F.E.A.R. ( FEAR )

[woeful helm]

an additoinal note that I know there's fps issues on some setups wiht the game and I could not get it to boot with the stutter/fps fix installed

[jovial dust]

this is all i've got 😦

[queen sage]

Interesting. So you don’t have the game set to any specific settings or launch parameters for getting remix to work? Just have the runtime in the folder?

[woeful helm]

yep

[jovial dust]

ah well. this game frustrates me to no end, so i'm gonna stop. you guys have fun 😛

[queen sage]

Weird. I’d think you’d want to have the game set to dx8 shaders since that’s SM1

[jovial dust]

it seems to crash instantly for me 😦

[queen sage]

FEAR is no longer available for purchase individually on steam btw Have to buy the entire franchise for the first game.

[queen sage]

Wonder if we need to throw a dx8to9 in the mix for it.

[jovial dust]

it still runs in dx9, just with dx8 level shaders iirc

i'm not sure if d3d8to9 would do anything. worth a try though

[woeful helm]

Is there anything additional I can try to help out?

[jovial dust]

if you could send your settings.cfg file, that'd be great:
%PUBLIC%\Documents\Monolith Productions\FEAR\settings.cfg

[woeful helm]

composite debug view. (I have no idea what i'm doing just poking at stuff at this point)

another curious thing, setting this texture to terrain alows me to see the environment better, even if it is a bit washed out looking

869B8E55E5B600D5

[queen sage]

Prob passing through. That looks unlit.

[steady swift]

The game seems to have a random chance of starting. I had to kill the process and reopen it 7 times until it booted. When I started the game I was treated to a severely flickery screen with a single normal map on it and couldn't seem to get any further.

[agile ember]

I will say the lighting issues look very similar to what we were also seeing in Condemned: Criminal Origins which is a little more stable.

For that game I had to revert to a previous dxvk because of a regression, hopefully that's been fixed now.

[woeful helm]

I’ve been poking at it the last hour and haven’t made much progress, not really sure what to poke at, at this point

[queen sage]

Are you able to get captures?

[woeful helm]

Yeah, at least I believe so, I got one earlier I haven’t tried to do anything with it yet

[queen sage]

Neat. Seems it’s working well for whatever reason. Could you try adding a light and seeing if it shows up in game?

[woeful helm]

Sure, I gotta figure all that out stlil I've only poked at the runtime so far

[woeful helm]

so i see how to create a light but how do I actually add it to the scene?

I see I can set x,y,z coords but there's nothing I see in the editor that shows any coords so I don't have any context for setting my own

oh i'm just blind ignore me lol

not sure what I broke, as far as I'm aware I didnt change any settings but now the games rendering like this for me :(

[woeful helm]

so I completely broke something but it does look like I was able to place a light as seen by the awful red glow I've got going on here

[queen sage]

Stable hashes

[woeful helm]

not sure how I broke the rendering though it was fine all morning ;-;

[queen sage]

Eh. I remember reading something about rendering at this level for fear was broken.

[woeful helm]

🤔

[queen sage]

Looks like some material texture is getting rendered. Like a decal or spec layer.

[woeful helm]

Hmm I dunno what I changed or how to reset it guess I’ll have to look through the textures and see if I did something dumb, unless there’s an easy way to reset things, or just reinstall and start over

[queen sage]

Can reset the rtx conf in the dev menu and see if does anything

[woeful helm]

Oh… my graphics settings changed, not sure how I managed that when I can’t see menus lol, gonna disable and go through the images I sent earlier and see if I can fix it,

Weird still broken I have no idea what I did

[woeful helm]

messed with graphics settings and got itback...

progress?

[queen sage]

Yea I’d say that’s progress

[woeful helm]

Any suggestions of what to poke at next? This is the first game I’ve messed with

[queen sage]

Maybe try to get the sky working? Could be as easy as making the texture

[woeful helm]

turned on DX8 shaders for science looks pretty normal to me 😂

[woeful helm]

ooh good call Ill try to poke at that, giving my poor laptop a break for a bit, gonna try to get setup later where I can run remix on my desktop and just move the packages to my laptop cause my poor laptop is struggling with it

[queen sage]

How’d you turn them on? Were you able to change the settings while remix was injected or using some config file?

