This is not good.

SO... for one reason or another, the Minecraft trial that came with my Humble Indie Bundle has not expired. And it probably won't ever expire, seeing as how I'm not letting it connect to the internet to patch itself. So now I have Minecraft.

Yeah. This is obviously not a good thing.

Should've done that earlier

So I finally did what I said that I would do a few posts ago. I tried to import the model into RCT3. Unfortunately, I ran into a snag. It looks like the RCT3 Importer doesn't like how detailed my model is. It doesn't give me any error messages, it just appears to begin loading the .modxml, deliberates for a good while, then hits me with a classic "ping!" with no accompanying message. I am guessing that it is just too big. So I'm thinking I'll just have to go with the base mesh that I modeled, instead of the subdivided one. Like I said, I think RCT3 would be able to handle the subdivided mesh, but I didn't think about the fact that it might not be able to get through the importer. That's OK, though, because I was starting to get a little overwhelmed with the weight painting of the hi-poly model. Hopefully I'll have an easier time with the lower poly version.

A Crysis Crisis

OK. I don't think that I'll be buying Crysis 2 if this is not fixed. I recently came across screenshots posted by a member of crymod. I'll get to that in a minute. First, take a look at these pictures of the CryENGINE 3 released by Crytek:

Wave propagation seems to be a pretty awesome feature, eh?

Like I indicated, I don't think that these screenshots look any better than Crysis 1, but I have to admit the screenshot below which - take careful note - is labeled as "Extreme spec," looks pretty darn good.

Now on to the deal breaker. The member of Crymod posted screenshots from the actual retail game of Crysis 2, at the "Extreme" preset (Which, by the way is all there is in Crysis 2. Only presets. No detailed graphics settings):

This screenshot looks NOTHING like the claimed "Extreme spec" that Crytek themselves released. Not only is the lighting less... well... good-looking, but the ripples don't have a fraction of the detail that the ones in the CryENGINE 3 screenshot.

The water ripple thing is (I think) a tessellation effect, which is a feature of DX11. Now, Crysis didn't ship with DX11. This would explain why the water looks so much worse in the actual game. Hhhmmm, why would Crysis 2 ship without DX11? Because the consoles don't have DX11; why bother to spend the effort to put something extra into a PC game that isn't on the consoles? The logical answer is: because it would be awesome. But Crytek apparently doesn't care.

Now, even if this is fixed in the future, serious damage has already been done, in my opinion. Crytek has gone and done exactly what they said they would not do! They said that the PC version came first, and that the console versions would not dumb-down the PC version. YET THIS CRUMMY SCREENSHOT EXISTS!!!!! Crytek clearly have their priorities straight. Just like every freaking other game developer out there, they put console development first. The version for the PC platform is an afterthought.

DX11 is now probably going to be included in Crysis 2 via a patch. Man. I. Freaking. Hate. This. Patch. SYSTEM!!!!! That's all there is these days!!! All of the PC releases nowadays are broken in some manner on launch day, and then we get patches that may or may not fix the problem afterwards.

Like I mentioned, I might still go for Crysis 2 if they update it with DX11. But even if they do, like I also mentioned, the damage has been done. I trust Crytek significantly less than before this debacle.

Man I love ranting.