Comments - Soroc

We have a team of thirty people working very hard to prove you wrong. Not everyone on the team is registered here.

Yes, we are currently using the pre-Alpha SDK for these screen captures. Bottom of each image says if it is a concept or an in-engine screen capture. As far as I know, these are the first in-engine shots seen publicly besides Crysis itself. Remember that these are just five of the eleven that we posted as part of our update on our site.

Perhaps one of the problems some mod teams have is that they have not identified their target audience (i.e., victims - :D ) before they create their mod. If there are not a bunch of folks out there looking for what you are creating, then there is a strong chance that most of the feedback on your mod will be confused and misguided. On the other hand, if you have a group targeted and you provide them with updates during the development process to keep their attention, you will get valuable feedback along the way and especially after any release.

@Joe - Have you considered providing the general process that you use to review a mod to the public so that they know what they are in for when they throw it out there? If not, then many will under-estimate the depth to which you will go in expolring the positives and negatives of their work. Just a thought.

I have been in professional software development for over 20 years, and in that arena, you get pretty used to having your work critiqued mercilessly. This is because you are trying to deliver a product as close to perfect as possible, and YOU NEED HELP TO GET THERE. Reviewers are a tool to find the shortcomings in the work you do. They help make it better. But you have to be mature enough to leave your ego at the door and consider the feedback, be it right or wrong. Conversely, it is critical that reviewers couch their reviews in a manner that helps the developers accept the comments as useful input.

You can choose to avoid early reviews, but eventually someone will review your work...your "customer"...the gaming community.

Look for a detailed update later this spring (?) on how well the tools and such are working for the Obsidian Edge 2 team. I'm thinking that choosing to use CryEngine2 might be a decision you end up being glad you made.

We did not change a single word of the answers (non-bold text) that we received from Crytek, to preserve the integrity of the answers. At least they were nice enough to give it to us in English instead of their native German!

Yes, go to our site and download the 1.2 patch for OE1, which is compatible with the FarCry 1.4 patch. FarCry is pretty much dead, so you won't find many players there.

We have taken great care to stay far away from the pretext, storyline, gametypes, and even the models used in Crysis. This is a total conversion mod, not using anything from the base game. We are projecting our own unique gametypes in the the CryEngine 2 environment. So Crysis definitely won't "have it all there", in terms of our content. Obsidian Edge 2 will be a completely separate game.

Oh Noooooo! You mis-spelled our mod in the trailer...lol

Opesidien Edge should be Obsidian Edge.

Arg! (But thanks for using it)

Updated the release date to reflect the delay of Crysis out to at least second quarter of 2007, as publicly announced by EA.

If you carefully read the first few paragraphs, you will see the following:

Obsidian Edge II is one of two chosen Crysis modifications which will work with a pre-SDK and receive support from Crytek during development. Crymod.com

No, there were limitations with the base engine code of CryEngine1 (FarCry) that gave the community fits trying to get coop to work. By the time some folks got part of it sorted, we had already started working on OE2 for CryEngine2 (Crysis). So look for it in OE2, as it is a primary feature we have slated, and since we are working closely with Crytek, we know we will be able to deliver it this time.

I updated the profile to make that more clear.

...and see if folks can follow along:

1. If it is OK for Rockstar and the publisher to put this hidden content on the disc without you, the consumer, knowing about it, then...

2. ...It follows that software publishers are not bound to fully disclose what is on the disc you are instlling from, so...

3. ...How long do you think it would be before someone tried to push the envelope further in regards to putting a few "extras" on a software disc (game or otherwise) that you bought and installed? Then the door is open for anything.

And I'm not talking about hidden porn scenes in the latest version of your word processing program. Companies won't find that profitable...but there are other things that they might find are very profitable to do...without you knowing.

But hey, if you're willing to let them do whatever they want to do without being accountable to anyone, more power to you. I mean, we all know that corporate America has done such a good job in the past of monitoring themselves to ensure they do the right thing, right?

You both missed my point. Typically when you run the installation program for an application, you are really trusting the company to not put anything on your machine that you didn't expect. It's all about full disclosure. To me that is the real issue.

Sure, a bunch of folks are bent out of shape on this specific content, but the real long term issue is whether publishers are going to have to be more careful about checking to see if the game developer has anything additional that needs to be disclosed to the user. When was the last time you installed a piece of software and double checked the purpose of every file that got installed? You can't. You have to *trust* them. And this incident brings that trust issue to the forefront in a way most folks had never thought about. Who knows what's really on that disc? That's what I was talking about.

I've worked in the software industry for 20 years, and you guys need to forget this specific complaint on smutty content and look at the loopholes that this issue is revealing.

@Cheezo: Who says the game designer didn't install a harvesting program to get a bit of additional information from your computer along with your online gaming data? Hmmm? That's the trust I'm talking about.

@Guest: How can you tell that the game developer and publisher are holding up their end of the trust issue...that they are not installing things you don't want installed? When's the last time you got a complete list of the programs that were going to be installed and what they do?

These are the points I am making.

...You go and buy a game. Later you find out that there was - spyware / tracking software / something else you don't want - also on the disk. The publisher says "Not our fault, we disabled it" after someone artistically enabled it (we call them folks hackers, but they think it's art too) and did bad things to your PC or network. Are you ****** off that the publisher left it on the disk and let you take it home? Do you wonder why it was left there in the first place?

You may want to reconsider your thoughts above...because if you think what Rockstar did was fine, then you think the same about my scenario and the door that it opens.

If you look at the bigger picture, it's all about *undeclared* content, not this specific content.