[woeful helm]

I just disabled it changed the setting in the graphics menu and relaunched with it enabled

[queen sage]

Neat. Some times games change their settings for remix since the gpu id changes

[queen sage]

It uh runs

Needs some love with getting the misc texture passes removed

[woeful helm]

Yeahhhh I’m still learning how all this works so sadly not much progress

Are you running dx8?

[queen sage]

Yea

[woeful helm]

I have no idea what’s better to work with, I guess I’ll keep poking at 9

[woeful helm]

Tried poking at this more and didn’t have much luck, might try a simpler game just to learn the workflows better

[agile ember]

If you want to try your hand at a LithTech game, TRON 2.0 compatibility is fantastic. Just disable advanced pixel shaders, crank the graphics down and disable the skybox in the config file and you'll be good to go.

[agile ember]

As a starting point for that one, I think I uploaded some configs or steps to a remix projects post in the past-- if not, I'll dig it up some time tonight.

[woeful helm]

thanks for the info <3

[compact rose]

why disable the skybox?

[agile ember]

If you leave it enabled, Remix confuses the cameras and there's a lot of texture reuse between skybox and scene. You'll need to do a more in depth rtx.conf setup of all skybox geometries, something I've been waiting for a chance to do with the toolkit.

So until then, basic testing is better with no skybox.

(make sure lightmaps and normals are off too!)

Same goes for Condemned but some of the lightmap issues we haven't been able to get past, same with this game.

[compact rose]

enable sky auto detection then

[agile ember]

It didn't work for this game. (TRON 2.0)

[heady dagger]

How its going?

[compact rose]

Did anyone try this with portal RR build?

[opal nacelle]

any luck with this game?

[craggy oxide]

Uh, new here and while working through the notes folks left behind I had a bit of a "bigfoot sighting." I remix had hooked in and I had a menu. Was not black until I dropped into the "Performance" submenu and it did its autodetection stuff.

Didn't manage to take a picture because I didn't realize what I was looking at until it was too late, and my steps to replicate have been in vain.

[opal nacelle]

did a bit of experimenting with fear and the game does seem to be path tracing (has quite a few issues though)

scene captures also seem to be working

managed to get a few more screenshots

[tame forge]

Well it's a start!

[opal nacelle]

so i tried running the game again, this time with some extra lines in the autoexec and with the 4gb patch and the game seems a lot more stable

however there are still issues with objects being transparent and the lighting popping in and out randomly

also for some reason the textures dont show up most of the time, either they're transparent or fully white

[fathom sapphire]

yo i own fear and a rtx 4070 laptop can i get in this project

[gritty plover]

you can try if you want

[fathom sapphire]

Nice 👍

[fathom sapphire]

I’ll be able to start later today I believe

Sorry I was busy with some random stuff but yeah

[fathom sapphire]

ok umm i never actually did anything but im doing it now

so im gonna try to read through the messages to try and find how to get this to work, cause it's opening but its clearly not rtx remixing

[opal nacelle]

yeah the game doesnt work very well with rtx remix atm unfortunately

[fathom sapphire]

clearly

its very shader dependent

the 3 types of mid 2000s games are: direct x, source engine, and renderware

[compact rose]

What

[gritty plover]

???

directx is not a game engine

[opal nacelle]

yeah although i think fear used to use dx7 or 8 if i remember right

they mustve removed it for the steam version or smth

[jovial dust]

it has a dx8 toggle, but it still runs in DX9 mode

in fact, the only way that it works with Remix is actually with the toggle set to DX9

not sure why

if you got it working with it set to dx8, not sure how. must've been some Remix improvements

[opal nacelle]

i dont think i have so far

but i can give it a try

idk if this helps or not but fear has a sdk on the steam version

[opal nacelle]

so it looks like with dx8 shaders on remix isnt detecting a valid camera

[jovial dust]

yeah. that was the problem

very odd

[opal nacelle]

ye i reckon if someone could fix that the rest would be relatively easy

[fathom sapphire]

Talking about rendering methods

[opal nacelle]

but source engine runs on direct x

[jovial dust]

directx is a rendering API, and renderware and source engine are game engines

they aren't the same type of thing

[gritty plover]

thats not how works lol

[fathom sapphire]

Eh ok, well I guess I’ll just quit the server out of shame

[gritty plover]

i mean

nvm he left

[agile ember]

Could have stuck around to learn 🥴

[keen pelican]

This transparent problem I kinda could solve before, idk about now if it can work

[opal nacelle]

how'd you solve it before?

