Picked Up Farcry

[Maximius]

I bought FarCry the other day, boy its a beautiful game! Only a few complaints so far:

 

Fucking save points. This really sux, I cleared half the map the other day only to lose all my work and start over. Yuck. And the save points are not even permanently placed, I tried to return to a save point to save anew but nothing happened. Argh.

 

No animal life on a tropical island/ocean. So far all Ive seen are pigs and parrots. No fish in the water, no bugs on land despite the mercs complaining about them. They could have included simple sprites for effect.

 

Other than that I dont have any complaints, the AI seem pretty smart so far and the firefights are a lot of fun. Ive had some success firing at one merc then moving, quickly, to another point on the island and firing from there. The AI coordination seems tight as well, one guy spots ya and the heli and buggies move in ASAP. If I actually kill all the mercs on the one map I want to see if I can take out that heli with the buggies twin machine guns.

[oDDity]

You can save anytime using a console command, but I can't remember what it is.

I think they actually released an official patch which does let you quicksave, so download any updates.

[Springheel]

Farcry is a very impressive game. The amount of wildlife you see is based on your system/graphics settings (there's an environmental setting, I believe). At the higher levels you should be seeing insects, fish, and birds (you can even shoot the fish and they float to the surface).

 

There's a console save command, search a farcry forum and you can probably find it.

[sparhawk]

Farcry is one of the most beautiful games so far I have played. But unfrotunately it didn't really hold my attention for long. As a game it became rather boring. Maybe I will try it later and play it from new.

[oDDity]

Yes, it was good at the start, there was a lot of stealth involved with all the foliage and wide open environments, but it turned into a bit of a corridor crawl towards the end.

[sparhawk]

Yeah. The stealth part at the beginning was pretty good. I only played a few maps though.

[Maximius]

I found a quicksave command, \save_game in console, on a walkthrough site. Ill look for the environmental setting, the lack of fauna is a little disconcerting.

 

I figured as I was buying the game that it would turn into a corridor crawl but I am desperate for some new video game action. I will have fun figuring out different ways to whack the AIs for a few weeks at least.

 

I originally bought Ground Control II but the disk was fucked up, kept telling me its was a bootleg copy. It looked like a lot of fun and I enjoyed GC1 quite a bit. Im also a big fan of the Homeworld series, titantic space battles always get my heart thumping.

[obscurus]

I bought FarCry the other day, boy its a beautiful game! Only a few complaints so far:

 

Fucking save points. This really sux, I cleared half the map the other day only to lose all my work and start over. Yuck. And the save points are not even permanently placed, I tried to return to a save point to save anew but nothing happened. Argh.

 

 

I've played the demo, and I love the save points. Really makes you play carefully. I quite like the way they did it, though the game is an absolute bitch on the highest difficulty setting, so I can understand why you might get tired of the savepoint system if you find yourself dying a lot....

 

I've been meaning to pick up the full game one of these days...

[Maximius]

I've played the demo, and I love the save points. Really makes you play carefully. I quite like the way they did it, though the game is an absolute bitch on the highest difficulty setting, so I can understand why you might get tired of the savepoint system if you find yourself dying a lot....

 

I've been meaning to pick up the full game one of these days...

 

Im playing it on the highest difficulty and it is a bitch. I also reset my video controls to the maximum and its look unbelievable but I still cant get the bugs, birds, and fishies to come out. Ill figure it all out. Hunting the mercs through the jungle is a blast though, I position myself well, snipe one or two in the head, and the rest come searching for me. I was hiding one time and a guard was standing right behind me, neither of us knew the other was there. I turned to run, boo!, we started shooting but missed each other completely and I ran off like a bat outta hell. Another time I lured about 4 mercs to cluster around the gas tank near the firing range in the first map, then took out the tank, you get the picture.

[Domarius]

That game sounds cool. I will pick it up in a bargain bin or somethign when I upgrade next year.

[sparhawk]

If you have a good gfx card then you might enjoy it. It really looks awesome. The first time I saw the view on the main menu, I just sat there and watched the water swapping on the beach. It feels as if you are at vacation on a carribean island.

[Domarius]

I got the opportunity to play it at a computer store on a computer that had everything. Yeah I know what you mean.

 

What stuck in my memory was I came upon a shark strung up to dry hanging by a cord, and I shot the shark a few times, and it swayed around... then I put the game to the test - I aimed up dead perfectly on the cord and fired. To my disbeleif, the cord broke exactly where I shot it and the shark fell to the ground and the cord fell limp and realistically alongside it.

[sparhawk]

Yes. That's what a good physics engine can do. And that's why I maintain the position that physics should also be done well in TDM because it adds immensly to a gameworld.

[Maximius]

Spar, is anyone advocating a weaker physics engine per say, or is it a question of dedicating time to one aspect of the mod over another? I agree with your point about the importance of a quality physics engine, as Domarius pointed out its the actions of little things that really help to build a more immersive experience. His bottomline test of the game was simple, did a piece of rope act like a piece of rope? You could test the game in more complex ways to be sure, but Im guessing that a good physics engine can take care of many of the little details that while unimportant by themselves taken asa whole add up to a lot.

