Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines (DX9)

[neat spindle]

The issue is that the runtime isn't even detecting the cars in the first place, so there's nothing to point at for replacement.

[stray whale]

My guess is that several models may have this problem so it might be good to ask the plus patch dev on this this problem

[left grove]

we'll have been the first to ever ask about it haha

[tame shard]

hey, is there a quick "beginner's setup" guide for the launch options, an rtx.conf, installations, etc existing for this yet? 🙂

I've followed the technical discussions but would like to take a look at it myself too

[left grove]

don't think so, I'd be keen to help with that

[somber sundial]

It's a bit too early on still, people are still cracking the case on this one!

[tame shard]

but the runtime hooks in, right?

[left grove]

I am mostly trying to learn the tools for now

yes!

[somber sundial]

If you force -dx70 mode in source it hooks yeah

[tame shard]

that's all I need to take a look then 🙂 I'm assuming installation of the runtime is the same as with other Source Engine games?

[somber sundial]

Some issues with the skybox rendering but for the most part seems pretty solid

[left grove]

-game Unofficial_Patch -dxlevel 70 +mat_dxlevel 70 -window

[tame shard]

CSS had a launch property list some dozen commands long, is the only one being used here -dxlevel stuff?

-dxlevel 80 +mat_dxlevel 80 +r_worldlights 16 +r_novis 1 +r_frustumcullworld 0 +c_frustumcull 0 +r_occlusion 0 +r_shadows 0 +mat_queue_mode 0 +r_unloadlightmaps 1 +mat_drawwater 0 -novid is what CSS uses

[left grove]

This one is a more up to date one, with some textures already setup. For this one all you have to do is enable volumetric lighting and it should look relatively good.
Still needs a lot of work tho

[tame shard]

wonder if it may be worth trying tacking some of these onto the VTMB launch options and seeing if it improves anything?

[tame shard]

gotcha, thanks 🙂 I'll try getting everything up and running, cheers!

[left grove]

possibly, i'd be down to try some after work

I might throw something on github, it'd be nice to have a rtx.conf under source control. Even if all we care about are the tagged textures

As irises need to be tagged as decals or else characters

[tame shard]

ModDB now has functions to support stuff like rtx.conf file uploads

probably worth compiling the relevant info together then amending the ModDB info to be up to date

[left grove]

yeah might be wise to upload that one there, but it's not my config file, all credit goes to @neat spindle

I'd be down for that, yesterday I dug up how to teleport to each and every map instance using the console commands

[modern bloom]

Believe the highest we could get so far is dxlevel80 but one needs to disable specular

#1095817237631348736 message

[somber sundial]

Using higher shading levels doesn't benefit remix in any way though, so may as well just keep it low

If the assets are going to be replaced anyway then you're not losing anything by doing it

[modern bloom]

I've not tried that myself yet.
Booted in with dx70 and briefly tried figuring out the remix toolset but was overwhelmed.

Figured I'd wait a moment and when I have enough time I'll watch all those recently released guides on the YouTube channel

[modern bloom]

Sure maybe not for remix. But since people have reported cars going invisible with dx70 maybe 80 won't have that issue?

[somber sundial]

Shrug Maybe! Typically increasing the shader levels will make more things dissapear and stop working though

[modern bloom]

Yea i have no clue.

I've been putting off learning this stuff until I have like a weekend to just dedicate to it entirely.

[somber sundial]

More shaders = Less stuff working

Das the remix way, woo

[modern bloom]

But If we are trying to get a group project going for remixing this game I'm down to join for it once I know how to work around remix

[somber sundial]

If I wasn't so focused on silent hill 2 I'd love to do something with VMT too

This game slaps

[modern bloom]

True!

But yea maybe remix picks up the cars though even if they are invisible.

Might just be the material and models normals flipping or something

Yea it would be my first true playthrough of it.

I was getting keen on it and saw that remix could work well with it and was like "you know what. I could wait a bit longer" haha

[neat spindle]

Some other issues I've noticed while messing around is that looking at certain objects will cause the viewport to fall back to rasterization, with some strange artifacting.

Places that I've noticed I can consistently replicate it are looking at the stoplights outside Asylum and the dart board in Kilpatrick's Bail Bonds.

[neat spindle]

Unlike other Source games you install the runtime in the main folder with the exe, not in Bin.

[left grove]

@neat spindle is it cool if I upload that rtx.conf you sent to moddb or you'd like to do it yourself? I think we should get everyone on the same page in terms of how to run it

I'll work on a tutorial for moddb too so more people can start working on this if they want to

[neat spindle]

I have some updated settings, I disabled fog rather than enabling Volumetric Lighting and a few other things.

Should save on performance a bit.

[left grove]

that's cool, the more of these findings we can document the better I'd say

[stray whale]

vtmb runs on a 2003 version of source so it lacks most of the hl2 console commands

its in a sense the earliest source game since it runs on the oldest version of source

[left grove]

As far as I can tell even loading a captured scene through RTX Remix invisible cars don't seem useable (mouse over won't do much). They aren't getting captured at all 😔 Unnoficial patch 11.5 + -dxlevel 70 +mat_dxlevel 70 -window

[somber sundial]

TO BE FAIR

That isn't an issue if you're going to replace the cars anyway

The only car I can think of being an issue that one car where you have to open the trunk

[left grove]

true I suppose

[somber sundial]

But that trunk seems to be there in the previous screenshots

[left grove]

I need to see the taxi driver scene

Hey could be worse

[left grove]

for that one the trunk is magically floating

[neat spindle]

But if Remix isn't even detecting the cars then there's nothing to point replacement assets at.

[left grove]

doesn't RTX Remix mods allow you to put things anywhere?

[somber sundial]

Other things in the same environment that ARE stable will work fine

[somber sundial]

No they need to have sources

But that can be other things

As long as the culling plays nice

And said source probably shouldn't have isntances

Or the new added cars will appear elsewhere too 😛

[left grove]

ah I see

my only concern is if the cars are invisible I wonder what else is invisible too

[stray whale]

The fact that cars don't work should indicate there are other smaller models that have that same problem

[somber sundial]

That is very likely yes

[neat spindle]

I've noticed there's a bunch of level geometry in the clinic that isn't rendering properly either

[somber sundial]

BSP can behave a little messy with remix

Happens in other source games too

[neat spindle]

It seems to mostly be on door frames, so I don't know if that's geometry that's borked or some doorframe asset that isn't rendering.

[somber sundial]

Some doorframes in the game uses cubemaps to be shiny

Probably same shader as the cars

[neat spindle]

Ah, yeah, then that's probably it. I'll admit I'm not the most familiar with Source modding, is there a way to intercept the cubemap stuff as a whole before it goes to shader?

[somber sundial]

Not through remix, you'd have to mod the base game

Is there a version of hammer that works with VTM?

[neat spindle]

There's a community-made SDK, yeah. That's what I was thinking about using to fix these kinds of issues.

[stray whale]

normal vtm handles these fine at dx70 by the way

[somber sundial]

Yeah that'll probably have to be what is done unless you can figure out how to nuke those shaders completely

[somber sundial]

INTERESTING

Probably want to figure out what the patch changes to them

ANd then revert that

[stray whale]

of course ideally we want a higher dx version than 70 because base dx 70 has other problems that probably can't be fixed

but that's a difficult ideal

[somber sundial]

No

Doesn't matter if you get replacements working

Although skeletal meshes are...

Dificult, to replace to say the least

[stray whale]

What I'm saying is dx90 has a lot of nice effects and it would be nice to figure something out

[somber sundial]

Right and all of those effects would get overriden by remix and replacement assets anyway

So in the end it doesn't matter

For both Need for speed underground 2 and Silent Hill 2 we have nuked all the graphics settings possible in the game to the lowest they can go

Because in the end, the original games rendering doesn't matter, since you're replacing it anyway

[somber sundial]

This screenshot for example, this is taken from the base game right?

This isn't running through remix?

Because that looks goraud shaded

[stray whale]

yeah

[somber sundial]

Right, yeah remix won't read the normals or the shading in the same way at all

[left grove]

with Remix, this is a fun one, the waves are a whole texture

[somber sundial]

So you probably won't see this issue at all under remix's renderer

[left grove]

that moves around

[somber sundial]

This is typically how effects like those were done during that time! Very fun to break things down like this and see it ^^

[left grove]

Remix does fix that in dx 70

[somber sundial]

Yup exactly what I suspected

[left grove]

yeah pretty cool tbh

[neat spindle]

I started looking at the capture and processing tools last night. When I did a capture all the materials were in USD format, is that normal?

[somber sundial]

Yup, art asssets in remix uses USD

[left grove]

everywhere seems to call it USD capture

[somber sundial]

Textures will get dumped as DDS

[neat spindle]

I thought the materials folder was where textures were stored? They weren't in DDS

[tame shard]

what's the UP patch config being used here? default, plus, or extras for the whole lot?

[somber sundial]

Materials are not textures, they're kind of "Containers" if you will, they tell which textures belong to one another and what settings they should use to form the final visual result

[somber sundial]

Plus

[tame shard]

gotcha

[somber sundial]

The extras patch adds fan made and cut content back

Plus is just the base game but with fixes to the gamebreaking bugs

[tame shard]

yeah, I've played VTMB more times than I can count with every combination of the UP, but just wasn't sure what we were using here 🙂

[somber sundial]

Aaah roger that ^^

[tame shard]

what does GOG come with by default? that might be the best baseline for an "official" supported installation

[somber sundial]

Plus

[tame shard]

then plus sounds like a good bet

[somber sundial]

Agreed!

[neat spindle]

We were planning on using default UP, but for some reason it's making things invisible that Plus doesn't

[somber sundial]

The fanmade and cut content stuff can always be added as a separate mod layer later on if there is demand

[somber sundial]

Well you're in luck, David here is a bit of a source engine wizard

Black magick and all that

A Tremere if you will

[tame shard]

tremere was my first playthrough 😉

[somber sundial]

I actually only played the game for the first time last year

Had a blast

[neat spindle]

Thought GoG was just basic?

