Crysis Community Q&A-Jynx interview!

[sxdemon]

I must admit, most of the "mod" and editor alias sandbox stuff in the Q&A was my questions which was completly anwsered by great Crytek team, boycout DICE not EA!

Some of you may remember my post in the forums prior to the event asking for your questions… Well, I used these questions to interview members of the Crytek Dev team in attendance at the media event. General gaming questions were answered by Cevat Yerli, multiplayer questions were directed to Eric Lagel, Lead Mulitplayer Level Designer and modding questions were answered by Felix Leyendecker, an artist on the dev team who was demo-ing SandBox 2 Editor at the event. A special thanks to community members Maximum Hype, SX Demon, Jonas NZ1, and BringThaPain who submitted questions answered below.

General game Q&A with Cevat Yerli

Q: Seems from the various vids of Crysis that the game is taking a "realistic" approach to its design (ie. You see your arms propel you forward while swimming, you see your hands when you climb a ladder, and your arm reaches out when grabbing weapons.) Question is, will your hand also reach out when performing actions such as opening doors?

Answer from Cevat Yerli: It depends on what the actions are. In pick-ups, we want to emphasize the pick-up because it's a conscious decision and action. But when it comes to doors for example, it's more a matter of the flow of gameplay. There we decided it was more hindering. So in some places we do it as a choice and for function, but in areas where it's a flow-impeding process we don't do it. It's a conscious decision for us to emphasize an action but not impede the flow of gameplay.
Q: Along the same lines as the first question, it has been stated and shown that you can fire the weapons on a vehicle while also driving it. How is this mechanic explained or shown in light of enemy ai only firing said weapons when visably operating them? (Particularly, how do you keep realism with firing guns from the back of a truck when you are driving it from the front)
Answer from Cevat Yerli: The way we rationalize the firing turrets is that they are linked to your nanosuit so you can fire them via remote operation. That's a decision That's a decision where we decided more in favor of gameplay as opposed to being completely realistic. Similarly when an enemy is outlined in red after he hits you, this may not be a realistic, but we rationalize this by saying the nanosuit can, based on the impact and speed of the bullet can reverse calulate the originating point and then through image analysis outline the enemy in the flesh.
Q: And how are you restricting movement with the super-jump offered by the strength mode of the Nano- suit?
Answer from Cevat Yerli: The top height of the super-jump is about 3 and a half times the normal top height. We made it so that if you see the height of an obstacle which it seems like a normal human would not be able to jump up, then in the suit mode, you'll be able to jump up it. But if it seems like even a amplified soldier would not be able to reach this height, then you will not be able to reach this height either. What happens is during the gameplay, you'll actually learn the heights by jumping a certain height and seeing repeatedly that you can jump this height. This creates a mindmap effectively, and soon enough when you look at a rock formation you'll know if you can jump it or not. Ultimately strength mode becomes realistic in your mind because the fiction is explained. It's not a superhero jump. It's a realistically approachable jump if a suit could exist that would strengthen you.
Q: Crysis is shown as a large and interactive world. What type of boundaries are in place to ensure players don't "escape" the map? Specifically, do sharks eat you if you swim too far out? Are certain cliff sides indestructible?
Answer from Cevat Yerli: The boundaries are created through natural boundaries, and also through natural light or the last resort, enemy capture. If you happen to swim out too far, sharks may come. If you kill the sharks, the enemy may come. So we address this in the details, there are no strict borders.

Modding/SandBox 2 Q& A with Felix
Leyendecker

Q: Will Crytek provide good tools to create and code models for dx10 use? (component damage and destructible environment)
Answer from Felix Leyendecker : Yes we will. Actually DX10 does not have a have a specific feature set. The rendering pipeline is still programmable in the same way. The only difference is in DX10 there are a couple more features that would actually work in DX9, but the speed wouldn't be there, so it wouldn't make much sense to include there. Yeah, we'll definitely include our SDK in addition to the editor. Our SDK contains all the development tools we use in internal development. The basic pipeline is 3D Studio Max, Photoshop for textures, and the editor-- that's pretty much all we use. There are certain ways to create these destructible objects in 3D Studio Max.
Q: Will Crytek support modder by making tutorials (step by step) to use the sandbox, to use tools that Crytek may provide us and a lot of help for beginners to create models?
Answer from Felix Leyendecker: Yeah, most of the documentations are structured in a tutorial style.
Q: When doing total conversion mods, can you do away with the nanosuits completely?
Answer from Felix Leyendecker: In general the system is very open and you can do what you want.
Q- Is there a vehicle workshop in the new editor? (to iron out custom vehicles)
Answer from Felix Leyendecker: Yes, there is. You could say it was made with the community mind. It's a very open system. We have all kinds of vehicles in the game from small cars to tanks to helicopters.You can create any kind of vehicle. You don't have to limit yourself to modifying system vehicles, you can set up entirely new ones. There will be lots of examples to reference, so it should be quite easy to create fully functional vehicles of your own.
Q: Will we get some rigged models to use as guides, including human, vehicle, and first person view models?
Answer from Felix Leyendecker: There will be functionality in the editor that allows you to choose camera positoning. There will be lots of models available to use as examples as well.

Multiplayer Q&A with Eric Lagel

Q: Will Crysis support the option to host a multiplayer game?
Answer from Eric Lagel: Yes.
Q: Will Crytek pick-up custom made maps to add to the game?
Answer from Eric Lagel:
Q: How will the rank system work?
Answer from Eric Lagel: The ranking system is per session. So there is no persistence in the ranking system. Basically whenever you start a session, you start fresh. If you play well during a session, you can go from Corporal to Sargeant to General. Then the next time you start fresh again. We didn't want persistancy for many reasons. The main one is that most of teh time it is cheated. The other reason is I feel like it's better for competiton with everyone playing at one level to start from.
Q: Is 32 the ultimate cap for Multi-player mode, or can the cap be removed by admins, to allow more on fully dedicated servers? (I would like to test with more, and set my player max at what my personal server can handle.)
Answer from Eric Lagel: 32 is the maximum.