The complete source code of the first part of the Far Cry shooter series, released in 2004, has appeared on the Internet. Without an official statement, it remains doubtful that this was the intention of the author.
For fans of the shooter, however, this could have positive consequences, since the code opens up new possibilities for modders to expand the title at will and modernize its graphics, for example with ray tracing effects. The Twitter user, among others, pointed to the data leak VinciusMedeiro6 hin, who discovered the source code of Far Cry 1 in version 1.34 last Friday in the Internet Archive.
The title was therefore uploaded on June 24, 2023. It contains the Entry in the Internet Archive according to the code of the CryEngine developed by Crytek and used for the first time in Far Cry, which is also available in version 1.34. As from a review by the user MobCat to the source code, the archive contains “True, some exes, but no Xbox code and no game assets“, which usually includes the memory-hungry textures. This is also indicated by the small size of the uploaded ZIP file, which weighs in at just 73.6 megabytes.
The graphics were impressive back then
Far Cry originally came from the German game company Crytek, which was founded in Coburg in 1999 and relocated its headquarters to Frankfurt am Main around seven years later. However, the later sequels of the shooter series all came from the pen of Ubisoft – Crytek was no longer involved here.
When the first part of Far Cry first saw the light of day exclusively for the PC in March 2004, it shone with a graphic quality that was groundbreaking at the time. Together with DirectX 9.0c and the Shader Model 3.0, the CryEngine convinced with a previously unattainable long-distance view and an extremely realistic water display for the conditions at the time. It wasn’t until around ten years after the PC release that console players were also able to purchase the title for the PS3 and Xbox 360.
The minimum system requirements for the PC version included an AMD Athlon or Intel Pentium 3 with a clock frequency of 1 GHz as well as 256 MB of RAM, 4 GB of hard disk space and a DirectX 9.0c-compatible graphics card with 64 MB of graphics memory. However, a CPU of the type AMD Athlon XP 2400+ or Intel Pentium 4 with 2 GHz, 512 MB RAM and an Nvidia GeForce 4 or ATi Radeon 9500 with 128 MB graphics memory were recommended. Windows 98SE, 2000 and XP and later also Windows Vista were supported as operating systems.
Far Cry 1 sold a total of 2.6 million copies over the counter. ComputerBase also dedicated its own edition of C:\B_retro to the title about three years ago, in which the hardware requirements of the title were the main focus.