[tame shard]

I caught a vid from someone reviewing it back in 2016 and played it first then

[somber sundial]

I played the GoG version back in december and it definitely had the fixed versino

[tame shard]

anyhow - can't guarantee solving stuff today (or at all) but I'm at least interested in seeing how smooth setup is and seeing if we can write it down as a rubric to increase accessibility

if more people can get it running, more eyes will care about sorting out issues or getting involved 🙂

[somber sundial]

Aye! Sounds like the right approach!

[left grove]

we are using Unofficial patch 11.5 (Plus shouldn't be mandatory but it does fix a lot of stuff)

[neat spindle]

Yeah, it's UP, but it isn't Plus Patch IIRC

[somber sundial]

I might be getting the versions confused here

It's the version that doesn't have the fanmade stuff

But also that one that isn't a horrible broken mess XD

[left grove]

non Plus Patch then

[somber sundial]

RIght!

@tame shardI lied to your face

[left grove]

huh just unofficial 11.1 - 11.5 has invisible cars, without Plus Patch

[tame shard]

all good

[stray whale]

Even though plus patch fixes the car problem it adds the problem of plus patch having a bunch of unwanted changes and stuff

[left grove]

I am keen on documenting stuff

the more people we can get on this the better

[stray whale]

I'd recomend finding an older version of the patch in the meantime that doesn't have the car problem

anything higher than 10 has it

[left grove]

I honestly been going for any with the plus patch for now

[somber sundial]

I mean you can always just edit the valve material files of the game

And force the cars to not use whatever cubemap stuff is breaking them

[tame shard]

so that presents an interesting conundrum really - plus is more compatible but has stuff that takes it away from being vanilla, which should (imo, anyway) be the baseline

if the rtx.conf you guys have been using was based on Portals as it is for a lot of games, it comes with the "missing texture" from Source pre-ignored

which can make stuff seem "invisible" when it's not, it's just ignored and actually a missing texture

[left grove]

unfortunately plus patch does add custom content and levels with the lastest 2 or so

[tame shard]

in which case file side edits will need modification to make sure it's not missing

[left grove]

there's stuff in there that wasn't even cut from main game

[somber sundial]

Aaaah, interesting

[tame shard]

I'll install the basic patch, runtime, and conf you've provided and go confirm if the missing texture thing is indeed the case

[left grove]

I can quickly test this out with a fresh rtx.conf

[tame shard]

if not then we have a different problem

[neat spindle]

Speaking of, what exactly does the process of dropping Portal RTX over the latest distro do exactly? I know there are Source-specific tweaks but I haven't seen what they are explained.

[somber sundial]

Bloodlines is probably going to have a lot of unique and wonky source issues given what an ancient version it is haha

[left grove]

anyway, we need some form of place to have all docs about this

otherwise will be hell to organise ourselves here

[somber sundial]

Very true

[tame shard]

as Traggey has just said I really have no idea what's going to happen if you put the Portal version of Source over VTMB's, but Portal RTX had actual engine tweaks by NVIDIA engineers to make a few things more compatible (and Prelude RTX had even more)

[left grove]

How about the invisible floors/walls from certain angles only

[tame shard]

culling or a texture tagging issue, perhaps. some of the launch commands I used for CSS and DOD:S are designed to fix the problem of culling, but not sure if they'll work in VTMB's version of Source

[left grove]

I see, understandable, guessing a lot of playing around until we can sort most culling issues

[somber sundial]

Seeing as it only affects the BSP this makes me spooked that the BSP might be even more troublesome than other source games

Marking their textures with anti culling might help

[neat spindle]

Right, I knew that much, but having an idea of what those engine changes are might give us some insight into making VTMB's older version work.

[left grove]

I been diffing my rtx.conf every so often and I think it's quite legible, except maybe for the hashes for all the textures for each category

[neat spindle]

Alright, so if v10 doesn't have invisible cars we should check the patch notes for the earliest v11 to see if it mentions shaders/cubemaps/anything to do with the cars

[somber sundial]

Yup! That sounds like a good approach1

[left grove]

yeah I'd be happy to help with that

I'd just like us to get something to make a knowledge base on, so that we can record our findings in a easily accessible to everyone place

even if just github or notion. Anything would be better than nothing

[balmy stump]

Hey honey! ❤️
Hookers just got sexier 😚 , it's incredible how the original assets look in RTX Remix even without PBR materials 😮

[left grove]

just wait until we touch up those textures

[somber sundial]

https://tenor.com/view/bonk-gif-26414884

[neat spindle]

The instructions right now are pretty simple:

1. Install Unofficial Patch (not Plus Patch)

2. Install Remix Runtime in main folder with exe ( not Bin! )

3. Set launch args to -game Unofficial_Patch +mat_dxlevel 70

4. Drop community rtx.conf in main directory to import settings

[left grove]

yeah so far so good, but we'll start having things pile up

[balmy stump]

What I really admired at the time was the attention they dedicated to eyes reflection, it gave life to the characters, curious to see what can be done with RTX Remix renderer

[left grove]

https://github.com/adamplayer/PathologicClassicRTX?tab=readme-ov-file
This one is a good example

it'll start simple, and it can evolve over time

[neat spindle]

It shouldn't really change, we don't need a DXVK wrapper because it hooks natively

[left grove]

yes, that is true, my main concerns are the quirks and knowledge we gather. Like figuring out which version doesn't have the invisible cars, links to useful things. Issues we are working through

stuff like that

[somber sundial]

A wiki would be good

[neat spindle]

The only thing I could see adding at this point is if we make a custom patch that drops on top of Unofficial Patch to improve Remix compatibility.

[left grove]

I do feel like a wiki would be good, I don't mind looking after it, if anyone wants to contribute I'll let anyone here contribute

[neat spindle]

Setting up a GitHub would be a good idea just to keep track of issues

[left grove]

I'll get it started

[left grove]

https://github.com/CattoSalad/VTMB-RTX-Remix

[left grove]

Having volumetric light with transmittance measurement set quite high seems to make some things better

[bleak barn]

Me too, although I am mostly working with meshes and textures 😅

[left grove]

I am currently playing around with the lighting in the asylum to try and understand how this works

on RTX Remix

I have a lot more stuff to add to the wiki above, but for now it's kind of bare bones

I just realised mirrors will behave like mirrors with RTX Remix

[wet atlas]

Damn

[amber atlas]

Having some fun messing around with it. Is there like... a master toggle key? I was poking around and didn't see anything like that. Guessing no?

[left grove]

haven't found one myself yet either

[amber atlas]

looking forward to messing with the materials, maybe generate some roughness/normals and some POM maps 😄

[left grove]

yeah that'd be cool

I have some asylum captures if anyone wants to mess around

[amber atlas]

oooh, do we have a place we are dropping captures? like in the github?

also: not sure if anyone else posted this:

https://boundingboxsoftware.com/materialize/

[left grove]

I could that to be fair

I'll create a captures folder

[amber atlas]

if you don't have access to substance designer/painter, this is a good free alternative

[left grove]

and expand the wiki

[amber atlas]

You're kind of a badass you know that?

[left grove]

thanks, I mean no one else here was taking any initiative, I think it's very beneficial

[amber atlas]

Every time I setup a github I do something wrong D: (artist first) haha

if your github is public we could join it and also drop captures in there too right, i think?

[left grove]

haha, I am a mere software developer bit out of my depth here, but it's so cool I want to work on it

[left grove]

yeah, I can add people as editors, and I'd be happy if people wanted to just do PRs

[amber atlas]

i'd be down to try and scrub for captures etc

once i figure out the workflow 😄

special tutorial level capture

[left grove]

sounds good, I tried my captures but my camera is always 90 wrong, I think my captures are all sideways? bit strange

oh interesting

[amber atlas]

i think theres a world axis correction option in there

i might try setting that up and capturing again

definietly a few kinks to work out...

[left grove]

https://github.com/CattoSalad/VTMB-RTX-Remix/tree/main/rtx-remix/captures/asylum

added them here, I have a few angles just in case

do you want to try and upload your capture for the tutorial?

[amber atlas]

i do.. but i'm still not sure if the state it's in is... good?

also im not sure yet what captures actually... capture?

it looks like its whatever it can grab, not just what's in the frustum

[left grove]

yeah my assumption was only what's rendered, it seems to be the case usually with my ones

I hope it doesn't contain any personal info but oh well

[amber atlas]

haha yeah...

i have to head out, but i'll try doing some more capturing + reading up on capturing later this weekend and add some, i belive i need to fork whenever i suggest changes, then probably make a pull request or something

[left grove]

sounds good

anyone that wants collaborator access to the repo let me know

[stray whale]

https://steamcommunity.com/app/2600/discussions/0/4137187221843474738/

[left grove]

I'll help

Crazy, never thought I'd talk to Wesp5

[neat spindle]

Wesp put me in touch with another modder who gave some advice:

If you rename the vehicles folder in the  UP materials folder you can see the pink check stuff going on with his models windows that kind of backs up my thoughts on this.

Option one is rename both vehicles folders in the UP folder.  one  resides in models/scenery/ and the other in  materials/models/scenery/ to vehicles.renamed. This will resort cars to vanilla.

The other option is go through each vehicles glass.vmt and set "$Translucent"    "1" to "$Translucent"    "0" so that the windows become solid again.

I don't have RTX so that all I got I'm afraid. I might be able to look via hex editor on .mdl /  or .x to see if anything obvious pops out. But to be fair it really is down to the creator to share information on his mod but I'm guessing they're AWOL.```

[left grove]

that's nice of him

I can test that

[neat spindle]

Alright, renaming the vehicles folder restored the cars to default and they are visible again (presumably they'll be replaced down the line with a better asset anyway, so this is fine). The vmt changes did nothing. The specific file that seems to be the culprit is (vehicle).dx7_2bone.vtx, but these aren't written in plaintext so I'll need to find a program to edit them.

Oh wow, it's so outdated that this particular variant of the .vtx doesn't even show up in Valve's documentation, lol

[left grove]

Good find

Wesp said we can continue the discussion on planet vampire

[stray whale]

Alright Well Reminder that this is probably not the only model with this problem and the plus patch with the extra content fixes this as well

[unborn tusk]

you guys need anything pinned?

