Thread: Crymod Monthly Update #1

Welcome to ?Crysis Monthly Update #1?, the first official status report from Crytek to the world-wide community since we turned the weekly issue into a monthly one. From now on every month you will receive an update from us in order to get you up-to-date on the progress of various Crysis related topics and also to tease you from time to time with an in-sight view on what is coming next.


Content: Crysis Monthly Update #1 ? May 2008

• Statement: Cevat Yerli?s Interview with PC Play
  
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• Statement: Crysis Multiplayer Disconnect Issues
  
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• Status Report: Crysis Linux Dedicated Server
  
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• Community: Upcoming Q&A ? Ask The Devs Now!
  
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• So, What About Patch 1.3?[/*:m:3c32uuuw]

Statement: Cevat Yerli?s Interview with PC Play
Last month Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli held an interview with the Hungarian magazine PC Play which was published on April 29th, 2008. In this interview Yerli stated that Crytek may not develop games exclusively for the PC anymore. In the interview, Cevat cited piracy of Crysis as one of the main reasons for Crytek?s current line of thinking.

Here is the excerpt for everyone who missed it or wants to re-read:
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Originally Posted by PC Play Interview with Cevat Yerli

* PC Play:
How do you estimate the current state of the PC gaming industry? Some say that it's only a matter of time when it's going to finally die-off, the others say that "the big one" is only getting its comeback pace. Considering Crysis is a PC-exclusive title, what do you think of its market reception and its future? Skeptics would say that it's pretty risky going PC-exclusive with such a high-profile title.

Cevat Yerli:
It is certainly. We are suffering currently from the huge piracy that is encompassing Crysis. We seem to lead the charts in piracy by a large margin, a chart leading that is not desirable. I believe that?s the core problem of PC Gaming, piracy. To the degree PC Gamers that pirate games inherently destroy the platform. Similar games on consoles sell factors of 4-5 more. It was a big lesson for us and I believe we won?t have PC exclusives as we did with Crysis in future. We are going to support PC, but not exclusive anymore.

After this report was filed online, we know there were parts of the Crysis community that were upset to hear we were currently thinking about staying away from developing PC exclusive games. We definitely take note of your concerns and we appreciate each and everyone of you that did purchase Crysis and continue to be an active part of the Crytek and Crysis community.

In terms of development for the consoles, this is certainly a logical step for us with the CryEngine 2 supporting multiplatforms. This is not a decision that was driven by the piracy issues on the PC platform, and this definitely does not mean we will lower the quality of our upcoming PC titles. We are known for our next-gen technology and rest assured that we will continue developing high quality games, and getting the most out of each platform.


Statement: Crysis Multiplayer Disconnect Issues
Since beginning of May the online multiplayer part of Crysis suffered from connection issues with the Gamespy master servers. There have been two stages related to this problem which we would like to address now:[list type=decimal][*]Gamespy Maintenance
Within the first days of the connection problems, the complete master server was turned off. This was done due to necessary maintenance at this point. Unfortunately due to a miscommunication, this message arrived to Community Management too late, so we could not warn the community. Nonetheless the maintenance was completed after a few days and the system should have worked properly from then on.

[*]Random Disconnects
Unfortunately, after the maintenance was accomplished, new issues appeared which prevented many people from playing online for some time. Random client disconnects from the game servers and even complete client disconnects from the CryNET system occurred more frequently.

With the technical support from Gamespy, our Multiplayer Dev Team has been focusing on resolving that issue as quickly as possible. After gaining more and more server and client log files from both the community and our QA departments we still were looking for the piece of code causing this issue. Yesterday an update has been applied to the master server which potentially fixes the random disconnects.[/list]We want to apologize for the circumstances and the problems you encountered while playing Crysis online. According to our statistics, we have recognized a huge drop of disconnects and the user count seems to be smooth. Still we will continue to monitor the situation and reviewing the results of the configuration changes to be confident that experience is consistent.

