This blog is still getting hits, oddly enough, and I want to know by who, so leave a comment down below if you visit :)

The status to the right has been set to dormant for many weeks now but, I’m afraid, during those weeks it has gone from dormant to dead. In fact, I’ve more or less given up completely on CE2, maybe while waiting for Crysis 2 even though Crytek seems to continue making the same mistakes they always have; naturally, since those mistakes are their foundation.

I could ramble on and on about Remod’s death, but you would have to ask me to.

Amazing, truly.

This is all unorganized and unfinished, dangling somewhere in between, but I figured it was better than doing jack shit in terms of pleasing the crowd. Consider it as-is; so no support promises. Nevertheless, I occasionally (sometimes daily, sometimes less) try to get playtests going on over at the Crymod IRC channel, and I might organize some more elaborate ones in advance in the future. Plus: fixing a game is really hard without getting proper feedback on your progress, and this can provide a solution to that.

What else can I say? I won’t get angry if you give me some of that sexy feedback, maybe I should finally put this on Crymod, and orange-purple gradient maps are the sex. Any questions are welcome.

One night, a couple weeks ago, someone reminded me of this video of Crysis MP from back in early 2007, and it made me realize something funny: it’s actually not that different from Crysis or Wars, meaning just a few changes reverted could largely fix the game, especially if it’s built on Remod which has a lot of the other issues not seen or apparent in the video already fixed. I ended up going for it, reducing recoil and increasing movement speeds etc., while still retaining all the good stuff from Remod.

All this being in IA and TIA, but it should also apply to PS to an extent.

There aren’t actually any of those obnoxious issues people had with Wars anymore and it’s a relatively good Crysis game, depending on how you look at it. I say it depends on how you look at it because there’s one thing that many players will probably find unpleasant: the feeling. My idea of game design is that it can essentially be split in two: logic and feeling. Logic being things like weapon balancing and other things that are almost entirely based on logic; feeling being about how the player feels and how the environment and everything else in the game feels to the player. These two factors, feeling and logic, play together all the time. Now, although the logic part of the game is generally fixed, I think the feeling part lacks; it’s not immersive enough, the balance between the need for reflexes and strategical thinking is off, there’s not a clear goal in the game etc. But a lot of people aren’t bothered by this and more importantly it might just be me, so I must be careful.

To get properly back on topic, the plan is to fix and work on things some more now, produce a little gameplay video à la the alpha video above as well as, maybe, a narrated version of it and then release 0.3 accompanied by the videos in an “announcement” on Crymod, and then some events! Maybe I will organize one or more PS playtests before all this, perhaps even go through a more long-term period of gathering official (basically people who are willing to take an effort to get and use SVN) playtesters and getting the mod into something more worth it. I guess it’s clear by now I like to just go with the flow and don’t really plan far ahead ;)

After several minutes of exposing my ears to the sheer terror of a sound so high it sounds like your mother when I give her pleasure, I have finally crafted a new sound for the stealthy amongst us (or the non-stealthy depending on how you look at it): a new cloak sound. (Queue angelic “Aaaah”)

However, I remain doubtful whether this pinnacle of sound design will be appreciated to its fullest by you players, and thus have come to the conclusion a poll is in order. But first!

Although everything is possible and every suggestion will be taken into thorough consideration, the sound should meet certain criteria in order to be useful and fulfil the cloak’s purpose: It mustn’t be loud and it mustn’t be too prominent, and it mustn’t sound like your mother when you give her pleasure. There are two obvious choices that meet these criteria: a very high frequency hum and a very low frequency hum. You can suggest other stuff as well, but in the end it’ll probably have to be some sort of hum.

View This Poll

If you’re one of those people who likes to spoil perfectly fine polls by voting for the “Other” option, please explain in a comment below. Remember this is a poll, not an election, so maybe I’ll just completely disregard the result. Just kidding, I’ll consider everything.

The first person to find them all gets a delicious cookie and a new car, a Cadillac. I fucking promise.

This is a small demonstration of the current new cloak in Remod; it’s more refractive but color-less. It’s a lot more visible in-game than on a screenshot due to the distortion moving around in-game.

I want to promote different play styles of which stealth is one. Stealth in Wars is mostly useless right now, so I’m giving it a bit of a boost in Remod, and I’m doing it with a proper cloak with a proper sound; most likely a very high frequency tone audible from about 15-20 meters away, that slowly creeps into your head instead of falling right on it. Your suit still won’t absorb much damage when cloaked so stealthy, infiltration gameplay remains a must.

The new cloak shader is included in the currently available release, but the cloak sound is yet to be made.

Nicer version of the picture for your desktop.

And yeah, that means 0.291 is now posted and available on the Downloads page. Changes include the removal of vehicle boost for land vehicles and pretty much nothing else; I know it’s silly, but it had to be uploaded for testing anyway.

Also, have a picture of the US suit helmet in speed mode (Note to those interested: we’ll probably get rid of the glowing red parts under the visor since they’re too narrow and we can’t get it glowing properly. It’ll probably become metal.):

This is the first version I’ve posted on the blog here, and it’s very unfinished, but I thought “Fuck it!”. Everyone’s invited to test it. In fact, we might be playtesting tonight around 19:30-20:00 CET.

I’m announcing Remod on MyCrysis later tonight.

More so, I’d love (and by that I mean I would really, genuinely like to) hear your views and thoughts on things, also if you think I don’t, because every opinion is of at least some value. I can’t figure it all out on myself anyway, sometimes i need help. Anything from a single word (I’m serious, if you want) to an entire essay about how bed sheets are related to game design: I’ll read and reply, with pictures most likely.

You willing enough to say “Fuck it!” to real life for a few minutes and delve into the ocean of writing about game design, head here, brave sirs.