[left grove]

https://github.com/CattoSalad/VTMB-RTX-Remix

this would be nice @unborn tusk , thanks

@neat spindle added you as collaborator btw

[unborn tusk]

added me?

[left grove]

oh I added Freedom's Flame, but you can get added as a contributer too if you'd like

[unborn tusk]

no thank you, i was just confused since it followed the other message 😛

[left grove]

ah no worries

Nice

[neat spindle]

Some raytraced visible cars for y'all now. Should I drop a patch file here for y'all?

[left grove]

yeah that'd be great

I can update the repo with it and instructions on how to add them

[neat spindle]

Extract to Vampire The Masquerade - Bloodlines\Unofficial_Patch\models\scenery

[left grove]

Added to the github, I am joining the planet vampire discord to try and join forces with them

[neat spindle]

Yeah, that's where I was talking to wesp

[stray whale]

||https://discord.com/invite/suwZsnAPCW||

here's the link

[white brook]

i think there was a way to get rid of the dev texts

[left grove]

it's all good now, we can use the latest version of Unofficial Patch. Thanks

[neon portal]

I have successfully swapped the nasty floor to another nasty floor

[neon portal]

Gigantic achievement for humanity, I know

[neon portal]

is there any way to disable this heckin fog?

[wet atlas]

try disabling volumetric lighting

or putting the value at zero

[neat spindle]

Check the pins, we have a basic config file set up, as well as instructions on how to fix the invisible cars.

[neon portal]

enabling volumetric lighting helped 🙂 Thanks a lot

[left grove]

more success than I had with the lights so far! Looking good

I was playing around with the lights for the asylum, and creating new ones and even if I duplicated the properties I couldn't get them to behave like the other lights that were already there. Even when I removed the light rays texture that was on there

[neon portal]

before and after. Some things have just been quickly upscaled, some have been completely replaced. Looks alright, except for that one pesky disappearing cabinets texture that shows on Omniverse remix with no issues but it's gone from the game

[left grove]

damn that's nice!

[left grove]

I think we still have some culling issues as well as invisible textures are still a bit funky

not sure if we need to try engine optimizations with extra start up params or if we have to change our config to make it better. As well as categorize the textures to show up with transparency

[neon portal]

I may have just messed something up because this is my very first attempt at anything texture related

[tame shard]

I found in HL2 that some invisible texture stuff was due to detail textures

Source used these as a way to add noise and detail to textures at a different scale than actually baking them into the albedo

Remix really doesn't like these detail textures, at all, so in Source games that use it you need to go through and categorise all of them as "ignore texture"

can't guarantee this is what your problem is but it may be the case in some places

[left grove]

worth a shot, I might explore those known start up parameters later, but I am not even sure what I am looking for in all honesty

[left grove]

honestly think you did really well 👍

even the lighting was that perfect gloomy

[neon portal]

I'm still messing with it 🙂 How can I share my modifications?

[left grove]

I am not even sure how we'd source control this, maybe someone else can shed some light on that. We do have a repo for the more common knowledge, I do wonder if you want to add it on there for now as an example

[grave flower]

in garrys mod, you can never ignore them completely, they seem to be different for every map (?)

[tame shard]

in HL2 we found you can ignore one and it'll work game-wide, but keep in mind map creators in Gmod will be using many more materials than are just in Gmod or even HL2 and might have many more detail textures

[grave flower]

its really really annoying, isnt there a way to completely disable it?

[tame shard]

not that I know of, it doesn't mean there isn't but we've been manually tagging-and-bagging

[grave flower]

also a quick question, have you done any changes to the SDK for portal prelude RTX to make it work better with remix?

(its using the sdk right?)

[tame shard]

Prelude isn't using the SDK, it's still based on Portal

I do believe some additional edits were made for Prelude's compatibility engine side and we were able to incorporate those into SDK 2013-powered HL2RTX without issue, so I assume they were made to a binary that didn't mess with the actual engine version stuff

so the bet might be to use Prelude's binaries rather than Portal's as far as Remix stuff goes in Source

[grave flower]

ooo
interesting

hopefully we can use that for improving compatibility for other source engine games

[left grove]

there are differences between them unfortunately, I couldn't tell you exactly all of them, but it's as if the VTMB version is lacking some things and options

[amber atlas]

Ohh dang I missed a lot since I had to head out yesterday, time to get caught up. You've all been busy! 😄

[amber atlas]

I didn't have too much time to poke around the other day, but I was also keen on looking into texture replacement, as well as adding things like roughness, parllax occlusion, normal mapping etc. Was it pretty easy to do texture/material swaps? Guessing there's a guide somewhere I should just read first ;3

[neon portal]

It's surprisingly easy, and if you use the built in upscaler for textures it'll automatically generate normal maps and roughness

[amber atlas]

It looks like you take a capture and then use the Remix from the launcher to edit and it updates in the game once you save, is that basically the gist of it?

[neon portal]

You can drop a .PNG image into the AI tools tab, it will produce 3-4 .PNG images for each texture (with roughness, maps etc), then you ingest them, click on a specific thing you want to switch - like a wall - and load the files you want.

[neon portal]

That's pretty much it. You capture a scene while in game then play around with the scene

[amber atlas]

Nice, I was going to try running the textures through substance designer and really get in there and build some nice PBR textures, maybe run it through Remix upsacler first then switch over to designer to have the in depth control... I also want to try replacing some models.

Ultimate goal is to replace characters but that's the long road...

[neon portal]

It's surprisingly power hungry, so make sure you get a Scene Optimizer

Its one of the extensions in Omniverse, it's free and makes a huge difference

[amber atlas]

thanks for the heads up!

[neon portal]

No problem, have fun 🙂

[amber atlas]

Seems like emissive masks work in the remix editor, but not in VTM?

[somber sundial]

THis most likely means your mod is installed in the wrong place

[amber atlas]

everything else is chaning fine, textures, values, subsurface, roughness etc

things update in real time just like they should

texture replacement works in general it seems

haven't tried a mesh yet

[stray whale]

How much control do you people have over ai textures, the floor tiles look too different I think

Everything else looks super similar the kitchen appliances and walls have super accurate cracks and grime

[amber atlas]

Haven't messed with the AI upscaler stuff myself, but I'd probably remake the textures in something like Substance Designer myself long term for better control. But I bet there are textures in here that would spit out AI upscaled version pretty well potentially?

[stray whale]

I think the right psychology to have with the game is too skip any assets that don't upscale perfectly and leave them be, then wait to upscale them later.

[amber atlas]

Yeah I think right now we are all just experimenting and learning the tools, long term it would probably be good to actually create a 'mod' subsection in the git repo and think about the approach, but honestly I can see different people starting their own mod approaches.

Some people might want to do a full traditional up scale, some people might want to re-imagine, so organizing around project intention long term is probably the way to go!

[left grove]

yeah feel like AI upscaled and handmade textures will be the two different routes to go here. I am down to focussing our efforts on the AI upscales for now, if that gets us something to learn from for now

[neon portal]

there's only so much you can do with AI when a floor texture from 2004 is 256x256 😦 I tried to find an appropriately grimey replacement

[left grove]

I like it, it fits the scene still even if it's not the exact same, it still looks good

[stray whale]

I think the vanilla textures are preferable and should be kept in until an ai enhancement translates the textures well otherwise you risk turning the game visual upgrades into a flawed sidegrade

In the case of the floor tiles the old floor tiles work with the entire apartment converying the idea of an old rotting apartment the tiles are likely intentionally made to look like a flat smooth old almost ornate surface from an apartment that was last refurbished in the 60s

The new ones by comparison come off as if they came straight out of a modern home with intricate patterns of fine made tile

It's an extremely minor thing to complain about i know but it's important to be aware of these kind of things

[neat spindle]

Yeah, I definitely think hewing as close as we can to vanilla textures is the way to go, otherwise you run into the "HD Remaster Mod" problem where everything is unrecognizable.

[stray whale]

The tabletop counter also has a similar problem where it looks off

Yeah I mean theres a reason the only good texture mod I reliable download for vtmb is a food retexture and even then I have some objections

Pic related of why I don't install graphics mods often for vtmb

[neat spindle]

To be clear, though, I think just hitting "AI upscale" on everything is a waste of resources. There's also the question of how to manage stylistic divergences as we (in theory) begin to import higher-quality models, etc.

[stray whale]

I haven't used the ai tool but I hope that it allows for some configuration on how it interprets data/how hard it interprets it

luckily source textures don't have any jpeg style optimizations so you're probably not going to have any artifact problems from textures

My favorite thing about the slavoid pic is the lighting got warmed up a bit it looks like

[neat spindle]

Think that's just the volumetric lighting

[broken scaffold]

Fellow old ass source engine modders, have you guys found a way around the level-in-skybox-bounds issue where it doesn't give the skybox any remix passthrough? In Dark Messiah there's a bunch of islands built within the skybox bounds and none of the enhanced textures work

skybox from inside map

noclipping to skybox

[neat spindle]

@broken scaffold
Something like this? We've also been having 3D skybox issues:
https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/rtx-remix/issues/381

[broken scaffold]

OH YEAH got something almost identical on my side too

vs what it's supposed to look like

[neat spindle]

Absolutely no clue how to fix it, but knowing it pops up in other games is useful. Mind adding on your stuff to the issue?

[broken scaffold]

Yeah I'm on it

[waxen pier]

Are you all having to manually add old lights? I've noticed none of been picked up when I try to capture a scene (Or really, just see anything)

[neat spindle]

It's been auto detecting lights for us, mind walking through the exact steps you took to install?

[left grove]

Yeah mostly auto detected lights, but some lights don't get auto detected. An example would be nearest light to the entrance at the asylum

[waxen pier]

I went ahead and did a fresh install following the instructions from the github page, and its looking better! I think I may have installed the plus options and the shaders originally, from the unofficial patch.

[left grove]

I was manually recreating the asylum lights and I couldn't replicate what it auto created

[waxen pier]

The closest thing I've found is switching the Sky Min Z threshold from 1 to 0.

[amber atlas]

Haha weird, that totally works!

