Rays of Anomalous Worlds : Weathers + Reshade addon

RAW is a comprehensive visual overhaul of the Zone, made with the goal of a maximum visual impact achieved with minimum tools, hassle and performance loss. It is a combination of reshade color grading and weather system redesign and will cost about 5-15 frames of performance.

It has started as a quick curiosity dive into the weather editor and ended as a full overhaul pet project for the game using just the standard game weather assets and reshade. It is the only mod contribution I will have ever made - everyone is free to build and expand upon it further, if you like, to keep making the Zone look more stunning and haunting. Have fun.

All the info about installation, FAQ, and recommended addons below, after the gallery.

GALLERY

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All screens taken during actual gameplay at 60fps with no special tweaks, using mid-high settings complemented with addons: SSS, GTR, CVFX 3.5 and Upscaled Skies. Note that night-time images may exhibit some banding due to png/jpg compression - it won't come across in the actual game.

FEATURE HIGHLIGHT

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- form & function: RAW is about striking the optimal balance between beautiful visuals and game playability that takes into consideration all of the x-ray engine's quirks. Absolute realism is not the goal.

- quality over quantity: less variations and skyboxes, much more attention to details.

- seamless horizons: minimised rough edges and weird artifacts where terrain and sky meet in the distance

- seamless transitions: cherry-picked skyboxes with smooth hourly transitions

- subtle eye-adaptation: interiors and exteriors balanced at day and night, without crazy jumps in exposure

- striking weathers: each weather feels distinct with unique pros and cons, with multiple wind variants for Arszi's radiation overhaul mod and systemic tree sway that allows to tell just how strong the wind is at a glance.

- beautiful, playable nights: night weathers designed to be dark but playable even when you loose your NVGs and go against x-ray engine enemies that behave as if they all had thermal vision. Now you may actually see them almost as well as they can see you, with visibility tweaked for the optimal ratio between realism, stylisation and good gameplay.

- fog and atmospheric haze: Instead of removing fog and stretching draw distance beyond what the game was designed for, RAW embraces it. It respects the limitations of the old engine and level geometry and utilises fog as artistic tool as well as to cover the various imperfections, just like original Stalker developers did. Those are old, old maps.

WEATHERS

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Clear weather reveals the beauty of the Zone in all its stark glory. Extreme visibility during day and clear and visible nights air sharpshooters, but the strong, high-contrast summer sun can pose a different kind of risk to a Stalker's perceptions, especially an unwary ones positioning himself uphill and against the sun, or trying to peep into shadowed areas while himself standing out in the sun.

Partly Clear weather is pleasant and subdued, with visibility ranges reduced by atmospheric haze, but also much less sharp sunlight contrast to worry about on the flipside. Variating pockets of sunlight and overcast make for perfect moderate conditions for a roadside picnic.

Cloudy weather is bleak and darkly but with fairly low-contrast. It is also near pitch-black at night.

Foggy weathers have seriously compromised visibility ranges but scattered full-moon lighting provides sufficient exposure to navigate at night.

Rains have 3 degrees of intensity, from a joyful summery shower to biblical downpours.

Storms split between those that rage directly on top of you and those that can be heard raging far away but which ultimately went past you... or are coming towards you yet.

FAQ

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Q: is RAW the greatest thing ever?
A: probably not

Q: ok, but it is pretty good, right?
A: yes

Q: how complicated is the installation?
A: download one shader using provided link, then drag and drop RAW into Anomaly. About 1 minute.

Q: is the reshade bloated with a million effects and heavy on performance?
A: RAWshade is tight like a bowstring, with no unnecessary bloat, however it will still take 5-15fps regardless. This is why nvidia/amd upscaling technologies are very helpful with reclaiming frames by rendering at lower resolutions and upscaling to higher ones.

Q: is the reshade even necessary?
A: Yes, it is integral to RAW. It's like a post-production structure that pulls together a few smart tricks that allow weathers to look the way they do.

Q: but do I really need to download a shader effect from some link?
A: Yes. 'Film workshop' is free but can't be redistributed by others. It is crucial to achieve the RAW's final look because of the shadow-compressing tool that it has.

Q: will RAW work with x addon / version / rendering?
A: I don't know. It was built using the 1.5.1 & 1.5.2 dx11 version of Anomaly.

