Lucky_Strike

This isn’t so bad, better than Senior Member, more character to it somehow. I’m also thinking of other titles, not for yourself of course, just something with a bit of character, for some reason Village Idiot sprung to mind. Has fantastic connotations... Who runs this damn place anyway? We need to ask one of those in the know, Warts obviously doesn’t have a clue and we are completely feckless, how can we attract some attention to our plight?

And there was me thinking it was longevity on the forum, eighteen years and a senior for the last three or so, which was actually down to the flick of a switch! That’s the wife’s job, she definitely has all sorts of wonderful names for me.

Ah, I think the light patch is an effect of LOD and those mini ground tiles. If you used my ground textures then the colouring of the mini ground tiles is not too well coordinated with the grass tiles, or something like that, so you get these strange bright squares. I will try to figure this out when I’ve made all my new ground tiles, but I think it’s also dependent, to an extent, on one’s GPU. I’m pretty sure it’s been mentioned multiple times in other threads, not so sure if it’s ever been fully addressed. Also this explains the draw distance line that you had noticed previously. I did some checks after you mentioned this and was getting draw distances of about 350-400m This was consistent across all the resolution of my mod, and the same as when using default textures. The line is where the mini ground tiles kick in. With default textures it’s much less noticeable. The engine has some weird lighting/shading effects that can’t be resolved. The casting of shadows in the opposite direction to what they ought to be has been mentioned many times. It’s a limitation of the engine I can’t do anything about I’m afraid. It can be more or less noticeable depending on the time of day, intensity of light, colours etc. I personally have shadows and shaders always on as I prefer things like tanks to be anchored to the ground, but I think the shadows are automatically off if the light is diffuse, like when it’s raining, though don’t quote me on that. Sometimes things can look better without shadows or shaders, but then you get floaty tanks ... Basically it’s a weakness of the game engine that shadows are either on, harsh and unidirectional or off. In reality there are always shadows, even on sunless, heavily overcast days, they are just softer whilst contrast is much lower so they don’t appear as dark. This is what the game should emulate, but unfortunately it can’t. ReShade can be made to affect how dark the shadows appear, but this can come at a cost to other things like how black appears. There are some very clever light adaptive effects in ReShade which work to emulate how the human eye reacts to very bright/contrasty light situations, such as a very sunny day. These effects can lighten dark/shadow areas, such as under trees, when looking into them whilst at the same time burning out the bright surrounds/background. If the view is switched to the bright areas then shadows plunge into darkness whilst the bright areas become clear, no longer burnt out or over bright. This emulates the opening and closing of the iris to allow more or less light in. It does this in real-time with a subtle, programmable delay switching from one to the other. Quite amazing and very realistic. The ingame Movie Lighting mode will exaggerate a lot of the artefacts and odd shadows, and your GPU may also have some influence depending on settings. If you use ReShade it’s best to not run it with Movie Lighting as the two can clash and are effectively doing similar jobs. Having said that if you only have simple things running in ReShade like a colour LUT and letterboxing then there won’t be much of a problem. Movie Lighting and ReShade don’t mix whenever anything depth-related or focus/AAA related is applied in ReShade. I think this is because Movie Lighting in the game turns off the AAA effects and has some unknown effect of depth This goes to my points about contrast and colour making some of the odd in-game artefacts more noticeable. If you run my mod with just the normal game lighting then you’ll see that the colours are not so far from the original game colours. BF were quite careful when they made the original textures to give us fairly natural colours. We see them as quite bright and almost lurid, but actually nature is bright. The big difference is that when we look at nature most of what we see is reflected light one way or another, whilst looking at our screens is illuminated or projected light, we’re inclined to turn it down a bit. We generally only turn down nature in bright sunshine, or reflected bright light like from snow, when our eyes just can’t cope - sunglasses or a big hat brim.

Yeah, I’m gonna look at this, but it is a weakness of ReShade - it is prone to updates breaking the settings. It is possible to open the ini files in a text editor and read the settings from it manually, but it’s a bit of a faff. Watch this space ...

That makes the sulking a bit easier.

Never mind, we will just have to wait for one of the old codgers to grant us a status upgrade.

Or give you the excuse you’ve been looking for to buy that shiny new RTX 3080

+1 What Vacilllator said. I think we remain as seniors until we depart the mortal coil and then we get some other rank, or at least the choice. Oh well, gives us time to come up with something apt, not just MOD GOD!!!! Man I was looking forward to that.

No doubt it’s based on age. Am now feeling very inadequate and left out. Will have to post lots of pointless responses - yes, no, I agree, I beg to differ - just to get my count up to earn some God-like status. Hmph ...