[amber atlas]

Really rough pass at doing a remake of a texture by hand as opposed to using the AI tools.

Not perfect but it's a pretty good start I think?

[stray whale]

this is near pefect just needs the same kinda grime to finish it off

[amber atlas]

getting a bit complicated 😄

[left grove]

that's some good grime

[amber atlas]

I'm not super thrilled about the color compression for the albedo when it's actually IN GAME, I'm vaguely picking up the tell tale signs of color compression and it irks me, lol, I've been spoiled by Unity and their texture compression

Also I was poking around and I THINK that BSP brushes are all selectable and removable as well, they are essentially considered meshes

side effect though is that it's not always clear how the system is going to split up the brushes

but it does mean we could potentially replace EVERYTHING

MAYBE

haha

[left grove]

haha I mean weren't we going to replace everything?

[amber atlas]

definitely my intention!

but i was worried at how the system was going to consider/allow us to mess with BSP

but i'm seeing stuff that indicates we can

[left grove]

it's going to take a good while

[amber atlas]

haha yeah

being able to open the USD in blender is going to make this much nicer though, just using their OG meshes as size/proportion guides

going to cut out a lot of guesswork

[left grove]

that's why we could AI upscale everything as possible for now. Then anything that looks bad or wasn't upscaled gets prioritised, and then redo the rest as we go

[left grove]

I didn't even know that was an option

[amber atlas]

yeah! blender has USD import!

everyone is kind of hoping game engines embrace USD for the future (we'll see)

this was one of the guys from the tutorial in blender though haha

i think the hardest thing we will run into when remastering this will be characters or anything that's a skinned/rigged mesh

[left grove]

I notice a lot of their textures do go invisible and look exactly like that ingame, like some bits get cut off and pop in and out

I'll have a fiddle with all possible launch arguments tonight and see if I can get any results with that

[amber atlas]

i don't think the anti-occlusion culling feature doesn't always seem to work, so i think that's probably the main culprit?

Getting a little closer

[tame shard]

world meshes in Source games aren't stable hashes

BSP geometry changes hash constantly as visclusters are calculated

so in general it's not really possible to replace world geometry with new meshes in Source

[amber atlas]

why must you hurt me

jkjk thanks for the info/context

[tame shard]

we've taken two approaches in HL2RTX:
-converted world geo into a mesh (don't know how it works in VTMB, but in modern Source you can use a tool called propper to turn BSP geo into a mesh and then put it into the game replacing the original geometry)
-placed a "dummy model" into a map (or used a stand-out, unique model in that level) and then used it as an "anchor" for additions to world geometry

the only problem is both require game-specific knowledge to modify maps to account for both, or a bit of luck having an already bespoke prop that only appears there to be used as an anchor model

[amber atlas]

Gotcha! I'm leary that propper would work for VTMB, it's SDK is all based on OLD source tools and most don't work and newer ones are just not compatible.
If we are lucky we can leverage it, but I'm betting the second approach is going to be the main approach.

Thanks for hopping in to proved context.

[tame shard]

strictly speaking though, we found we needed to rely a lot less on needing to mesh-fiy stuff once we took advantage of POM

worth tinkering with your POM settings and getting cozy with heightmaps because they simplify the workflow immensely

[amber atlas]

yessss POM is real nice. I'm more concerned about 'curved' surfaces, but that's probably not the end of the world

VTMB did seem to favor modeled props more than it's contemporaries so it's probable we can get a lot of mileage out of it.

[tame shard]

POM has improved since it first found its way into the runtime, so maybe sometime it might be able to handle curved surfaces better (though atm I am not aware of anything in the pipeline that directly addresses that)

[amber atlas]

I put a slight bit of POM on the tiles and it looks real nice. Very happy with it's implementation!

[tame shard]

you can screw around with the quadtree versus raymarched stuff too depending on what you feel looks better. quadtree currently requires more work to get functioning properly but theoretically produces a better end result. I found if you're not interested in the extra legwork right now, you can knock up the iterations on raymarched at a perf hit depending on iteration count which will also increase the fidelity of POM globally

[amber atlas]

I'll have to dive in a bit more. I'm the type that does indeed enjoy the leg work. I'll do some more experiments.

You wouldn't happen to have insight into replacing skinned meshes like characters? I'm concerned about that pipeline in general especially in the context of VTMB, the character construction is very rough, and there's only so much uprezzing textures can give us.

Things like blendshapes and eye control are my big concerns, but in general, replacing skinned meshes probably has some really specific requirements/roadblocks...

[tame shard]

so on that topic, we have replaced one character - Grigori - in HL2RTX already. the skinned asset workflow is indeed very complicated right now but does work. I'd like there to be support in the toolkit eventually; for now it's all manual. it's a bit long, but I think the documentation has a write-up. it's basically like this:
-capture skinned asset
-load the captured skeleton into Blender and note what names it gave the base game's bones and where
-rig your new character model to the original game's skeleton, and then export that as an FBX
-ingest the fbx as a USD
-rewrite the assigned bone names according to the names Remix gave the bones.

that works for the non-blendshaped/eye bits

however, for the facial animations (which are vertex animated) and the eye shader, you will have to do that legwork in-engine

you could theoretically just put a higher-poly mesh into the engine and then assign RTX materials in Remix if the perf impact wasn't too bad. if it was, the perf-light option is to make the in-game model's body a "noodle person" that is ultra low poly, and put in a high-poly face that has had VTAs and eye stuff all setup. then replace just the body model in Remix

[amber atlas]

Very promising, replacing characters has been a big dead end in the VTMB pipeline for a long time, would be really cool to get unstuck there, but I won't get too excited until I can prove it out.

The facial animation aspect is definitely the part I'm most worried about.

[tame shard]

Remix has no way at this time (and I don't know of anything like this on the cards) to interpret VTAs/blendshapes as they are, so that'll have to remain in engine right now

for what it's worth, didn't the Clan Quest mod devs put in some custom characters? I recall it when I played the mod, but they might've just been retextures

if they were straight-up new face models then someone who was a part of that mod had to have worked out the workflow to implementing facial flexes in VTMB

[amber atlas]

I worked on Clan quest a bit!

it was a really messed up workflow

You couldn't fully replace meshes whole sale, you had to rip meshes, and then sneak things in and out, it was so jank

[tame shard]

oh, neat! I consider it the second must-have mod for VTMB after UP, I now don't recommend the game without it considering how fantastic it is 🙂

I used to work at ModDB as its editor and community manager and selected it for my editor's choice award Mod of the Year one year, heheh

[amber atlas]

I did hazel and then the gangster lady. He had the meshes set up already, and it was a lot of careful texture work not to violate the very specific requirements that he did to get the meshes working. Like adding the hat to Hazel was some mind numbing trickery he had to do.

[left grove]

that's quite interesting

[amber atlas]

The guy who runs it lives like 2 hours from me but we never met up in real life! He's a really nice dude, fun to work with! Wish I could have had more time to work on more stuff for it 😄

[left grove]

@tame shard while you are around I might ask, for the culling issues with stuff going invisible and stuff, do you have any advice? I am going to go try some of the launch params you had mentioned work for HL2, but other than trial and error I have nothing. Any advice on that? thanks

any light you can shed on this might help us greatly

[tame shard]

I believe +r_frustumcullworld 0 and +c_frustumcull 0 are responsible for the culling fixes we apply wholesale to most Source Engine stuff

these are both launch parameters

no idea if they'll work in VTMB's version of Source but yeah

[left grove]

hey worth a shot 👌

[amber atlas]

crossing my fingers 😄

[left grove]

ok.... so, that does indeed help, but only with some floors some walls still disappear

[amber atlas]

dang, almost...

[left grove]

This has got to be my favourite issue so far 👍

[amber atlas]

big oof D:

[left grove]

I'll keep playing with the launch params in about an hour. I have stuff I need to do now. I'll definitely add these to the github

[left grove]

This definitely fixed the walls disappearing on the tunnel to the pier tho so very nice

[stray whale]

someone pin this

[left grove]

it's ok I'll add it to the github

planning a deep dive into all the launch args tonight (in like 30 minutes)

[left grove]

https://github.com/CattoSalad/VTMB-RTX-Remix/wiki/Launch-Args
working on it now

copying the CS S args just makes mine crash (when trying to load a save)

I'll have to manually try each and every argument to see what effects it has

Found a good spot to test some of these issues

[wet atlas]

Looking good, except for the part where it looks like you've entered the 4th dimension

[neon portal]

that looks awesome! what software have you done this in?

[left grove]

I have a solution for all the invisible walls now. But it has a cost. Some heavy stutters. Captured some on video.

[amber atlas]

Thanks! A slightly older version of Substance Designer! I think your redo of the kitchen looks great btw! The wood textures really pop...

[left grove]

I have documented everything here about the launch arguments, not sure if we should go ahead with recommending them all just now

[amber atlas]

Hmm yeah it's like a whole flicker, the entire scene culls for a frame and comes back, dang it.

Also +1 for picking malk ;3

[amber atlas]

excellent as always

[left grove]

thought I'd go malk to hear the voices while I decipher settings and what not

doing a quick write up on my findings about rain, but nothing substantial yet

oh yeah one of those commands does break the skybox, might be what Kralich/David was describing, I might need someone else to actually validate this is benefitial for us

[bleak barn]

https://tenor.com/view/the-simpsons-homer-apocalypse-the-end-is-near-gif-7204885

[neon portal]

how did you make the middle green? I've been messing around with it and can't figure it out 🙂

[amber atlas]

i used some shapes, scaled em down, made em 45 degrees, then combined them with others and a 2d transform, then tiled it

i had to set one of them to not tile and give the other a white background

also im trying to do the carpet

carpet is a lot harder

it's getting there but it needs more grain/grit/detail, and i think my carpet flow needs to change a little and get fuller

not quite there yet D:

[neon portal]

that's as far as I got, now I have no idea how to blend those together while they still could look nice

or am I doing all this backwards

Holy crap I wondered what the original floor was

I was thinking 'did Troika put fucking hay in here'

I don't know if I ever saw a shag carpet in a game and there may be a valid technical reason of it being a pain to figure out?

