Interview: Crytek's Diemer, on "Warhead"

Dyre Straits · September 15th, 2008, 07:30 AM

An interesting Q&A session with Producer Bernd Diemer:

One of the questions....

"Q: The only thing that stopped me from playing the first Crysis was not being able to run it well. On my machine the demo ran...okay on medium settings. You guys have addressed that in Warhead. What exactly have you done?"

This particular paragraph is quite interesting.....

"'In our editor we have budgets, we have a red bar that blinks if you've exceeded, for example, your polygon budget--but nobody really cares [laughs]. So the way we dealt with this was, we put together a PC which back then cost about $700 and put it in the middle of the studio and said "Guys, this is where we're going to have all our milestone presentations, where we're going to show off the game to the Yerlis, to EA Partners, so on this machine it has to look really good, it has to play well, and it has to support this hardware generation." So we called it the Warhead PC, and the R&D guys had to put a lot of effort into reining in the design team, saying "No, wait, you have to do it that way." Then we had this sort of boundary you couldn't cross, because the PC was like the oracle. If somebody came up with something fancy and new, we'd say "Let's put it on the PC, see how it does." That helped us a lot in the development.'"

Read it all here: http://www.giantbomb.com/news/qa-cryteks-diemer-on-the-warhead-pc-piracy-and-cryengines-future/232/