All is fine here

Hello, all is going well in my life, I have not been hospitalized or have died, as some comments have suggested. And yes, I have posted in Guru3D. I spend some hours finding good SLI config for Farcry 3, Assassin's Creed 3 and Hitman Absolution. Very good games.

I bought a new motherboard, cpu and memory. Now my computer is a 2700K, G1 Sniper 3 and 32 GB of RAM. I was testing the computer, doing oc (5 Ghz for 24/7) and testing some games that I have bought and had not had time before. I have also spent time with my family and I had to do some jobs at home that had left backward by using the free time with the mod (I will post pictures for the curious).

The thing about the mod is that Crysis 2 install, Editor and material in progress, is on a IDE hard drive (I took them out of the SSD after problems in the past), and the new motherboard only has SATA connectors. Ten days ago I ordered an adapter IDE-> SATA, but I have not received it yet.

If I have not written before is because in reality these delays are affecting me more than you.

All I can promise is that the mod will come before the end of the year, whatever the cost.

Computer problems again

This morning my computer has burst. Fortunately the SSD is perfectly and I was able to make a backup to another computer using a SATA to USB adapter. Sorry but surely it delays final version release a few days. Looking components on ebay. Sigh.

BETA to FINAL (Step 1)

Changes since BETA release. More screenshots tomorrow.


Config Tool

-Fixed an error produced if someone edited config file and enter incompatible values in UseConfigTool variable.

-Fixed an error where Penumbra Shadows only works if checked twice after a restart.



MOD

(*) symbol for fixes to problems existing in original game without mod.


-Tweaked a bit more values for power jump, sprint speed, energy consumption and energy regeneration.

-Fixed problem with r_DrawNearFov reseting to 55 after loading a checkpoint. (*)

-Fixed some decals with incorrect projection in Battery Park. (*)

-Fixed portal in the left after start Battery Park mission (looking through walls gap produces corrupted sea) (*)

-Fixed flying objects in Battery Park. (*)

-Fixed/new bump and displacement map for yellow bricks walls in BatteryPark.

-Added lights/ivys/shadows/decals/props in Battery Park (armor mode tuto zone).

-Added cars and new elements in Battery Park streets.

-New scaffolds texture. Beta version was from 3.0 and newer is better.

-(33%) New texture for maple tree. 4096x4096 resolution in normal mode and 2048x2048 for reduced mode. Screenshot below.

-More optimizations reducing bumps resolution in specific materials.

-Improved newspapers texture with more detail in one of them.

-New planters texture. Same resolution with better broken interior.

-Improved texture for air aconditioner big machines with rust detail in metal to match original texture.

-Added bump detail in some subway stairs.

-Fixed flicker light through elevator walls in Alien Vessel. (*)

-Fixed reported flickering in Downtown curbs. (*)

-Fixed incorrect position for next level trigger in Downtown.

-New grey bricks texture Downtown (initial zone).

-Fixed some graffitis.

-Fixed transparent subway tunnel in Road Rage. Engine has limitations with parallax in some elements, like transparent doors in version 3.0. In editor works well, but in some situations became transparent in pure game. Disabled Parallax in floor and ceiling.

-Fixed clippable walls in Road Rage.

-Fixed flying grass in Road Rage. (*)

-Edited Time of Day in some levels.

-Fixed parallax glitch in floor bricks in Dead Man Walking plaza. (*)

-Fixed terrain and wall flickering in Dead Man Walking.

-Fixed Madison Square Level that doesn't load in Beta.

-Fixed floating Keypad in Gould Apartment (and new keypad texture applied) (*)

-New "papers in the wall" texture in Gould apartment.

-New wood door texture in Gould apartment.

-New water material with distorsion in octopus tank in Gould apartment.

-Fixed color banding when using microscope in Gould apartment (added water effect too) (*)

-New camera position and exterior elements for telescope view in Goulds Apartment. (*)

-New black/white picture in Gould apartment.

-New 2Kx2K texture for books in the shelves in Gould apartment.

-Fixed main door flickering in Gould apartment. (*)

-New 2Kx2K stone wall texture (affects a few levels). New bump and displacement.

-New concrete bricks wall texture.

-New texture for servers cabinets and hooked laptops in warehouse level.

-New 2Kx2K brick wall texture for exterior walls in small_warehouse and warehouse buildings. Regular and dirt versions. New bump and displacemnt too.

-New mask texture for interior walls in small_warehouse and warehouse buildings.

-Fixed flicker in some decals in warehouse. (*)

-New barnacle (diffuse, bump, displacement and mask) and concrete textures for warehouse pillars. Added tesselation to pillars.

-Fixed Microwave material. The new material had absolute paths and game load original textures instead new ones.

-Applied alternative stone wall in Terminal interior.

-Applied 4.0 keypad texture in Flooded Streets keypad.

MaLDoHD 4.0 BETA

Here we go, BETA dudes!

Important things:

• IT IS A BETA.