Hah, I think the Forum Gods are most powerful, we will have to wait our turn. Either that or it’s like the US Supreme Court where one of the elders has to pop their cloggs before we can rise up, not that I’m wishing that on anyone of course It’s been so long since I looked at draw distances, I’ll have to take another look. Are your options maxed, I found that I could get all the textures whilst dialling it done a notch, that may help a bit. As for the pop-up plants - I thought that was normal, I’ve always been aware of that weirdness. So maybe that’s related to high res mods. I’ll have to experiment a little, see what effects what. I think you should be alright with 1060. I run it on an 2019 27” iMac, with some kind of Radeon, at some silly high resolution, not 4K but not far off, and that’s okay, just no decent mist effects. For my gaming I made a little PC with a 4.something GHz i3 and GTX 1660, which is no high-end GPU - it makes a better fist of the effects AND I can run ReShade, all at high res, though it does stutter with depth effects. Try the medium res, they are still pretty good, I use them a lot. Trees and Bocage especially seem to slow stuff down. Or it may be time to, huhum, borrow that RTX 2060.

Great, thanks for these Lethaface. It’s amazing to see the textures afresh, even though I’m so familiar with them. Hmm, it looks to me like the various shaders aren’t loading. I can see that you have the ini selected, but only three shaders look to be working. I doubt that the Mask will work too effectively as that tends to be very specific to screen res, aspect ratio etc. You also won’t notice too much of an effect with eye adaption. What version of ReShade is that? What I might need to do is update my ReShade and try to get a newer version of the ini for you. I can always revert back to my current version.

I’ll PM you with the links to my archived files, see if you get any joy with them. MEGA is what used to be some dodgy file sharing outfit that had to go legitimate AFAIK. When I get to my desktop I’ll send you that message.

Wow! Thanks for sharing those images umlaut Absolutely love all the added details in those scenarios, incredible stuff and excellent promo for the mod. Thanks!

Thanks Lethaface. Not sure if being signed-in to Dropbox helps, guess you may be able to make a direct transfer to your own Dropbox, I don’t know much about the inner workings of Dropbox. I thought it had suspended sharing the files, that’s their message said to me yesterday, maybe that was only temporary. Still, if they are working again that’s a plus. Enjoy!

@mjkerner Okay, I tried the Google Drive links which seem to be working, you can find them on this message: Otherwise one of the links on this message should work. They are links to folders that contain the three possible downloads: Do let me know if you're still getting problem downloads.

Thanks @mjkerner. Did this apply to all the links, not just the Dropbox ones. I will try them in a moment to see what I get. If you still can’t get anything let me know, I have another set on my paid-for cloud backup which should work, I can PM you those.

Thanks Vergeltungswaffe. This is why we do it ...

Sadly I don’t have a ‘Member Title’ field to edit, I’ll just have to stay a mere mortal for now. Probably have to earn it from number of posts or some such. Oh well, the praise and happy faces of all you guys will have to do

Thanks Erwin. I may have exaggerated a little, but it’s certainly well over a thousand hours. Every COVID cloud has a silver lining ... To clarify - you DON’T need Part 1 as well, Part 2 has everything in it BUT if you want a good basis/starting point then install a set from Part 1 and add in any options you like from Part 2. Part 1 is the easy route to bucolic countryside views, it gives you a full set of textures, but not every optional texture. So if you install Part 1 you will get, for example, large Oak trees, if you want different large trees, say Ash trees, then you need Part 2. If these things are not so important and you just want a nice, easy install with a good set of new textures then Part 1 will do the job. I got carried away when I was making stuff, every now and then I’d find a great new bit of reference and think ooh we’ve got to have Sycamore trees, or Sheep’s Fescue grass, or whatever, and then @Falaise would pop up and drop a bombshell into the conversation about how we can have loads of textures for Bocage, or @benpark would drop by with suggestions about thickets. It all goes into the melting pot and the thing gets bigger and bigger, so here we are. Thing is, I still have lots more fantastic references for other textures. I found a great source just as I was finishing some of the last trees and Bocage textures, they haven’t made the cut, yet, but one has to stop somewhere ... Enjoy!

Thanks Slippy. Appreciate your support. Sorry, forgive me asking - we’re you Born Slippy? - long in the tooth Underworld fan so can’t help myself

Great, you’re welcome!

Thanks Peter, much appreciated Mod God I like the sound of that - I want to have it under my name in the sidebar, how'd I do that, like your, err, Throbbing Member Honestly, it just makes me happy that you folks get to enjoy something you already love doing just even more so. I can get an early night now and have god-like dreams ...

Thanks that’s good to know. The secret is to stand a little way back, tilt down a bit and use the zoom. You can get in close and see the veins on the leaves. Another fun experience is to line yourself up at the exact end of a good straight line of tall bocage and then to slowly push forward through its whole length, you get to see all the varieties of leaf and branch up close and personal. This is how I spend my time ... battle, what battle? I was just making a landscape simulator.

I very nearly included some before and after images, none as delicious as yours ... And to think it’s all because of those brambles and nettles you made for us. Bon appétit mon ami!

Thanks JM. This time I’m happy to release this puppy onto the world - my birthday present to you all!