Percentage system and System requeriments

Requeriments considerations


Before some people take disappointments, I would like to clarify that the mod requirements are quite high. Version 3.0 of the mod was a pretty big optimization compared to the original game, but in 4.0 there are too many improvements and I can't do optimization miracles.

While it is true that by using the 4.0 recommended settings, performance can be higher than in the original game in ultra settings (at least in my computer), the memory usage is higher.

I guess you may have noticed the large number of textures modified, the new improved materials, additional shadows, etc, and that is not free in terms of memory usage.

Currently, there are several points that crash the game on my computer. Lowering the resolution below 1920x1200 I managed to avoid it. Of course, that's not the solution. I want to say my cpu is already very electromigrated and I'm having crashes from time to time so it's difficult to separate the cpu problems and problems because excessive memory usage.

To test the mod I'm using only one 480GTX which has 1.5 GB of VRAM. Before the release there are still many optimizations at several points in some levels and textures. Furthermore, I added a new option "reduced Textures" in the Configurator Tool which allows using the mod with some of the larger textures reduced. I hope that after the release of the mod has some feedback from users with different configurations of graphics memory so I can further refine the reduced texture option.






Percentage system


I want to clarify one more time (I hope it's the last time) how percentage system works. I work with a few documents with pending tasks. I have a file only for pending screenshots of important or "easy to see" changes. Another file is for to-do fixes in levels and it has an individual percentage for each level.

The main file is about textures/materials pending changes and some levels fixes are into this file too.

The percentage I post in blog is global percentage. How is possible that only a 0.1% is too long? That's easy, because each 0.1% implies a lot of changes.

In the regular monthly copy of June, I have 1075 textures and 1051 material definitions. Some of the textures are exact copy of crytek HD textures, others are Crytek HD textures with some modifications and a lot of them are new from scratch textures. All materials have modifications on some way.

Also the number of fixes on each map exceeded 1.000 some time ago. A few of them can have more than 2.000 changes and Crysis 2 have 19 levels. It's easy that global sum is near or exceeded 20.000 fixes/little changes in all the single player campaign.

With those numbers, each 0,1% can be more than 20 modifications including fixes, textures and materials. Now you can understand how long every update is. For example, since last post (99.9%) I have fixed 40 flickering problems in two levels and those are not included in the to-do files because I've discovered them two days ago.


On the remaining tasks, the truth is that they are a very few. Those are the main pending tasks:


- Create new texture to the branches of the trees (maple). I have made many tests and photos but can not find a result that satisfied me. It is one of the textures is costing me most. Right now I have planned a route through the countryside to find better pictures with which to work.

- Create new texture for the walls low shrubs. Similar situation as above.

- Create new texture for columns_B (diff, bump, spec and displacement) in Central Park.

- Finish fourth Precipice Rocks texture (diff, bump, spec and displacement) and use it in some materials.

- Create new texture for Downtown Church doors.

- Fix bumpmap for interior parking walls.

- Finish the last marble texture in Terminal Station level.

- Add casing shells shadows on each decal in CentralStation level.

- Optimize some areas to reduce memory usage.

- Add materials list for "Reduced Tesselation" option.

- Finish reduced textures versions and add list into program.

- End TOD.

- Integrate QMOD.

- Complete final test walktrough in search of forgotten bugs.

- Preparing and uploading files.


It's a lot of work, but compared to what I've left behind is only a small step. I'll show some of the pending task for more accurate percentage representation.



Thank you very much to all who follow the blog regularly.