[Vadrosaul]

I'm trying to decide between Farcry, Area 51, or Pariah

 

Any suggestions?

[Maximius]

I myself only know FarCry. BTW has this Western "Gun" made it out for PC yet? I saw the Xbox versions at the Gamestop but nothing else.

[sparhawk]

Spar, is anyone advocating a weaker physics engine per say, or is it a question of dedicating time to one aspect of the mod over another?

 

I have the impression that some may think that physics is just a nice-to-have feature and that it is better to devote the CPU cycles to something "more usefull". Personally I'm of the opinion that it is always better to have a generic solution which works with many unexpected cases as well, then implementing a specific hack for something to "save time".

[obscurus]

Did anyone on the Darkmod team consider the Cryengine via a mod to Far Cry as a basis for the DarkMod? If so, what made it less attractive than Doom 3? Just curious, as there are many features about the Cryengine that would make it ideal for a nice little stealth game....

[Springheel]

I brought up that possibility when we first started. But apparently Farcry lacks dynamic indoor lighting, which is more important for Thief gameplay.

[TrevP]

If you have a GeForce 6 series card, download the (huge) 1.3 patch and read up on how to enable HDR.

 

http://trevp.dyndns.org/screens/farcry/FarCry0000.jpg

 

http://trevp.dyndns.org/screens/farcry/FarCry0001.jpg

 

http://trevp.dyndns.org/screens/farcry/FarCry0002.jpg

 

HDR > Bloom any day

[god_is_my_goldfish]

Are you sure that's HDR? Cause i'll be damned if that doesn't look exactly like bloom.

 

Oh, and of the three games listed, i'de pick Farcry, both Pariah and ARea 51 were mediocre at best, and Farcry at least adds some free roaming and deeper stragety to it's standard FPS fare.

 

 

Then they put those stupid mutant monkeys in...

[obscurus]

I brought up that possibility when we first started. But apparently Farcry lacks dynamic indoor lighting, which is more important for Thief gameplay.

 

 

That isn't true though - it does have dynamic indoor lighting (it can use a combination of real-time lighting, precalculated shadowmaps, with normal maps and full dynamic shadows - same as Doom 3, but it has much bettter outdoor rendering and LOD. It also does smooth volumetric realtime shadows, which look less plasticy without as much work as the Doom 3 engine. I'm not criticising the decision to go with D3, I think it is a very suitable engine, I'm just saying that there are a few engines out there that have a suite of features that would be well suited to a Thief-style mod or TC.

 

I think the one thing that would stand out for me with the CryEngine is the fact that it can render huge outdoor areas, so you could make a massive city level without too much difficulty, while D3 is a bit more biased towards indoor rendering ( I know it can do outdoor levels nicely, but not on the scale that the Cryengine does).

 

The AI in FarCry is also quite good and has a pre-existing stealth implementation...

 

But I'm not sure if it is as easy to mod FarCry...

 

http://farcry.ubi.com/technology.php

 

 

 

 

http://farcry.ubi.com/downloads/CRYTEK.wmv

Edited September 28, 2005 by obscurus

[Darkness_Falls]

That's a pretty cool demo video. Thanks for posting

[sparhawk]

Personally I didn't consider Farcry because D3 offers a lot more features that are nice than Farcry does. Does Farcray also have an SDK? I never really looked into Farcry that much, so part of the decision was also because I didn't even think about Farcry for modding.

[Gildoran]

I've played around with the map editor in farcry, and my conclusion is that although farcry engine makes it easy to do massive beautiful outdoor areas, I found it to be a complete pain in the butt to do indoor areas (read: areas with buildings, including "outdoor" cityscapes). You can't just vertex edit a brush to be the shape/size you want. You have to build walls out of (model) blocks that are presized and pretextured. If you want to use a new texture, or want to use an existing one in a new way, or you need a wall with different dimensions/features, you end up needing a 3d modeling program. I should note that my experience with the farcry editor is very limited, so maybe I just don't know about some features. On the other hand Doom 3 makes it a complete breeze to construct custom geometry, even if you're as phobic of 3d modelers as I am. In Doom 3, even things like pipes/wires/tentacles/etc are usually made in the editor, whereas in most games such things need to be constructed in a 3d modeler. Also Doom 3 can handle massive levels, so as long as you can keep the polies/fil-rate down for any given view you could do truly large city levels. (I've heard 13km maps are possible, though I don't know if that's true) On the other hand, I'm under the impression that without changes to the SDK, Doom 3 doesn't support LOD.

 

I'll go look for a screenshot to illustrate how large D3 levels can get...

Edit: Ok, I found the image I had in mind. It's not 13km, but I'm not sure if it uses up the entire map, and in any case it's not small. To get an idea of scale, keep in mind that cyberdemons are more than 40 feet tall, and are large enough for the player to walk between their legs. Obscurus, do you feel you need to make a city larger than this?