Cryostasis Performance Mod

[Xiaopang]

Originally Posted by shaq

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

Originally Posted by shaq

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.

Originally Posted by shaq

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

Originally Posted by shaq

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.

Originally Posted by shaq

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]

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:




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




update: half the particle count for each particle flag




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]

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]

Originally Posted by shaq

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...

Originally Posted by shaq

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.

Originally Posted by shaq

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.

Originally Posted by shaq

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

Originally Posted by shaq

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?
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

Originally Posted by shaq

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?

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.

Originally Posted by shaq

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]

Originally Posted by Xiaopang

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

Originally Posted by Xiaopang

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.

Originally Posted by Xiaopang

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.

Originally Posted by Xiaopang

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?
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.

Originally Posted by Xiaopang

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

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.

Originally Posted by Xiaopang

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]

Originally Posted by shaq

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?

Originally Posted by shaq

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!

Originally Posted by shaq

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

Originally Posted by shaq

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.

Originally Posted by shaq

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

Originally Posted by shaq

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

Originally Posted by shaq

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]

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]

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

Originally Posted by shaq

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

[gunhaver]

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]

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?