In the case you still encounter this kind of disconnects when playing on a server or if you still find the 'User left the game' messages in your server log files please contact Cry-Alex and let him know about the situation.


Status Report: Crysis Linux Dedicated Server
We are sorry to say that the current development progress is not satisfying enough, as we have a hard time getting the code to a state where it is stable and playable.

Thus we made the decision to put the development on hold for now. We are definitely not happy with the current quality and stability of the server and we are far away from having a stable version which could be sent out to the community for alpha/beta testing.

We hope that you understand the current situation and that you can make adjustments to your plans if you wanted to host a Linux server for Crysis.


Community: Upcoming Q&A ? Ask The Devs Now!
A long time has passed since our last community driven Question & Answer session. Now we want to kick off the whole new wave of upcoming community activities with a Q&A especially for you.

If you feel you have very important questions that definitely need to be answered by the development team you now have the chance to submit them. Whether it is related to this monthly update, to Crysis or to Crytek in general, the choice is totally up to you. To do so, simply visit your favorite fan site or one of the official web sites that are www.nanosuit.com or www.crymod.com and place your questions into the respective thread in the forums.

You have time to do your submission until the 16th of June, 2008. Afterwards our Community Team will collect all questions from the world-wide forums and pick quite a few of them which will get answered by Crytek.

Once this is done the Q&A will be published on all Crysis fan sites and also the official sites. We are looking forward to your questions!


So, What About Patch 1.3?
At this time, there almost certainly will not be a patch 1.3 delivered for Crysis. We are aware that this news will disappoint many of you, and we would like to apologize profusely. There is a good reason for this and we hope you understand when you hear more about the reasons why in the very, very near future. Please realize this was an extremely difficult decision, but please do know that we are listening to your comments and are making more consistent community support a high priority.

We are confident that the things we are working on will be appreciated by the community, and we hope for your continued support. If you have any questions or concerns please feel free to contact us.


So that?s it for the first Crysis Monthly Update from Crytek! Thanks for taking the time reading all this. Do not miss the next Crysis Monthly Update coming to you in June! [img alt=Smile]http://www.crymod.com/img_crysiscrystal/smilies/smile.gif[/img]


Related links:
- Crysis Monthly Update #1: Community Q&A - Place Your Questions Here!
- Original Source www.crymod.com

Hands up if your surprised that EA has ruined another studio? They're already working on their next game, rather than finishing this one. Nice one guys, nice one. Smells like battlefield to me.

Well we've yet to hear more details but we do have this about Warhead:

The Crytek CEO has stated that Crysis Warhead will be playable on 'high' settings with an average of 30-35 frames per second thanks to changes made with the game's engine:

"We want to take away the fear that a player can't play our game. Warhead is a game that everyone can play. Even with a PC that costs ?400 you should be able to play it with high settings."

He also says that the changes they have made to the CryEngine 2 game engine may also be applied to Crysis.

"That will take a long time, because the fixes are fairly profound.We are still in the process of the steps, but first we want to conclude Warhead."

Crytek is confident that the game's system requirements did not affect sales.

"Other's lower perceived hardware requirements did not actually translate to bigger overall sales numbers than Crysis. You only have to look at the comparative PC sales volumes of other prominent FPS games which shipped around the same time."

Oh, fantastic. Making sure that more people will be able to buy their game, rather than making sure the game's as good as it possibly could be... I'm not happy about this. Not that crytek were ever *that* well known for community support (anyone who played it will remember the nonsense about farcry patches post 1.2)... Makes me angry though - they promised better support this time round, so what they actually do is not deliver a promised patch and move onto their next game... I'm not sure whether to blame crytek or EA for this, but I'm not happy.

I'm blaming EA for this move to be honest. The fact they admit that if it wasn't for Warhead there would be another patch maps it worse. There is however already a community map autodownloader. So the mod scene is very much alive.