[amber atlas]

haha yeah my brain read it as... vague brown ground when i recalled the game

you could add another blend node and put your green diamonds in the foreground and mask by the tiling diamond shape

[neon portal]

Yours is still better 😄 What a hellish program, this was so much harder than it needed to be

[amber atlas]

what? that was your first time messing with it?!?!

that looks awesome!

[neon portal]

Thanks! I've seen some tutorials and I spent an unhinged amount of time on it

[amber atlas]

it turned out nice!

[wet atlas]

in retrospect, vanilla carpet looks kinda weird to begin with

[amber atlas]

it def does, not sure how to remaster, or if it's a candidate for changing up a little

[wet atlas]

don't be afraid of experimenting with different textures for that particular floor

[neon portal]

did you do the shag carpet yourself?

[amber atlas]

I did, same process, used Substance designer

I had some older versions where I followed the original less that i actually liked a little more

i dont have this version anymore but i liked it a lot better haha

[neon portal]

I guess I made noodles

Spent an hour on a god damn kindred ramen

are you a dev @amber atlas ?

[amber atlas]

i would def eat that carpet for sure

also yes, i'm in the game industry, technical artist and many other things

Still working on my crinkle cut fried over her... def a tough one to crack

[neon portal]

looks good!

are you also having trouble selecting some objects in Remix tool?

[amber atlas]

yeah it's pretty inconsistent, sometimes it displays the gizmos in another location than they are as well

i have to quit and reload pretty consistently

also it seems like the captures don't always show up for some reason

[neon portal]

i am weak

maybe I should leave this to the pros

[left grove]

that's a very clean kitchen

but great stuff, I liked your kitchen floor texture

[amber atlas]

more tests

sidewalk material replacement

done in substance designer

trying to add in wetness since the game seems to have lots of rainy vibes to it, whether it's actively raining or not

not quite there in terms of coloration but shape is pretty close

also i converted all the windows to be emissive compatible and the sign too

added a light to the sign to make the red pop a bit more

a good technique i found is to open the window in photoshop and tell it to interpret transparency as the alpha layer

copy and paste the alpha layer over top the RGB channels and set it to multiply

that will give you you emissive map

since remix's renderer doesn't multiply the emissive maks by the emissive color, you'll want to do this to maintain color and intensity

save this out as your emissive texture and plug it in, it will respond to the emissive intensity though so you can get some control there which is nice

honestly this is a ton of fun, it makes the game look like how i remember it in my head lol

[left grove]

Damn this looks nice!

I may need some help, the Malk Mansion has a lot of flickering walls and stuff, I have no idea how to fix it, but hopefully just retexturing it should work

[neat spindle]

Very nice! I was reading through some of the documentation and it was saying to use emissive sparingly because they're much more resource-intensive to resolve. Slapping lights on all the windows might be too much.

[left grove]

ah that makes sense

I toyed around with lightning myself and it always just killed my FPS

optimizations might come later in the cycle tho

[neat spindle]

We could potentially apply some transparency and put point lights behind them. Also gives us greater manual control over what windows are lit, rather than all of them.

[left grove]

yeah that would be smart. For the diner we'd want to mimic the same lights that are inside from the outside, that'd be super cool

[neat spindle]

For things like signs emissives are perfect, though!

[amber atlas]

Well currently, the way it works is that all these windows currently HAVE emissive maps on them, they just don't work when Remix is on because they are stored in the alpha channel of the diffuse texture (odd). Additionally, the way the original team authored it, is that many of those windows have light OBJECTS on them as well.

So if emissive masks and emissive enabled materials cost a lot, then I imagine also throwing additional lights on things will not be free either. I'm not sure which would be cheaper overall... in a non RTX game it would absolutely be removing lights and adding emissive textures. But in an RTX enabled game... maybe not?

So achieving the look of the OG + balancing against performance constraints of how ray tracing is consuming emissive info and spitting it out could be a bit complicated...

[left grove]

kinda cool the tricks they used back then

[amber atlas]

unfortunately for me i was there back then too D: i was almost out of highschool when Half Life 2 and VTM:B came out

SO OLD

[left grove]

yeah I do wonder what's cheap and expensive in a Path Traced game

[amber atlas]

Might not work the way I expect it to in a normal rasterized game, hence the experiments I guess haha

[left grove]

experiments are useful

I think you got some amazing results honestly

I have been trying to do some stuff but to no avail, like the rain for instance. It's on this like texture thing as well as most sky effects and some others, very intriguing. Tried categorising this texture as many things, only world texture seemed to have an effect, but the rain was only visible on the sky. How should I go about this?

[amber atlas]

Oh yes I'm also interested in this mystery haha

i've seen like 6 copies of this texture in there...

[left grove]

I think it's 1 per map

I went to the Pier and stuff, each map/instance seems to have one

[amber atlas]

not sure how to approach either, also when it rains the world CRAWLS and eventually might crash if im looking certain directions

ah ok that makes sense

[left grove]

I noted down the texture Hashes
BA95AE8C693B64DB - Pier

No idea:
4FB1A949468A2B70
5166A68CB33F3219
5B5800740DED4982
D3CBBEF959BF0E7A
C55A9469930B8AF6

They are all mostly the same and then some are missing the plane, so suppose each map has it's own

[amber atlas]

do you find that the rain tanks your framerate? or maybe that's something i did on my end?

[left grove]

hum, not sure, I didn't do anything specific to the rain

mine does fluctuate heavily

I do turn frame gen on sometimes, that does help a bit, but does add some ghosting here and there

[amber atlas]

im on a 3080 so it's unavailable for me 😦

[left grove]

oh 😔 I am on a 4080, feel free to send me stuff to run if you want

[amber atlas]

i'd love to drop mods in at some point to share but it's a bit of a mess, i didn't know how they saved files at first so i don't think i have it set up the way i want

was going to look into that

[left grove]

yeah honestly wonder how we can work with multiple mods and stuff like that, as standalone POCs I think it's fine to send

I saw on the RTX Remix roadmap that multiple mods and mod ordering is feature that's coming far in the future

[amber atlas]

hmm that would be pretty useful

but sounds extremely complicated haha

[left grove]

well yeah, would be cool, but I think we can survive for now. I do wonder how we can all work on the same mod file, if source control even works for it, I shall investigate a bit

I do get 25fps by the Diner without FG. With I get 50fps. DLSS set to Quality

[amber atlas]

yeah source control and mod files is a big question in my head as well

[left grove]

and for rain on santa monica hub the texture is E164152E6AF51CF2 but that also handles everything else, planes, fire stuff like that

[amber atlas]

im guessing those instance id's are random per project

i think those are generated by the mod file

[neat spindle]

Yeah, I think it's the raytracing that makes all the difference here. Having a full complex emissive surface complicates the calculations and light bounces significantly, whereas simpler light objects are much easier due to their more basic geometry. If I had to guess, the original's emissive textures probably didn't cast shadows, while "real" lights did, which is why emissives were cheaper then.

[left grove]

they are hashes, so should be the same

but I guess per runtime they would change

[amber atlas]

my assumption was that they are generated when you make a capture and then for that mod project the hashes are consistent and mapped to assets, but someone else's might not be

i just searched for that one and i dont have anything called something that contains 'E164'

[left grove]

that's crazy. I think that's definitely it

[amber atlas]

i think it's because remix has no real way to reason about the data until it maps it entirely itself, and i think that's how from capture to capture it maintains consistency, but im just wildly guessing here haha

[amber atlas]

i've only recently been getting into deving with RTX and so many conventions have changed in that render method, it's been a trip, so your point is well taken :3

[neat spindle]

In your defense, I think the advice to limit emissive textures is in the documentation about light objects, not the texture section, haha

[amber atlas]

If they treat emissive as truly ray traced then it could definitely get expensive SUPER quick, but if they are doing some other method then maybe they can stay cheap? but I'd love to see how it plays out when I restore all the emissive hehe

Also I'm not sure if this is right, but I'm sort of taking the approach that lots of captures are totally fine, like if you take a capture in one corner of the room and then another corner to get all of it and swithc between, but ideall i'd just like to capture THE WHOLE scene in one go, and not have a weird workflow

[neat spindle]

IIRC you're supposed to take multiple captures, yeah. Since a lot of games have distance culling objects get lost if you capture from far away (say, noclipping outside the map)

[amber atlas]

Okay, it feels funky, but it seems like that's the best way to do it for now?

[left grove]

I just did what one of the HL2 tutorial videos guy said, capture from a few points and angles in the map as well as one from out of bounds for good measure

[amber atlas]

Okay cool, thanks for the input, both of you :3

[left grove]

https://youtu.be/A3Sw8qerNmY?feature=shared&t=112

no worries. I didn't find a way to like fuse those captures on RTX Remix just yet, is it even possible?

would be cool to stitch them together, but idk how that'd work in all fairness

[neat spindle]

https://docs.omniverse.nvidia.com/kit/docs/rtx_remix/latest/docs/howto/learning-lighting.html
Here's the lighting page that talks about emissive meshes

[wet atlas]

you bet

[left grove]

I just wonder if we should attempt to contact this guy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXdvLzEl6-c
he's not posted anything since, and I wonder if he'd share what he has worked on

yeah! I'll keep doing everything I can to help and contribute, but expect it won't be a few long months until it's anywhere near complete

Wouldn't say it's playable just yet either

[amber atlas]

You mean in regards to the occlusion issues?

[left grove]

either or, he clearly knew a lot more than we do now

I am wondering if just replacing the textures is enough to fix it, or if something else needs to be done

[amber atlas]

I did see something in there for a texture setting that was like anti-occlusion textures or something like that

I also did see some mention of portals in there and yeah I know portals are how they were calculating viz leafs for stuff like occlusion. So I wonder if manually building or placing occlusion areas is possible.

As far as the malk mansion goes it looks like some texture and material replacement. I didn't see any emissive or mesh replacements.

There being a lack of flickering does interest me greatly though haha

[left grove]

yeah, like it may not seem impressive, but the fact he figured the flickering out is almost enough to have me reach out to him and ask honestly

[amber atlas]

Hey don't get me wrong I'm still impressed! They went through everything and also balanced the lighting super well.