• Before use this BETA, I recommend run Crysis 2, select standard Extreme graphics settings. Select DX9 or DX11 (I recommend DX11 for this mod, all changes have been made to shine in DX11). Select your resolution, you can use downsampling for better results. Disable HiRes Textures if you want save some memory or leave them turned on if you have a good amount of memory. Exit game.

• Download, unrar, and execute MaLDoHD_C2_Setup to run installer.

• Select your Crysis2 game root folder if installer can't find the path.

• When installer finish, run Config Tool (shortcut in your desktop).

• Please, I know you maybe have a super highend computer, but take a look to Recommended Settings in Config Tool. Mod has been tweaked for use those settings. You can add Reflections, Penumbra Shadows and those candy effects over Recommended Settings using checkboxes. I recommend you do NOT check Particles Shadows. If you miss some important graphic effect using this config, ask me using this blog before try standard Ultra preset. I want you can play this mod with higher framerate possible.

• Don't use ingame graphics options. Using could break mod configuration.

• Use DXOverrider or twice ALT+TAB to enable Triplebuffering. DX11 have Triplebuffering disabled by default. If you use multigpu you don't need it (remember to check Multigpu option in Config Tool in your case).

• When you play the mod for the first time, you must start a new campaign or restart a level. Savegames from original levels checkpoints DON'T WORK. It's because this mod uses updated versions of maps and savegames have map info inside that don't match with the updated versions. Using old checkpoints from original maps in updated maps produces invisible objects and broken gameplay, so you can't resume your old campaign checkpoint. Start new campaign to play whole game or use Mod campaign menu for map selection. If you want reset your nanopoints, create a new profile.

• Known issues: Maple tree leaves texture is not done. TOD changes are not finished (config tool option is disabled and some levels have edited TOD at this time), Reduced textures option is not finished (more reduced textures in final version) but you can use it, two marble textures in Terminal level are not finished. And some brick walls textures are finished but not applied.

• If you find bugs you can post here. Write a new comment like "BUG: bug description". White elements, flickering, etc.

• If someone reads a bug that he does not suffer, can add a reply in bug comment like "NOT IN MY SYSTEM: computer description."

• If you have an "easy to implement" idea (add ammo crate in a place, remove ammo crate, add weapon, add a barrier for cover somewhere, etc) you can write a comment such as "SUGGESTION: idea description". If this petition gets some +1 replies I can include it in the final version.

• I hope you enjoy this BETA.

• It's possible that I will be some days offline.

To simplify the graphics configuration of the mod, whoever can follow these simple steps.

**Please, if you have problems with links, write a comment and if possible, an alternative site to upload the mod.**

FINAL SIZE: 2.34 GB

RAR SIZE: 1.5 GB

Consider a donation if you like the mod

Torrent download:

(Old torrent deleted)

New Torrent

(Thank you michael fisher to upload)

Mediafire download:

Mediafire folder with files

Atomic Gamer download:

AtomicGamer

Some numbers

I wrote "In the regular monthly copy of June, I have 1075 textures and 1051 material definitions. Some of the textures are exact copy of crytek HD textures, others are Crytek HD textures with some modifications and a lot of them are new from scratch textures. All materials have modifications on some way."

In last night count: 1894 textures and 1297 materials. I want to release a beta this week so everybody that wants try it can share problems or bugs (I will finish 'maple tree leaves' texture after launching the beta).

I've tweaked a little more the recommended settings. I have very similar performance with SSAO than SSDO with only one 480GTX so recommended settings uses SSDO now. Particles are tweaked too, shadows (no more shadows cut) and a few more cvars. I hope you to try the recommended settings before your eyes will go to the "ultra" word.

In Antialias side, the final options are:

• No antialiasing

• No shaderAA ingame + Ultra SMAA filter

• Ultra FXAA ingame (too blurred but subpixel information) + SweetFX (Ultra SMAA + LumaSharpen). LumaSharpen fights FXAA blur. 

Screenshots with U2 preset using 1,5 downsampling


EDIT: Direct links for better quality



Screenshot 1

Screenshot 2

Screenshot 3

Screenshot 4

Beating aliasing.

Crysis 2 includes FXAA filter (an old version). In MaLDoHD 3.0 I included a FXAA tweak to improve  FXAA sharpness using "FXAA ultra" in the Config Tool. A few months ago, I talked with Jorge Jiménez (SMAA creator) to include the injector in version 4.0 of the mod. SMAA offers very good results. The best results of SMAA in Crysis 2 occur when the in-game FXAA is completely disabled. The problem is that the effect of rain in Crysis 2 is tied to r_postMSAA=1, which activates the FXAA. That is, if you disable FXAA in Crysis 2, the rain disappears. There are three levels (I remember now) where it's raining: Intro (when you leave the submarine), Times Square and City Hall. I don't want to lose rain effect, and I think is a bad idea to ask users to activate FXAA only in those levels through command console.

