get them now due to the shutdown of megaupload. The savegames on the other hand doesn't have to be the ones he uploaded it could be your own, I just need someones savegames I don't feel like starting all over.

goldenamy70
04-14-2012, 09:07 AM
it's too complicated to me. maybe my son can understand it.
http://www.unblocked-bebo.info/luoying1.jpg
http://www.unblocked-bebo.info/luoying2.jpg
http://www.unblocked-bebo.info/luoying3.jpg
http://www.unblocked-bebo.info/luoying5.jpg

bugmenot
04-18-2012, 05:25 PM
To the three guys above my post: You guys aren't too smart, are you? Why are you asking around in a dead forum while the guy who posted the stuff that you want supplied a link to his blog in his profile? Why don't you contact him directly? Why even ask again for a re-upload if no one reacted to the first request??

No wonder the game received such a bad reputation - most of those that played it are barely capable of moving around the web without hurting their head.

Floggin101
06-05-2012, 01:52 PM
You got to be out of your mind. Why did you waste so much money on that Over-rated CPU. Wasteful. anyway, even a Dual Core CPU plays this game just fine. My guess is sense you fell for the i7 CPU your probably not that intelligent.

Just because you have a Brand New CPU doesn't mean you can play everything. My guess is that you listened to NewEgg reviews.

I've played this game on a AMD 5000+ BE stock and 2 GB of RAM DDR2 with a single GTX275 with everything on and MAX resolution and in StereoScopic 3D using a Dual Panel Front and back output/filter. Better go rebuild that Slop man. 1200 down the drain, and I spent about 800 for everything

Thanks for the config. I have a i7 920 @3.9 and 260 SLI and the falling icicles dropped the FPS to 8! I can't believe they set it that way. If my rig won't play it they shouldn't have released it.

Are you going to do a higher end config? Putting everything off and at 1 seems a bit drastic. I am going to mess with the numbers and see how high I can put everything and still have it be playable. Thanks for showing which numbers to edit. And I'm glad they made the game so moddable.

Quatrix
06-22-2012, 06:49 PM
I've played this game on a AMD 5000+ BE stock and 2 GB of RAM DDR2 with a single GTX275 with everything on and MAX resolution and in StereoScopic 3D using a Dual Panel Front and back output/filter.

Define "played". I agree that the game isn't too CPU-dependent and hits the GPU much harder, but I have difficulty believing that you played at a smooth 60+ FPS the whole time. I still get hiccups with an i7-2600K and GTX 690.