I wonder if they are still secretly working on it or if it was just a one off project

[left grove]

the checkerboard texture on the floor looked so good

[left grove]

I'll reach out, I think collaborating may be wise in this case

even if he then wants to go off and do his own thing that's fine

[amber atlas]

You know me I wanna put some roughness scuffs on em hehehe

Did some work on the shelves and such in the safehouse I'll post when I get back from the gym

[amber atlas]

If they want to join the discord and jam with the rest of us that would be sick too

[left grove]

look forward to this, enjoy the gym 💪

[left grove]

that'd be ideal, but I wonder if they have moved on from this

[amber atlas]

Does one really ever move on from bloodlines?!

:3

[left grove]

Yeah honestly don't think it's possible

looking through reddit seeing if I can post the link or so, get more people involved, I have found random people who attempted it and showed screenshots or so 👀

[mortal quest]

We can never move on from it, I've replayed it like a billion times now

now I'm trying to tinker with it with rtx remix

[left grove]

time to gain an even deeper knowledge of it

I tell myself I only do 1 yearly playthrough but I do more like 3 playthroughs a year for the past 3-4 years

[amber atlas]

hehe yeah it's bloodlines and deus ex 1 that always bring me back in

Posted NO Remix, remix with defaults, and remix with my enhancements so far

ALSO

just turning a few thing's metallic factor up makes a huge difference

i haven't done anything else to the pipe except set it's roughness to .3 and it's metalness to 1.0

and it

physically based rendering is such a great tech

funny thin is that half life 2 and bloodlines were actually on the right track with their cubemap workflow, they just hadn't developed a concept yet of convolving it based on roughness, they either had a material fully reflect a cubemap or not

also some experiments with the wall, not rebuilding from scratch but some tests with the displacement

kind of rough in some areas there haha

so there ya go @left grove XD

[neon portal]

Are you planning to release this as a mod publicly?

[amber atlas]

I'd love to! I just have to answer a few more questions about how things work, so the experiments continue! But I really want to release this as something people can just drop in.

I've also tried to balance exposure values and I'm going in and 're-lighting' stuff against that to keep a faithful look but also with more contrast and light bouncing etc

so my hope is to have something that feels like a remaster but not departing from the original intention

also remodeling some props too and all that

[neon portal]

I'd love to contribute. I'm obviously an amateur with limited amount of time, but I'm learning a lot and I feel really nostalgic about this game

[amber atlas]

as a character artist by trade im most interested in remodeling characters but i think we are ways off from this supporting that well

I'd love to figure out how to use that github to share stuff or work on stuff together

instead of having to email things to each other hehe

[neon portal]

I'd also like to know how to edit and replace meshes

[amber atlas]

from what i was watching, it should be pretty easy overall

the trick with this is knowing what is a mesh and what's bsp D:

[neon portal]

I tried it once and it didn't go very well for me

[amber atlas]

like... all doors are BSP, but the hardware on them like knobs and locks are all meshes

the toilet might be bsp...

so there will be some stuff we just cant replace

some stuff we can

[neon portal]

I just watched a tutorial and yup, I should have started with that

apparently it's not difficult at all

and there has to be a way to convert the mesh files

[amber atlas]

there's something to be said for tinkering first 😄

i usually like to dive in and mess around and ask questions and be annoying and THEN look at tutorials

[stray whale]

I should probably find a way to get a shared dropbox or mega folder setup that anyone can edit

dropbox is only 2gbs and mega you can't share a folder with a link that other people can edit

instead you have to manually add them by email

[amber atlas]

The reason I'm leaning toward Git is that it MIGHT be possible to do shared work and file diff. Wheras dropbox and mega you have to send back and forth and update manually which could get funky without a ton of manual coordination.

though Git would probably need LFS installed if the files are large...

[left grove]

I'd be down for git, the only problem is, are these really that shareable, and would we do PRs on different places and textures?

we'd need to properly utilise github to collab on it

I'd be down to create an issue for every room in every map 😂

[stray whale]

That could work tbh

Each hub has about 10 to 15 rooms so that's about 60 - 100 which sounds doable

[amber atlas]

The part I'm REALLY looking forward to is the characters D:

I had been rebuilding the VTMB characters from scratch a year or two ago for fun

but i'd LOVE to be able to actually replace them

I had started on the player tremere, jeanette, and beckett

but since you couldn't replace characters in the old VTMB SDK I kind of lost steam on that

definitely exciting to think there might be a pathway to replacing the characters in the future...

[left grove]

AYO holy shit

that's amazing

that shit slaps

[left grove]

100%, from what I gather we can do that this time

that's gonna be great

[neon portal]

That looks great!

[neat spindle]

Could we start with some basic texture replacement as a stopgap? I know Remix has support for subsurface scattering, which would go a long way toward making the people look less like plastic.

[left grove]

I mean yeah this would be an optional thing for later on, sadly 🥲

[neon portal]

Once you figure out how to replace them (I'm sure you will sooner or later) it's gonna make a huge difference

[amber atlas]

Yeah I think there should be like... 3 stages, a mod that just replaces textures/materials, a mod that expands that into replacing prop models, and the final expansion that adds characters in
If that could be downloaded in 3 different downloads, it would let people go, 'nah i dont want the new characters, just the characters with the upgraded textures/shaders

[amber atlas]

Def going to be the hardest part of this 😄

[neon portal]

There's so much crowdsourced knowledge on this that even if you won't figure it out personally, someone's gonna notice how to do it

[amber atlas]

Here's hoping they want to help out XD

[neon portal]

VTMB is made on Source engine, right? Maybe HL modding communities have some answers

although it may be naive of me because I know fuck all about actually making games xd

[amber atlas]

OLD source engine, pre hl2 release version of the engine

replacing characters is notoriously dead ended

[neat spindle]

One of the HL2 RTX folks pops in this channel every now and again since they're basically the same engine. Literally came out the same day. (It's why VTMB killed Troika, actually, it was pushed out the door too early)

[amber atlas]

Yeah the issue being VTMB is on an OLD build, they stopped taking engine updates well before HL2 stopped updating the engine (for HL2 release).

So it's SDK tools are really busted and can't do as much.

Updating the engine has proven to be pretty out of the question as well

[left grove]

yeah makes perfect sense Valve kept working on Source for HL2 specifically, while Troika was just proving the engine could be used to make a proper RPG

[amber atlas]

There's ONE random example of a fully custom character in VTMB and it's like... the mod communities biggest mystery, who did it? how did they do it? where did they go!?

[neat spindle]

Reminds me of similar problems with adding new models to Gamebryo/Creation. Apparently something about how animations are handled is really inaccessible.

[neon portal]

do you remember by any chance which mod is it?

[amber atlas]

I was desperately looking just now haha, but I can't find it

Mostly the problem stems from the compiling tools for making models, they just don't really work

so if we could bypass that by replacing skinned mesh assets using Remix, that's the money

2 big issues I see: facial animation phoneme setup, and eye tracking

We talked a bit about it the other day, but I think those will be our two big roadblocks

[neon portal]

I just checked nexusmods and saw this https://www.nexusmods.com/vampirebloodlines/mods/286?tab=description

No idea if it works or how it works tho

[amber atlas]

This is new to me... whoa...

also hell yes

I'm behind on the mod communities capabilities then

ive got some catching up to do...

[neon portal]

looks like it was done without remix, just with sdk

I mean... "just". I've heard it's hellish

[neat spindle]

Model is getting distorted with some animations```

[amber atlas]

Yeah I have tried for years to get the SDK to compile something, and worked with a couple other mod creators to try, but there are so many ways it breaks and so many limitations...

If I could reproduce what this mod is doing, I think we are pretty much set though...

I'd keep everything roughly proportional anyway

[neon portal]

I tried looking up model swapping on planetvampire forums and found accidental comedy

[neat spindle]

Could be worth hitting up wesp, I know Plus Patch adds a new boss fight character in the library level

Also you said you worked on CQM, right? How were all the new characters in the suburbs handled?

[amber atlas]

IIRCC He had done some funkiness to like... hotload new meshes into the current meshes, it was so bizarre.

I'm looking on Planet Vampire now, looks like lots of people are getting some degree of success there that wasn't happening a few years back

time to dig in and do some more research...

[neat spindle]

Yeah, I saw a bunch of people doing model swaps, but adding new models is more interesting

[amber atlas]

That's the one I really want to figure out

Wesp's SDK updats that are included with UP are great but I remember encountering issues with compiling player and npc models, that was the big dead end for me at least

looks like others got further!

[neon portal]

Remix just crashes on startup for me now

heck

[amber atlas]

Hmm I haven't gotten that yet

[neat spindle]

Are you trying to start through the Omniverse launcher? If so, it's not using your launch args, which can lead to crashing. (Also it just won't hook at all because you need to be in DX7 mode)

[left grove]

No more flickering, so hopefully this is it we should be able to texture the walls, I wonder

do you guys use "Correct baked world transformations" on capture?

hum these are invisible within RTX Remix :/

yeah no clue

[amber atlas]

that didn't seem to do anything, for remix, but the "Scene Z-Up" made a world of difference

also oh my GOD @neat spindle and @neon portal I went and searched my old convo with the Clan Quest guy to find the example of the custom mesh, and it was the SAME ONE YOU POSTED. I'm so dumb

so yes that is the example I was thinking of apparently lol

to be fair that convo was back in 2017/18 so I guess I'd forget a little

also realized, I did more civilians for him in clan quest than I remember haha. And he did end up replacing the face I gave him for Hazel (he should have mine was terrible) but his body is still my texture 😄

[amber atlas]

what did you do to reduce the flickering? also dang where did the walls go? D:

[left grove]

I am using all the launch args I know about it's messy, but it does fix some things and break others (apparently)

Expectation:

Reality:

all I want is real walls, is that too much to ask for?

[nova trellis]

Testing some upscaled textures , not easy to play with the lights atm.