[keen pelican]

Well, there was thing called "Legacy Cutout... Textures" and if you marked textures as this, they became solid. But Ig this feature was removed due to probable working issue

In future updates its stopped working

And build when it was working, was 258-260 ig

[agile ember]

Keep in mind that you can restore transparency to textures with backgrounds by cutting out the alpha layer yourself. I had some scripts for ChaiNNer to do this, but I haven't touched my Remix projects in something like five months at this point so I don't know if I'll be able to dig those up.

I ran into a lot of problems like that with Red Faction II since it almost exclusively uses textures with black backgrounds for wall decals.

[opal nacelle]

huh thats interesting, I wonder if that would work for spore as well

[fathom sapphire]

IM BACK 🗣️

[gritty plover]

welcome back

[steady swift]

This is progress right? It's with minimum detail + DX8 shaders. Also epilepsy warning (don't even try to boot the game with the remix runtime if you have issues of that sort)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0gT5mT_m7M

[nimble crest]

Yeah it’s def progress. We had to fix a bunch of bugs to get to this point but I’m glad someone has tried it recently

It’s worked for a little while now. It’s just nobody has bothered to post about it I guess

If you want to get rid of the weird flickery sky turn off motion blur and assign a sky texture

[distant kelp]

If anyone knows how to get the menu to render lemme know, in the meantime note to self:

• Enter
• Down
• Enter
• Enter

[gray grotto]

It is pretty broken und not really remixable tho. Tried my best to reduce culling without drawing the entire map but the way they build their visibility lists for geometry and "models" is really really hard to understand and modify.
Was only able to reduce frustum culling but there is still a lot of light leaking indoors.
Models do not have stable hashes due to the way they handle visibility ...

The sky is also only a remix replacement attached to a always rendering unique marker because the original sky is broken

Most stuff is rendered via FF tho (including skinned meshes).
Clips were recorded with the entire map visible. So no culling at all (via the F4 menu).

Files are available here: https://github.com/xoxor4d/remix-comp-projects (latest actions build)

[steady swift]

Hell yes, you are a wizard

[gray grotto]

Dont expect too much .. it is really, really broken and nothing special 😂
But thanks

I have to stop working on this or I'll get burned out creating comp-mods because this one is frustrating af

[steady swift]

Is it normal to have normal maps rendering everywhere still with the mod?

Seems like maybe the mod files aren't working. Did you set any specific in-game settings to get it to be compatible?

[gray grotto]

Oh right forgot about the settings

Dx8 shaders

[tame forge]

Still, this is much, much better than it was before!

[steady swift]

Has anyone been able to get it working for them? It still looked like my screenshot with the -dx9 command line and DX8 shaders enabled. Running the GOG version

[gray grotto]

Sorry the dx9 cmd does nothing (that was from bioshock1). The latest actions build should now include an autoexe and my settings file. Game should create an external console if you launch it

[steady swift]

Nice, thanks, I'll try it later!

[steady swift]

Hmm, I tried it and sadly still had no luck. Still looks the same. The game also doesn't launch an external console for me. I tried a retail version and that threw a bunch of errors that stuff wasn't able to hook so I assume the GOG version is actually working properly at least in that respect.

[gray grotto]

Weird so you extracted all the assets and placed them next to the FEAR.exe? That also includes the fear1-rtx.dll?
winmm (dxwrapper) should load the dll then and this should pop up

[steady swift]

Oh, I'm dumb sorry, forgot about the extra .dll. Sadly I get "[!][INIT FAILED] Unsupported Game or Version of the Game!" with that in there. Which version of the game did you test?

[gray grotto]

fear platinum (gog)

[steady swift]

Weird, that's the exact version I have as well

Does it just look at the .exe?

