Crysis Remastered dropped yesterday, and as a mod developer for Crysis (going way back to 2011!) I had to take a peek at the internals- in fact, I was more interested in the internals than the remastered version of the game itself (which by the way, is a major disappointment as certain game mechanics are different or otherwise modified from the original).
How close is the code to the original?
As far as I can tell, the Lua side is identical to the original. That is, the scripted game behaviours are identical (and so are the bugs, but I haven’t tested for these), and the C++ side is different yet almost the same. What do I mean by that? Well, there’s clear hooks into the older version’s code that don’t exist in Crysis Remastered.
This means that any Lua-based mod for the original game should in theory also work for the remastered version. Speed/fly hacks via BasicActor.lua? Check. Custom game modes via a copy of SinglePlayer.lua? Check.
Hello again, GameSpy! Multiplayer is built in!
A sign of an incoming multiplayer mode? Unfortunately not, but there’s clear hooks in the CrysisRemastered executable for CryNetwork.dll, the multiplayer networking component of CryEngine. There’s also a whole load of references to GameSpy!
“GameSpy? Isn’t it dead?” I hear you say. Well, yes, it’s unclear why there are references to GameSpy in software released seven years after its untimely demise, but it does allow us to paint a picture of how the remaster was created.
My best guess is that Crytek manually upgraded the original version of the game to CryEngine 5 and then linked the upgraded version against the newer version of the engine. This would explain the references to the missing components that were part of the original version of the game.
I hear you, what if GameSpy isn’t quite dead and Crytek has some new fangled code to make use of it?
Ah:
So, it turns out that the CrysisRemastered executable file is a combination of most of the original game’s libraries, including CryNetwork.dll. This means that the multiplayer code is in there already, it should just take a small mod to enable it.
Multiplayer in Crysis Remastered? Yes please!
Want more evidence that this is possible? I used Wireshark to see if Crysis Remastered tries to connect to a server I put up via the ‘connect’ console command- lo and behold, it totally does!
I still need to work out if it’s possible to get the multiplayer maps from the old version to work in Remastered, but if they do, then we’re game!
What exactly is Crysis Remastered? Is it optimised?
Crysis Remastered appears to be a port of the game to the most recent version of Crytek’s flagship engine, CryEngine, and no it isn’t optimised at all.
What Crytek has effectively done is they’ve knocked down the walls of a house and rebuilt them, but keeping the floors intact and added a few more floors. It’s not optimised and appears to be a really lazy port and a cash grab from Crytek to cash in on the DLSS hype, nothing more.
While on the subject, I personally really don’t think it’s worth the £27.99 asking price. 90% of the game was already there, all Crytek needed to do is upgrade the engine and that’s it.
It looks like Crysis Remastered was done for as cheap as possible, the same UI system as the original is even still being used (ActionScript, anyone?)!
Are mods supported?
Apparently not, the -mod switch doesn’t work. Not that it stops you from modifying the game of course, but it certainly seems that (at least, for the time being), traditional modding methods are not supported.
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