[bleak barn]

You can do that now with playable characters

I also successfully replaced playable character and hands over a year ago

You can't replace NPC's models without loosing facial animations. But PC models are fine since they don't have any anyway

[mortal quest]

this looks awesome, I am still at a very novice level tinkering with rtx remix

mostly learning to swap textures and reading what everyone else's experience is

[amber atlas]

Do you have any guides or anything like that? I tried following some back in the day but the tools just didn't seem to allow it. Would love to hear how you got it working!

[amber atlas]

Cooking up something cool @left grove but I'll have to finish it late tonight... get ready ;3

[left grove]

Ohhh nice, good luck!

I honestly hit such a wall, no matter what I change there are always invisible textures at the Grout's mansion 😔 I'll come back to it fresh tomorrow

Do keep us posted

[neat spindle]

I had some similar issues with the Empire Arms Hotel lobby. Every time I enter that map a different part of it is invisible!

[stray whale]

I'm no expert on this stuff but if the facial flexes are the same as standard source stuff you could theoretically use any source model with facial flexs (alyx for example)

[bleak barn]

No, as far as I understand vtmb used a very early version of source engine and we can't compile the models and keep facial flexes working

[bleak barn]

There should be a test model in the SDK. The Poison Ivy from batman that is set up for compiling for vtmb. I used it as a base and replaced fem malkavian with a model made from scratch. But I had to keep the vanilla eyes that Ivy's model had to make them work properly in game. Unfortunately I cannot show the results because it was a private commission that uses the liking of a real person. But I can show screenshots of Ivy's model in game and the hands I replaced

I think I can show my custom model from behind

[stray whale]

found these gmod models that seem to have face poses so it seem possible

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=110221645&searchtext=jeanette

[bleak barn]

I think the issue is not exporting them from the game but importing them back

[neon portal]

turns out my mod file got corrupted ^

REPLACING EVERYTHING AGAIN

Also - I've checked out the main Troika devs

for a lot of people this'll be old news, but

1. Tim Cain said that as much as they'd want to, their contracts with publishers prohibit sharing the source code "because of piracy". He pointed out how senseless it is, especially for old games 2) They wanted to patch this game up a bit more before release and update the engine to improved Source, but Activision didn't approve any of them, and their contract stated they can't publish any modifications without their approval

[neon portal]

I'm getting okay at this

[amber atlas]

I'll take a closer look, thanks for pointing it out!

[amber atlas]

Seconded, this is where all my friction has existed 😦

[amber atlas]

Ok here we goooo

so old tv

in old and new lighting

modeled a tv from scratch and ran it through toolbag 4's texturing process

[neon portal]

the lighting is so good

[amber atlas]

new tv wires are a little heftier obviously

[neon portal]

oh wow thats really good

[amber atlas]

found a tv that had a similar front to the one from OG VTMB

and based it off of what i THINK they used a picture from

[neon portal]

did you make the model or did you find it?

[amber atlas]

made it from scratch

i make everything i can from scratch

i love modeling/texturing :3

here's a better side by side

[neon portal]

I spent hours trying to increase polygon count and autosmooth stuff in blender 😄 You're good

I think I'll stick to texturing

[amber atlas]

i used the original model as a guideline

that's what made it so fast

i just imported that tv and used the rough proportions and size

then looked at the reference pic and built it from that

i think being able to get the games props and such and bring them in to use them for guides is going to save SO much time

[neon portal]

ngl you've motivated me to learn a lot of stuff in the last few days

I can make passable prop textures now

[amber atlas]

hell yes! everyone should make games and game art :3

I ALMOST modeled the space heater, but I'm glad I didn't because you gave me a good idea on how to approach it, your perspective is gud

Also: @left grove so you can see this when you wake up /\

[neon portal]

I also wanted to look into remaking the stereo but I can't seem to find the reference

[amber atlas]

someone on art station remade the entire safehouse and rendered it in unreal or something for their portfolio and it looks pretty good, they also did the stereo

i was just going to use the texture and the og model proportions and just free hand it

[neon portal]

http://www.audioreview.com/product/portables/boomboxes/memorex/mp4321.html sadly, it's a noname

[neon portal]

have you got a link by any chance?

[amber atlas]

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/mqP5be

Artist is: Kostiantyn Boichenko

This was done in Unreal. Pretty neat take on it.

I probably would sculpt the lighting scheme out a bit more, but I think he really captures that grime and he also has some nice fine detail in there.

[neon portal]

oh wow

that is amazing

[neat spindle]

That TV's amazing! I really need to brush up on my Blender skills. Learned the basics during the pandemic and haven't really kept up with it since.

[amber atlas]

Thanks! I was trained in 3dsmax, but a couple years ago I switched to Blender and never looked back. I love it.

[left grove]

I need to learn texturing myself

Great work @amber atlas!

[neat spindle]

Looks very professional 🔥

[wet atlas]

Great work!

[wet atlas]

Now turn it on

[amber atlas]

I have found the TV screens don't work in remix, probably a render texture issue

😦 the computers do though...

[amber atlas]

You can do it! Also thanks!

[amber atlas]

Blusin', thanks!

[wet atlas]

Projected camera are a big thing in Source, I wonder how the HL2 RTX team have pulled it off

[amber atlas]

Yeah I was thinking of that last night while driving lol. We could def ask.

[wet atlas]

the TV is basically a projected screen of a room elsewhere in the map

[oak forge]

It's definitely worth asking, I wonder if they have better handling of render textures in a closed fork of Remix.

[amber atlas]

Yep and displayed on a render texture. So it's either the camera, like remix only lets you have one active or something... Or it's the render texture and there's either a setting somewhere or it's just not supported yet. Those are my current theories anyway

[amber atlas]

True!

[somber sundial]

Remix only handles one camera at a time

Pathtracing several cameras would be incredibly expensive

@tame shard Have you guys figured this out in HL2?

"This" meaning the Rendertarget cameras

[tame shard]

we have written a ticket for Remix which mentions render target cameras since they're a bit important in the first map of HL2 particularly 😛

doesn't work for us yet but we can't exactly ship without it so I imagine it'll be fixed eventually

[somber sundial]

Coolio! That's something for the future then ^^

[neon portal]

ngl the difficulty of learning to model is pretty discouraging

[amber atlas]

Glad you guys are pushing on HL2, definitely going to be a great example of a feature rich renderer. HL1 and 2 and Bloodlines were the reason I personally got into the game industry so I'm personally invested in how this all turns out ;3

[amber atlas]

I for one believe in you. There are 2 things you need to learn:

1. The tool
2. The concepts

The concepts can translate across most any industry tools, so if you just do blender tutorials (the donut one is a classic) you'll get a grasp of the tools and the concepts at the same time!

The reason I'm so fast is just repetition and knowing the tool and concepts enough to translate it to new and different contexts. So to me, it's not a matter of IF, it's a matter of WHEN you learn to model. Because you totally can. And also you should because it's super fun and rewarding!

[tame shard]

well HL2 has so far found all kinds of exotic issues which fixing has improved the runtime and toolkit in many ways, and in addition, the asset standards we've asked to be able to meet brought stuff like POM more into the forefront as we believed (rightly, I think) that we couldn't just put a 4k texture on a cube and call it a day for lots of HL2's world geometry

POM both increases the visual fidelity and massively reduced our theoretical scope

[amber atlas]

Hell yes! I've been a huge proponent of POM since Amplify Shader Editor made it super easy to set up in Unity so many years ago. It's such a great technique.
Also thanks for letting us reap the benefits of your guys project haha. Hopefully we can bring something to the table too soon with our similar needs/issues.

[neon portal]

4 hours to make a donut

souns about blender tutorial 😄

thanks for the advice, i'll come back with a banging donut

and hey, there are donuts in this game so could be useful clutter for later

[amber atlas]

That goes into SO MUCH. Modeling, materials, rendering etc. I don't know how much it goes into uv mapping and game specific requirements like tri count and topology etc. but it's such a great start on the path. I expect some NICE donuts ASAP ;3

[neon portal]

as someone who does this for a living and got a degree - do you think it's possible to get into that industry without a degree?

[somber sundial]

Nobody gives a rats about our degrees

Speaking as someone who did go to school for it and has worked in the industry for 10 + years doing art

Your portfolio and personality is all that matters

Ain't nobody care if you've got a fancy paper

Unless you're trying to move country and need to convince them to let you live in said country, but that's not industry stuff.

[amber atlas]

100% you can. My first job out of Art Institute, I sat next to one of the best environment artists I've ever worked with. I asked him, "So where did YOU go to art college?" He goes, "I dropped out of highschool sophomore year..."
He taught himself on Polycount. And tutorials... Man invalidated my education in 2 sentences ;3

[amber atlas]

You are so right. When I hire for my team, I don't look at resume or name till WAY later. I look at portfolio FIRST. I care about the work. Then I interview and I care about the ATTITUDE.
I rarely go through someone's resume/cv

[somber sundial]

I was entirely self taught through things like polycount and youtube etc etc as well, school just became a place for me to sit down and hone my skills and most importantly make connections

[amber atlas]

Basically it has never been a better time to get into this stuff, the resources are all ther and there are tools like Unreal/Unity/Blender. When I was coming up, it was... walk to Barnes and Noble and pick up a book on 3d modeling and read it before you get kicked out. Then hope that translates to whatever 'student copy' of the software you have when you get home. Youtube and open source free software has changed the whole game.

[somber sundial]

But the most important skills I learned, I did so on my own

Tonnes of people get into the industry that way

[amber atlas]

90% of what I learned came AFTER college

[somber sundial]

So just go for it

[amber atlas]

+1 to everything Taggey is saying

[somber sundial]

Shit is A LOT more competetive today though haha

It was starting to get pretty wild back in 2014 when I graduated

But that was nothing compared to today

The school I attended for example, the stuff the students there make to just get accepted to the school is often things I'd consider good enough to get hired for a junior position

Sure wasn't like that back when I got accepted

[amber atlas]

That's fair. I think a lot of times Indie development has some huge advantages because of that. The bar you need to meet for AAA is so high... but people don't even like AAA games these days, so I think self taugh + joining a small studio is a really viable and fun/rewarding path

[wet atlas]

I'm living the opposite

I'm getting a degree at almost 30y/o because lacking a degree have been more of a curse than expected

[amber atlas]

Oh snap. What industry?