Q: but it is ok for me to test and find out, right?
A: absolutely. check the info on recommended addons.

Q: enhanced shaders?
A: No. There's potential to ES but there are also problems, so I'm not using them myself, but it may be possible to retune RAW to ES by adjusting the global lumscale/hemi/amb values to get to a similar gamma curve.

Q: Screen Space Shaders?
A: All the way. They created some quirks with the fog at night but otherwise made the visuals so much better and are highly recommended.

Q: can I use this as basis to do my own weather spinoffs and create new, cool things for Stalker?
A: go for it!

Q: can I buy you a coffee?
A: no. but you can promise to recycle plastics, help the elderly and be a good, rational human being who doesn't shoot humans, dogs and cats outside of games. Shit Rats and Controllers are fine, bandits in kneecaps only.

Q: how long did it take you to make this?

A: Too long. We don't talk about this.

INSTALLATION

=======================

[1] Get 'Film Workshop' shader

1. download [https://www.patreon.com/posts/48118405]
2. unpack and move [Film Workshop] folder into [01 CORE\bin\reshade-shaders]
3. RAWshade is now complete and ready to use

[2] Place (01 CORE) content into Anomaly root folder

[3] Adjust your in-game settings

1. start the game with Debug Mode [x] ticked on
2. open console
3. type "cfg_load RAW"
4. hit enter

[4] Confirm the reshade is working

1. Tap [page-up] to open reshade menu.
2. Check that all the effects are present, active and in the correct order.
3. Confirm that 'performance mode' in bottom right is ticked on [x]
4. [page down] toggles the reshade on/off (keep it ON, obviously).
5. Tap [page-up] to close the reshade menu.

[x] Bloom
[x] prod80_06LumaFade_Start
[x] AmbientLight
[x] prod80_06_ChromaticAberration
[x] UnrealLens
[x] prod80_06_LumaFade_End
[x] Deband
[x] AdaptiveTonemapper
[x] FilmGrain
[x] FocalDOF
[x] Film Workshop <<< ![MAKE SURE THIS IS NOT MISSING]!
[x] Lightroom
[x] prod80_03_Shadows_Midtones_Hightlights

[5] Good hunting, Stalker.

INFO

===============

CHEAT SHEET

[page-down] show reshade menu

[page-up] toggle RAWshade

[page-up + shift] toggle VFX Booster on/off

VFX Booster

If you don't enjoy the sun glare effect in strong, clear daylight, hit [shift + Page Up] to toggle the VFX booster off. It will only have a visible effect during bright, clear weathers and won't affect anything else.

In-game settings

RAW was adjusted to change as little of the game's default settings as possible.
If you'd run the "cfg_load RAW" command during installation, only few things have been adjusted and with very minimal effect, that you may as well keep even if you decide not to use RAW. You likely won't notice any difference beyond sunshafts mode which are volumetric by default and which RAW changes to Screenspace. You will find the setting in the in-game menu, so again, no sweat at all.

RAWshade

RAWshade has been very tightly tuned - there's nothing in it that's unnecessary. Good advice: don't mess with it, if you don't know what you're doing. Changing any parameter, even slightly, will likely mess up the look in one weather or another, somewhere, as every effect connects to another in some way like a house of cards.

If you want to mask your hud against the grade, the UImask is included in the load order, with full-screen 0-alpha png mask that you'll have to draw from the file. If you don't know what this is, don't worry about it, it's fluff.

ADJUSTING BRIGHTNESS

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Remember that better is the enemy of good: it is highly recommended to just play for a little while before instantly messing with any brightness and exposure settings: see how different weathers and times of day come out on your screen first for a while. Compare with RAW screenshots.

If you have played for a while now and feel that the game is definitely, positively too bright or dark on your monitor, I suggest that you fine-tune it with very small increments using the [Gamma] and [Lumscale_Hemi] settings from within Console rather than the default in-game sliders, where increments are quite strong and broad.

[Gamma]

will lift global contrast a bit if you feel shadows are too harsh.
You only need tiny adjustments in the range of (0.95 - 1.1)

[lumscale_hemi]

will lift only areas of sunlight shadow.
Again, tiny increments should be all you need.

