Far Cry Tweak Guide
[Page 11] Neat Stuff & Conclusion
We're almost at the finishing line, just a few more nifty tips and tricks to go, and we're done!
HDR Lighting in Far Cry
Far Cry was one of the first games to offer HDR Lighting for graphics cards which support Shader Model 3.0; namely GeForce 6600 or above, or ATI X1000 or above graphics cards. To enable HDR in Far Cry, you will need to use the r_HDRRendering command as covered on page 9 of this guide. An experimental 1.4 Patch for the game (See page 4 for details) also allows the use of HDR in combination with Antialiasing, something which is normally not possible in Far Cry, however this appears to only work on ATI X1000 cards and above. If you wish to enable HDR + AA on an ATI card, it is recommended that instead of installing the experimental 1.4 patch you use the 6.10 Catalysts or newer. In general though since Far Cry wasn't really designed for HDR lighting, you may see visual anomalies when HDR is enabled (with or without AA), and of course performance will be lower when HDR lighting is used. In any case at least the option is there for you to try.
Skip Introductory Movies
To skip the introductory movies (Ubisoft, Crytek, Sandbox logos) every time you load up Far Cry, just go to your \UBISOFT\Crytek\Far Cry\Languages\Movies\English\ directory, and create backups of (or rename) the files Crytek.bik, Sandbox.bik, and Ubi.bik. Now create three new (empty) text files and rename them to the above filenames and place them in the same directory. Far Cry will now skip playing these movies and load up much faster, and use less RAM to boot. Note this method should work with or without the use of a No-CD crack.
To save time you can download the replacement blank movie files I've prepared from here (Skipintro.zip, 1Kb).
Saving Games At Any Point
If you don’t like the way in which Far Cry automatically saves your progress through the single player campaign at certain save points, and want to save manually anywhere in the game, this tweak might be what you need. To save a game anywhere, open the console (press ~) and type "\save_game gamename" (without quotes) where the gamename can be any name or number you like. For example:
\Save_game Quicksave
Will save your current place in the game under the name "Quicksave". You can now reload this game position at any time by opening the console and typing "\load_game Quicksave" (without quotes). Note that the saved game file is saved under the name you gave it (i.e. Quicksave.sav) in your \UBISOFT\Crytek\Far Cry\Profiles\player\[Profilename]\savegames directory.
If you want to assign and use specific keys to make the saving/loading functions faster, you'll need to do so in Developer Mode. See the Advanced Tweaking section for more information on enabling Devmode and the Devmode.lua file.
Open up your Devmode.lua file and copy and paste the following lines into the end of that file:
Input:BindCommandToKey("#Game:Save('Quicksave')","f9",1);
Input:BindCommandToKey("#Game:Load('Quicksave')","f10",1);
Note that in the bindings above F9 is quicksave and F10 is quickload. You can edit the words "F9" and "F10" in the lines above to whichever keys you want to use for quicksaving and quickloading, just check to make sure they're not being used for another function in Devmode or this won't work. Also note that quicksaving and quickloading this way may lead to a few glitches or odd AI behaviour in the game every once in a while.
Far Cry Music
If you enjoy the music of Far Cry and want to extract it and listen to it separately, all the music is contained in the file Music.pak in the \UBISOFT\Crytek\Far Cry\FCData\ directory. To extract the contents of this file, simply copy the file to an empty folder somewhere else (don't mess with the original), and rename it to Music.zip. It can now be opened, and the contents extracted, with any archiving program like WinZip. The music is mostly in Vorbis .Ogg format, and can be played with a free music player like WinAmp.
If you extract the entire contents of the Music.zip file you'll notice a lot of folders and subfolders are created with slices of music for various levels and various moods. For complete tracks, such as the music playing in the background of the game's menu, go to the directories Menu and Titletrack. For example, the track playing during the menu is called MenuMusic_shortversion.ogg, and is one of my favorites from the game.
Far Cry Benchmark
At the moment there is no official Far Cry benchmark. You can record a demo on a particularly challenging stretch of the game and circulate that for others to try, as people have done so far, but a true objective official benchmark which makes all the settings equal on every system - and hence makes comparisons valid - is not yet available. Perhaps the CryTek team will release one as part of their next patch. Stay tuned to this guide for an update.
HardwareOC have released a Far Cry Benchmark of their own which you can try along with this Registration Utility. It weighs in at around 1.5MB and is free and easy to use. Install the benchmark, run it and select your language, resolution and level to bench, then let it run through the set benchmark.
Conclusion
That brings to a close a rather large tweak guide for what is currently my favorite game. Far Cry really is a step ahead of most other games (except perhaps in its plot), and for those who think that it's simply a “run and gun” game, I’d suggest that perhaps you need to play the game on a harder difficulty, take your time to explore, and employ a lot more stealth. Being stealthy also gives you the time to soak up the incredible atmosphere this game has, and appreciate the amount of detail that’s gone into Far Cry.
Anyway enough about my love affair with the game. I hope this guide has given you the knowledge to customize Far Cry to suit your preferences for performance and eye candy. In many ways the guide only scratches the surface, as there are many, many ways in which you can tweak and customize Far Cry. I leave additional experimentation to your curiosity.
Since the CryEngine game engine is new and relatively undocumented, I have attempted as much as possible in writing this guide to test every tweak and tip, and research all available information. Combined with my own knowledge of game engine functionality, this ensures a high degree of accuracy. However I would truly appreciate it if readers could Email Me and tell me if they’ve discovered any inaccuracies, or if they understand more clearly what particular functions do, or even if they've found some useful tweaks which I haven't mentioned in my guide. I can then feed this information back into the guide (after further testing) to ensure everyone has the most accurate information to work from when tweaking.
Of course if you just want to let me know what you think about this or any of my other guides, or about my site in general, I would love to hear from you too. Please remember that I can't provide any personal tech support or tweaking advice. Note that I have already had many requests for a "printable" version of my guides. For the moment, due to limited server bandwidth on my new site I can't provide downloadable versions of the guide, however if you send each page of the guide to your printer it will now print in a clean, full page format as detailed here.
Links and Credits
The guide is the result of a great deal of personal testing, but also a fair bit of searching for information and tips on various sites. I recommend that if you’re a fan of Far Cry like I am, that you visit the following sites:
Well, that’s all for now. I’ll be back with more updates to this guide, and indeed more guides very soon, so check back on TweakGuides.com regularly. Take care guys!
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