Hacking a Better Crysis

Alright let's pop the hood on Crysis and tinker around a little bit to make this PC game even better (yes that's possible). I guess technically these are 'cheats' although we're not going to be enabling 'god mode' or anything like that. Just a couple or three tweaks for the sake of convenience.

We'll start with...

How to Toggle Crouch

Having to hold down the 'crouch' key can be a bit of a pain (especially while moving forward). You can hack the game's configuration files to 'toggle' crouch mode.

Here's how to do this:

1. Anytime in game (either playing or in menu), press the tilde key on your keyboard (~) to open the game command console.
2. Some console commands are locked. To unlock all commands, type in "con_restricted 0" (without quotes) and press Enter
3. Crouch toggle can then be enabled by typing "cl_crouchToggle 1" (without quotes) and then pressing Enter.
4. Close the command console by pressing the tilde key (~) again.

You will now no longer be required to hold down the crouch key to remain in the crouch position. One press of the crouch key will make you crouch. Another press of the crouch key will bring you out of crouch.

One undesirable (or desirable, depends on how you look at it) side effect is if you're in the prone position and you press the crouch key, you will go into crouch position. However, pressing the crouch key again will put you back in the prone position rather than standing up. This is a little counterintuitive and may lead to some confusion. To stand up, you have to press the 'stand up' key (whatever that is in your setup).

Enable Crouch Toggle Automatically When the Game Starts

1. Open Windows Notepad
2. Type in the following lines of code (make sure they're on separate lines):

   con_restricted=0
cl_crouchToggle=1

3. Save the file as "System.cfg" in your Crysis install folder.

   (This assumes that you don't already have a System.cfg file. If you do already have a System.cfg file then simply add the two lines in Step 2 to your current System.cfg file.)

Now whenever you play Crysis, crouch toggle will be enabled automatically, i.e., you won't have to go through the command console rigamarole everytime you play.

How to Hotkey Suit Modes

Various suit modes (Cloak, Speed, Strength, Armor) can be assigned to specific keys to allow single key press activation of suit modes (instead of multiple key presses using the 'Suit Shortcuts' option). This is accomplished by modifying the actionmaps.xml file located in your Crysis profile directory.

Here's how to do this:

1. Click on Start >> Run and type in (or copy-and-paste) the following (WITH the double quotes):

   "%USERPROFILE%\My Documents\My Games\Crysis\Profiles"

   ...and click on OK.

   OR use Windows Explorer to navigate to:

   C:\Documents and Settings\[USER_NAME]\My Documents\My Games\Crysis\Profiles

   ...where [USER_NAME] is your Windows logon username.

2. In the Crysis\Profiles folder, open the subfolder pertaining to the Crysis profile you wish to modify.
3. Right click on actionmaps.xml and click on Open With... >> Notepad (or 'Choose Program' and then select Notepad)
4. Press Ctrl + F on your keyboard and do a search for actionmap name="player". This will bring you to this line of code:

   <actionmap name="player" version="20">

5. Make a blank line directly under that and then insert the following code:

   <action name="suitcloak" onPress="1">
<key name="q"/>
</action>

   This will assign the 'q' key to Cloak mode ("Cloak engaged").

6. Save the actionmaps.xml file.

Now whenever you play Crysis, a single press of the 'q' key will put your character in Cloak mode.

Using the same method, you can assign all the suit modes to specific hotkeys.

All the suit mode special codes that can be used are:

This is obviously a much more desirable method of keying suit modes than enabling the Suit Shortcuts option which, in fact, has a design flaw. For example, with Suit Shortcuts enabled, double pressing the 'melee' button will enable Maximum Strength but will also trigger a melee attack which is kind of dumb. You want to be able to do either one or the other rather than both at the same time.

How to Quickly Delete Multiple Saved Games

As you play Crysis, you'll realize that all those checkpoint autosaves will create a bazillion saved games, most of which you won't give a rat's ass about. You can use the in-game load/save screen to laboriously delete those unwanted saved games one-by-one OR you can simply exit the game and go to your Crysis saved games folder.

To get to your Crysis saved games folder, click on Start » Run and then type in (or copy-and-paste) the following (with the double quotes):

"%USERPROFILE%\My Documents\My Games\Crysis\SaveGames"

Once in your saved games folder, you can mass-delete a whole bunch of saved games in one fell swoop.

How to Display In-Game Info (Including Framerate)

1. Anytime in game, press the tilde key on your keyboard (~) to open the game command console.
2. Type in "r_displayinfo 1" (without the quotes) and then press Enter on your keyboard.
3. Press tilde (~) to close the command console.

The current game info will now appear in the top right of the screen. To remove the game info display, repeat steps 1-3 above except this time in step 2, type in "r_displayinfo 0" (without the quotes).

The game info display includes a real time monitoring of the frames-per-second (FPS), a.k.a., framerate, that the game is currently running at which will give you an idea of how well your system is running Crysis. I usually average around 45 FPS (low activity) but sometimes it can go as high as 90-95 FPS (high activity). Only at one time did it go down near 20 FPS (beginning of the Awakening level during the eruption of the volcano).

And while we're on the subject of framerates, here's a few quick words about...

Performance

Since the question on the minds of so many gamers around the net these days is "Will my system run Crysis?", here's a quick rundown of my system and performance which you can use for comparison:

My rig:

—AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 5600+ (2.9 GHz)
—2 GB RAM 667 MHz
—Asus GeForce 9600 GT
—Windows XP SP3

I run Crysis on medium settings and it runs beautifully except for the occasional inexplicable crash-to-desktop (CTD) which I've read around the net is par for the course. I only had about half a dozen CTDs through the entire course of the game. One of them was related to loading a particular saved game right after starting Crysis. I worked around it by loading another saved game and then exiting that save (didn't exit Crysis altogether, just the saved game) and then loading the problem saved game. Then it seemed to work fine for some reason.

UPDATE:

I've since upgraded my video card to an Asus GeForce 9800 GT and installed 2 more GB of RAM (so now I'm up to 4 GB of RAM although Windows XP will only read 3). Crysis now runs on high settings with a framerate usually above 30 FPS. Haven't had any CTDs yet (although time will tell).