[gray grotto]

yea

[gray grotto]

https://emn178.github.io/online-tools/sha1_checksum.html

drop your exe into there and paste the sha1 hash here

should be cc74990b4df5378caf4d5342fd3fc73f410a3eca

[steady swift]

Yeah, mine is different it's e5ac870a39aead28391a76a7eaaa9c5d6a9470f6

Seems like I keep getting that one, tried GOG Galaxy originally, then downloaded the installer from the site and also tried to install it in German, lol

But it's always that exe

[blazing elm]

has anyone tested this game today

[steady swift]

It'll probably work the same as before

[pine kernel]

Hello, i decided to boot up f.e.a.r. with remix today, and i was surprsied that it was ray tracing now. I have run into some of the same issues as described above. Has anybody been messing around with f.e.a.r.? I also don't see where i can use @gray grotto patch for this, going to github i can't find anything specific to f.e.a.r.

I am using the dx8 shader toggle,which seems to improve rendering of different surfaces

[gray grotto]

Its part of this: https://github.com/xoxor4d/remix-comp-projects

im currently running a new actions build that you can dl when its finished: https://github.com/xoxor4d/remix-comp-projects/actions/runs/18432055603

[pine kernel]

Ok, i was wondering if it was the black mesa release you have on github, but it wasn't clear to me

ah there we go yeah your other action builds were not available to Download, thanks!

[gray grotto]

Yea they expire. I've added that action build as a release now: https://github.com/xoxor4d/remix-comp-projects/releases/tag/251011

[pine kernel]

thank you i am trying it now

argh i have the same exe issue as @steady swift oh well

[gray grotto]

ah shame. Dont have the time to look into this unfortunately

[pine kernel]

no dw, that was not meant to be a call to action!

[steady swift]

Hmm, mine worked after xoxor did a fix

It's the GOG version

[pine kernel]

my hash is yet different from yours gabdeg

it doesn't matter, i just wanted to check how far the compat patch had gotten with it, it seemed to solve the normal maps overlay issue

anyway sounds like same story as usual, culling issues etc

[steady swift]

Ah ok

[pine kernel]

@steady swift what was it like with the patch for you?

[steady swift]

First level or two worked decently although the skybox was hardcoded in with one texture only, I think xoxor had issues getting that to be picked up properly. Performance was pretty poor with culling disabled though

Later levels had all sorts of issues

[pine kernel]

right

[steady swift]

And the skybox thing would obviously cause issues in levels meant to be dark

[pine kernel]

yeah

it's a shame, Fear is a good one, because simple geometry/level layout, the pbr and lighting could do a lot of heavy lifting pretty quickly without having to deal with reams of different types of assets littered everywhere.

i do still wonder when nvidia was prototyping remix, the kind of discussions they had around game engine culling, because i feel like it would usually stop a project like remix dead in the water. I guess they did just hope people would keep patching games individually...

[steady swift]

Seems like they were overestimating how many people are capable of doing that work

Culling is a major roadblock for most projects. I couldn't finish Manhunt until xoxor removed culling

And it took him a long time to figure out even with his expertise

[gray grotto]

ahh I remember the pain

[pine kernel]

yeah i have three games that really work fine in all other respects but they use internal studio engines and the culling just destroys possibilities.

I would love to pick up more info myself, but i only ever started being aware of game rendering (beyond being a competent user/gamer, watching youtube channels) with remix and i don't have the time, nor any special ability to learn quickly.

i have been looking at the stuff you did for gta 4 like 'fuck i want to do that!' even though i suspect on some level i really don't want to lol

so yes remix = love and hate relationship, i love the core tech, it's crazy, but i also do question the project as a whole

[agile ember]

I think there was a lot more discussion at the time about Anti-Culling, which is a great idea but something that has always been (at least from my testing) not really usable in practice. There's lots of aspects of Remix that sort of feel like they would be amazing solutions for a universal project but bad for individual ones, or great for specific games but bad for a universal project, but I guess that's the nature of a general-purpose tool dogfooded with two specific games on a single engine.

I don't mean that as a slight on Nvidia, just sort of my own feelings on it. It's all way above my head anyhow

[pine kernel]

yeah agreed

[random folio]

damn @pine kernel are you active in every game? 😄 nah cool to see u dude, FEAR would be cool with RTX

[blazing elm]

Since remix is updated can you make a fork for 2 and 3?

[gray grotto]

For what?

[blazing elm]

you have a remix build for fear 1 but the same purple stuff from 1 is in the other games