[lumscale]

RAW was tuned for default game lumscale value of 2, but will work all the way up to 3. Pushing too much may be unnecessarily extreme and can cause shadows to be too deep in clear daytime weather, as well as cause possible unexpected sun flares from the VFX Booster.

RECOMMENDED ADDONS

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SSS, SCREEN SPACE SHADERS

SSS makes a fundamental difference to the game's visual fidelity and RAW has been balanced specifically towards using it. You can use the provided settings_screenspace_SSR file for convenience, but be mindful that future versions of SSS can change the structure of the file, so the best practice may be to spend 60 seconds to manually change the values on the settings file of your current version of SSS.

The provided file and parameters below come from version 14 of SSS.

[Anomaly/gamedata/shaders/r3/settings_screenspace_SSR.h]

G_SSR_INTENSITY 1.3f
G_SSR_MAX_INTENSITY 0.6f
G_SSR_SKY_INTENSITY 0.6f
G_SSR_FLORA_INTENSITY 1.0f
G_SSR_TERRAIN_BUMP_INTENSITY 0.6f

G_SSR_WEAPON_INTENSITY 1.0f
G_SSR_WEAPON_MAX_INTENSITY 0.03f
G_SSR_WEAPON_MAX_LENGTH 1.3f
G_SSR_WEAPON_RAIN_FACTOR 0.3f

UPSCALED SKYBOXES

[https://www.moddb.com/mods/stalker-anomaly/addons/2k-upscaled-skyboxes-almost-definitive-edtion]

cleans up the skyboxes compression mess.

If you're using this, you may want to pass up on SSS sky debanding module - there may be too much blurring overall, since RAWshade uses its own debanding to clear up the horrible color gradiations and volumetric light spreading at night and that takes care of the skies as a bonus.

AGGRESSOR GRASS

while most of the grass in base game is fine, some maps look a bit funky.
I recommend using aggressor grass for Jupiter, Truck Cemetery, Army Warehouses.

CVFX v3.5

CVFX adds great visual fidelity to particles and anomalies.
I recommend the older archived version 3.5 that can be found in the description section of the addon. It is a bit more toned down than the newer versions.

GTR, Global Texture Rework

[https://www.moddb.com/mods/stalker-anomaly/addons/global-texture-rework-beta]

If you use GTR (it looks great, but terrain may be a bit funky and glossy in places), make sure it does not overwrite the single conflicting file from SSS addon above, else you will see black grass during foggy weather.

Some tiny concrete surfaces in GTR may come out black through the fog.
GTR is in beta - it's no big deal but just headsup warning.

Some grounds have strong shine to them, so you may want to fish out just the ground textures from the addon and delete that folder - everything else will work nicely regardless.

If you DON'T use GTR you may want to increase the gloss factor a bit. Open Console, find 'gloss_factor' parameter and adjust the number accordingly to tune to your texture mod and screen. Test while looking at the ground against the sun in bright strong sunlight to get the best idea.

ARSZI'S RADIATION

Great addon that reworks how radiation functions in the game into something more interesting. I recommend Demonised Edition which is more up to date and less conflict-prone.

RAW weathers have been tuned to work nicely with it, and you will be able to tell how strong the wind/radiation is based on the sway of trees.

PERFORMANCE TIPS

=================================

- use nvidia/amd upscaling tech if available, greatly helps with performance.

- lower your world draw distance in-game, most importantly dynamic and static objects to at least one below maximum. This and grass settings murder frames even on powerful rigs and will vary from one map to another.

- turn off grass shadows and lower the settings. Try 0.8 size, 100 distance, 70% density for grass type coverage, or 1.2 size at 30% density for ‘shrub-type coverage’ and even better performance.

- turn down object detail setting.

- lower Zone’s aLife simulation settings if CPU is your choke point.

- finally, you can turn off the below effects in RAWshade, sacrificing some flash without loosing the essential look:

[x] prod80_06LumaFade_Start
[x] AmbientLight
[x] prod80_06_ChromaticAberration
[x] UnrealLens
[x] prod80_06_LumaFade_End

[x] FilmGrain
[x] FocalDOF

CHANGELOG

====================

1.0

missed a text file in the upload and also the addon was stuck in authorisation for 6 days, so was updated with no changes beyond the missing file being restored.