[wet atlas]

I can't specify

[amber atlas]

I'll make up a cool backstory for you in my head then.

[wet atlas]

Nothing cool about reality though 🤓

[somber sundial]

Space... Monster hunter, cowboy!

[amber atlas]

Exactly.

[left grove]

yeah true, I am a full stack developer, so as most game devs would put it "not a real developer"

self taught too

[amber atlas]

We have a team of full stack devs for our backend, it's so CRITICAl to everything we do. And their API interfaces with so much of what our game is doing on the backend. The unsung heroes of any live game or service...

[left grove]

oh yeah by no means is my work useless, a lot of people rely on it. I just never went into game development due to how competitive it is, and with current economical climate it's a lot worse

I'll open some issues on the github tonight, see if anyone else can solve some of the problems we are having

and try to reach out to that guy to see if he has the answers to all the invisible textures and such

[oak forge]

Getting a degree was basically the worst mistake I've ever made, I would have been better off moving out on my own after high school and skill building/networking right away. College actively took my focus away from useful skills and I learned nothing useful for my field except for the lessons I brought to the table myself. The money I spent on tuition could have been spent on actually useful tutorials and subscriptions for software, instead I got a piece of paper that still gets me ignored. You'll eventually hit a bureaucratic brick wall without a degree but my recommendation is to go to the job market first then get your degree afterwards.

Part of that was going to college during COVID though 😛

[amber atlas]

You are an officer and a gentleman... I'm going to continue working on some prop replacement stuff, I think am starting to figure out what things are a model and what things are BSPs. Also doing some research I'm finding out a I didn't give the level designers enough credit, the street lamps are based on actual Santa Monica street lamps... just missing one of the curved bars on it. Like... man these people somehow 50/50 split authencticity with also having their own unique take on the world. So cool.

Still thinking that a good proof of concept for me to push on is just to focus on the safehouse map, so the room, the adjacent apartments and the hallway.

Do a replacement of everything and see where it lands.

[left grove]

sounds like a good plan! I just think if we each tackle a problem, we'll solve most of the bad problems right

[amber atlas]

I also suspect as I go through I'll find shared models/textures and I'll see things replace in other scenes naturally. I do think they had some pretty unique assets per area, but there is also some re-use

[amber atlas]

Hell yeah

[left grove]

and yeah every passing day I gain more admiration for Troika games and their work on something I already love

[amber atlas]

I will say, once I get back to the characters my rage will boil again. I wake up at 3am thinking about Boris Checkovs uv maps. The bottom of his foot overlaps with his pantleg... I literally think about it like twice a week. Lol.

the bottom of his foot has to look like his pants, or a triangle of his pants needs to look like the bottom of his foot

you can't win

[left grove]

that's crazy

[amber atlas]

The characters have a lot of little errors like that. When I first started character modeling I actually handled the UV's the same way without knowing it. Flat cards for front and back and just blending on the side. Multiple textures for characters sometimes rather than one shared map. It was a hell of a time to be a game dev lol

Still... VTMB 10/10 don't @ me

[left grove]

And yeah I think textures being reused will be helpful in the sense that, the areas we do first will be a lot more work but over time each area will require less and less work (even though they all will require a bunch of work)

[amber atlas]

hehehe

[amber atlas]

That's my hope 😄

[left grove]

I wonder if we can get some cool graphs with like "textures done" and "textures left to do"

sorta like how OpenGoal does it for the Jak games, but they have lines of code to decomp and stuff

[sinful lily]

I've messed with these character models so much. I made a recreation of Kilpatrick's Bail bonds in Unity (somewhat related, but kinda not so I won't embed and take up space) https://youtu.be/3dmn1DdjHmU
But Arthur's foot got mangled when decompiling the model, so I made him sitting down so it's less noticeable.

[amber atlas]

Dudeeee this is so cool.

[left grove]

yooooo, that's really cool

[sinful lily]

It's playable, demo should be in the description I think

[amber atlas]

I like pumped my fist when the video started....

NO

[left grove]

it is, gonna try it

[amber atlas]

Im downloading now

[left grove]

same 😂

[sinful lily]

programmer by trade, so most of my time was spent re-making the computer logic & menus functional.

[left grove]

just watching that video, you did a great job

[amber atlas]

Yeah I am very excited/impressed

[sinful lily]

Everything else is just original assets, decompiled/ripped from Source, ported to Unity.

[left grove]

See it's so good, I instantly tried to press ALT + X

[amber atlas]

haha same

[sinful lily]

There are some tools for Unity + Source engine that make it easy to auto-port in.

[left grove]

the clock works

[amber atlas]

this is so sick @sinful lily

[sinful lily]

Yeah lol it's simple to program the clock so that it turns the hands accurately

[left grove]

yeah honeslty!

are you also going to be working on the RTX Remix? 👀

[sinful lily]

The other small detail in the background is the random environmental sounds

[amber atlas]

in one of my game prototypes you have a phone that tells you the time on your computer lol

yeah the soundscape is great

what a cool prototype dude

[left grove]

the repo is on the pins here, give me a shout and I can add you as a contributor

[sinful lily]

They were done in the original game so that they used polar coordinates based on the origin being the player character

[amber atlas]

also you KNOW i gotta turn that radio on and listen to deb of night

[sinful lily]

so the random environmental sounds in the background play at random coordinates between certain ranges, certain radius around the character and certain height and between a certain range of voume

[amber atlas]

that's awesome, i've been realizing how useful polar coordinates are for LOTS of things

[sinful lily]

I've been trying since the Portal RTX release... But you guys have made much better progress than I have.

[amber atlas]

Working within constraints can be painful. That's why I moved on from modding to using Unity 😄

[left grove]

hey I feel like we still have lots of cool problems to work through sadly (or gladly? passion project lets goo)

but making good progress

[sinful lily]

@amber atlas May I DM you about some thing I'm working on?

[amber atlas]

absolutely!

[left grove]

tbf I have noticed that all VMTB maps are on VRChat, quite an interesting discovery

[neon portal]

"you guys" lol. Two or three highly competent guys and rest of us bumbling about at a novice level :v

[sinful lily]

still better than me

[neon portal]

soon I will join the expert circle after the blender donut tutorial

[left grove]

that's the thing tho, we each contribute however we can, that's the beauty of this

of course it'll take a long time, but we are all passionate about the game so we can work together

[neat spindle]

But did they get put in prison while going out to research reference material?

[neon portal]

is there any way to list the important assets in this game? Meshes and textures already have a usefully unique and abstract IDs so it'd be good to stick to that, my amateur ass named all replacement textures 'ass', 'aids' or 'asdgdgfh'

[left grove]

we can probably rely on some of the work that Wesp has done to know the names of each texture as they will all be within the Unofficial folder inside your game folder

ayo found a reddit post by @sinful lily, I'll post a link to this reddit and see if we can get more people in here

[sinful lily]

I think some custom mapping would make the Remix stuff a lot easier

the glitches from walking in the parking garage are probably from area portals if I'm not mistaken

[left grove]

100% at least from what I have seen the nvidia dev on here talk about HL2

wait, we need to make mirrors work, but they can't reflect the player

[sinful lily]

If we're running these games on modern hardware that is capable of rendering RTX, then most likely those area portals are not totally necessary.

[left grove]

these may be different for everyone

[neon portal]

is this by design or an accidental bug?

oh damnit

[left grove]

vampires

[neon portal]

I guess that makes sense, if these ID numbers aren't anywhere in the original game files then there's no reason they would be shared across different users

[left grove]

I can investigate and check

oh send them again please, I'll verify if I can find them on my game

this is good to know

[amber atlas]

Heheh I hate to be that guy... but in Whitewolf lore, almost all Vampires have reflections except... the Lasombra!

[left grove]

ok we good then, no Lasombra we need to worry about in this game, right?

no Hecata either 😔

[amber atlas]

I think there is ONE Lasombra in the Unnofficial patch actually! Secret quest line with him I beleive...

[left grove]

oh I see

[amber atlas]

Also as far as ID's go, I don't think Remix has any conceviable way of scrubbing meta data like names and such of files that would be consistent across all games, since meta data is stored differently depending on filet type etc, so I think that's why they went with a meta data agnostic approach to hashing files. That's just my theory though?

[left grove]

we could ask the nvidia dev for that

If anyone knows anything about Peter Sauter (author of this https://youtu.be/oXdvLzEl6-c?si=AXEjJEl5u3E3Veau) let me know

[neon portal]

I tried to stalk him out - this video was shared online by a few people who stated they aren't the authors, the author hasn't linked any of his other socials, he uploaded his video under a full name that seems to be generic enough to bring up a ton of results

[left grove]

yeah, I left a new comment, doxing myself but it's worth it for the cause

I left some links to here and the repo on reddit too, may help who knows

[amber atlas]

Sacrifices!

[neon portal]

thank you for your service

welp, I tried to help, back to the donut 😄

[neat spindle]

When you set up the Unofficial SDK it will decompile all the assets so you can see the original texture/etc. names.

[left grove]

haha thanks, when I can have most of the culling issues resolved like the invisible walls I will also go on to the doughnut

[left grove]

even better

[neat spindle]

If we wanted to be really thorough (particularly now that there are more people on board) we could set up a spreadsheet or something with all the assets to track what's been replaced.

Help avoid repeating others' work.

[left grove]

yeah could do

try and put it on git somehow

[neat spindle]

If it's something people will find useful I'll work on that tonight. It'll be a fair amount of work, though, so I want to make sure it's useful.

[left grove]

https://www.moddb.com/mods/vtmb-unofficial-patch/downloads/bloodlines-unofficial-patch-115 new revision of UP came out, will let you know if it fixes invisible cars

[amber atlas]

One thing I'm a bit concerned about, is that is 'solving the culling' actually solving it? or just turning it off? because ideally we'd be able to make use of culling since it's a realllllyy nice optimization

not to make things complicated

[left grove]

please automate the process as best as you can, like any script to list all texture names or so

[left grove]

yeah you are right on that one

[neat spindle]

Don't worry, that was my plan. Time to dust off the python skills

[neon portal]

Wesp is such a blessing for this game

[neon portal]

behold