Last week I discovered the SweetFX injector. It uses Jorge Jimenez SMAA as the basis adding some new effects on top. Thinking about the filters again I took up an old battle, and I decided to spend this weekend to get rain effect while disabling FXAA. And I did it. So now MaLDoHD 4.0 has an amazing image quality using the SMAA injector, with internal FXAA completely disabled and visible rain. This week I will test SweetFX and perhaps replace the SMAA injector. I have to find a good setup because I don't need more sharpness and do not want to modify saturation values because are ​​already slightly modified in my TOD.

Do not worry, this is not the only mod thing I've done this weekend.

Walking the final stretch

As I said, I will put more info here for the final part of version 4 development. So you can know how many is each 0.1. I hope there are no complaints about putting too many info XD As you'll see I use to making it less boring opening several fronts and doing several simultaneous tests.

I have a near final version of the textures for the doors of the church. Lack decide whether I get the "mass timetable" into a separate decal to gain some definition in letters without taking up much more memory. As I can make a squared decal I can make it without alpha layer, which would be only 170 KB for a 512x512 resolution, which is far enough for crisp letters. Below you can see the texture of the big and small doors (version with "mass timetable" into the main diffuse). You can notice that the crytek original texture from a real picture preserves a person reflection in the glass. LOL.


For columns of Central Park I had previously done tests using decals. I had take that decision because the ornament is a piece of columns within a texture atlas. An atlas is a big texture that includes smaller textures inside. For example, a texture atlas for texturing a car would be a big picture with the door, front, lights, wheels and steering wheel all crowded together and then use each piece in the share. Using atlas reduce drawcalls. One atlas for diffuse and one for the bumpmapping that could be 10 different textures if you have them independently. You've surely heard of the Rage megatexture as a giant atlas where they put all the textures of the level.

When I want to improve the resolution of a texture that is a portion of an atlas, the first attempt to do using decals (if possible) to paste on the final object without changing the atlas (you can see a perfect example of this on the Warning sign in the Hargreves cryomachine in the last post). This not waste memory multiplying by four the whole atlas that I will not improve. So the first tests were with a decal ornament on the columns. I then added a bump detail layer using my stone bump texture. The problem with it is that it's necessary to paste as many decals as that item is displayed on the map and place them accurately on the surface (and here are 4 ornaments for each column, with dozens of columns). This also triggers the memory, since each decal has its alpha layer for transparency when decal is not a square.

In this case, as Central Park is not a level that has too much variety of textures, I have valued expand the 1024x1024 atlas to 2048x2048 and improve much of the column instead of just the center ornament. The original atlas includes a 1024x1024 alpha layer to use as specular texture. So the atlas has a size of 1.3 MB. If I keep specular texture in the alpha channel, my new 2Kx2K atlas will be 5.4 MB. The first thing then is to get the alpha channel as a separate texture, then I have a 2.7 MB diffuse plus a 680 KB specular. Then I walked around the map looking for lighting conditions, the location of the columns and the low values ​​of specular in the material they use, and concluded that using a 512x512 specular represents no loss in visual quality. So that in the end will be a diffuse atlas of 2.7 MB and a specular atlas of 170 KB.

To make the column first thing I did was look for real pictures of central park columns. Below you can see the two best real pictures I found in google images. From the first I could conclude that there aren't two equal columns in the park, so it was an impossible task to find the original image used for column crytek. So I decided to use the second photo removing the bird's nest, which seemed too quirky element to include it on all columns.

The following is the color change, increase symmetry, eliminate hard shadows, add three layers of dirt and start creating the height map that I will use to make bump map and displacement map (parallax effect). You can see below part of the unfinished process. It's the first test, no bump and no displacement yet.


I also searched photos of leaves to redo the texture of the bushes. In this case, the leaves of the bushes are also part of an atlas that includes textures for various types of vegetation. It is an even worse scenario than columns because these bushes are at all levels. If I decide to improve texture atlas using a new texture to represent only that part, I have to create a new material by changing the tiling values and later assign this material to all the bushes of all levels one by one. A really hard work. In this case, alpha layer can't be extracted, it's required to handle alpha transparency. The only way to reduce size would be using an alpha layer with a single bit of precision. This halves the size of the texture, but generates more obvious aliasing at the edges of the leaves. The final size of the texture can be something like this

Atlas 1024x1024 with full alpha    -> 1.3 MB
Atlas HD 2048x2048 with 1bit alpha  -> 2.6 MB
Atlas HD 2048x2048 with full alpha  -> 5.4 MB
Atlas HD 4096x4096 with 1 bit alpha -> 10.8 MB
Atlas HD 4096x4096 with full alpha  -> 21.7 MB


Currently there is no 4096x4096 textures in the whole mod. The only two candidates to use this resolution are the bushes and maple tree leaves. That's why I have left them for last, to test performance in both cases. Screenshots below of individual leaves and some tests using a 2048x2048 with 1 bit alpha (the "worse" option).