Comments - Panopt1c0n

If none of the solutions provided in the readme.txt and disabling any windows compatibility mode have worked for you (also FEAR.exe needs to be patched with large adress aware so I suggest you try to patch it yourself in case the .exe from the mod might have strangely failed to do so), the other possible solutions left for you could be to either edit the default.arch.cfg and delete "HDTextures_3.Arch00" (but you will miss some great textures from the mod) or not do any of that and play the game with texture quality set to medium (worst solution but the textures will still be better than vanilla)

For me there was one map where I had no choice but to play with texture set to medium during 2 checkpoints, so you might have to do that at some point anyway.

That's a great idea :D
I think what I would see myself do is to take both files and make two Default.archcfg: one for max quality when it runs fine and one for stability to replace the first when the game struggle too much, like in this area where I had the "out of memory" message, that way I could enjoy your mod as much as possible.

Also if people still have issues even with your future updated version, the last resort option could be to just lower the texture quality setting to medium, when I had to do this it didn't take away your textures, they were just less sharp, but it might take away too much good stuff to be a good solution tho, it seemed to me that at medium setting the game uses less bump map texture for instance, I don't know exactly what it takes away. The HD texture pack for Max Payne 1 has a similar issue where it ended up being needed to play with texture quality at medium, but it's not wort it, better play it at high and expect some crashes; same goes with your mod, I'd be fine with some stability issues as long as I can still complete the game and it doesn't happend too often :p

You really did a great work to end up having so few issues :)

Glass05_D.dds is the only glass texture that I thought wasn't needed, the others are quite gorgeous, I always loved how the glass looks in this game, but with your mod I was amazed, I also never realised there were some hands dirt on some of them, your mod revealed a lot of details I never saw on some textures.

I am glad I was right about Picture_D.dds, I thought it could have been a wrong dxt convertion, but it could also just have been a bug on my end.

I hope you'll manage to make an update on your mod and I can't wait for news, good luck tho, it might be quite some work to make it more optimised than it already is.

Also one thing I learned while doing my silly editing of your textures that might help: lowering the resolution might not resolve the stability issues completly, it might just be more of a problem of how many textures are used by the game, for instance the prefabs folder seems to be the one that causes the most issues, and I think it might be because most of the textures in it are used on so many objects in the levels that the game might struggle to apply them on all on the objects. I think the reason my game crashed with "out of memory" message is because the checkpoints where it crashed use a lot of different textures from different folders in the prefabs one. I don't know if that will help in any way but just in case I prefered to point that out :) I might be wrong tho, I don't know much about how all this works.

I finally played the whole game with your mod :D
I still had some issues tho, but not like before, only 3 checkpoint glitched out (two during Bishop, one during unauthorized personnal) but reloading with the texture quality trick worked out and I didn't need to do it each time, most of the other glitch I encountered only appeared after a tremendous amount of reloading while ingame, but not that much of a problem, like I said, as long as it's rare it's fine, also I almost didn't have any crash.

One thing tho, during Point of entry, near the end when you are near the labs, I had 2 checkpoint that wouldn't work at all with texture quality up to maximum, if I try to set it to maximum the game crash with a message "out of memory"...wich is weird... if loading those checkpoint with texture quality already set to max then it takes forever to load and either crash or just almost no textures are rendered by the game. I could set texture quality to medium tho, but couldn't wait to see when max would work again, wich it did one checkpoint later, the one with the creepy clones ninja that jump from the windows to ambush you, I think it's one of the last checkpoint of the level.

Other than that nothing wrong. I think the part I actually enjoyed the most was the last levels, in the underground lab, not that it's the best visuals your mod gives, but I think the original textures of this levels were the worst of the entire game due to low res, so with your mod it finally looks great.

Two final issues I found:

_One Glass texture tend to disappear often, I first thought it was linked to the glitches I have when loading a level/checkpoint/save goes wrong, but it could not, because for me it also does it when everything is fine, the texture is "HDTextures_1.Arch00/tex/DemoOffice/Glass05_D.dds", it mostly happend during the level "Watchers", and actually I think it's not needed, this might be one of the rarest texture if not the only one that don't gain any benefits at all from your mod, the only way to tell the difference with the original is from very close, yours has more grain to it, but that's about it.

_I think something might be wrong with a texture, in Alice Wade's office, on her desk there is a familly picture in a frame of her with her father: that's the texture that might be wrong, because when I played the only thing visible was Alice's shirt in the picture, the rest was black, unless we look at the frame from very far, when checking the textures files I didn't find that familly picture, but only a part of it: Alice's shirt, so I don't know if the issue is from that one (HDTextures_3.Arch00/Prefabs/Office/Picture_D.dds) or from the other part that I didn't find..that's so weird that just this simple picture is made of several textures, unless this is just a glitch on my part, but I don't think so, I did try the texture quality trick and so on, and it was still there.

Thanks, I used dsoal+openalsoft with hrtf for EAX, that's why I needed the compatibility mode, but I tried Creative alchemy instead and realised it was much much, very much better, although a bit too reverbed sometimes and it lacks some bass, but it doesn't need the compatibility mode to work and there's no comparision about how much greater the audio quality is with Creative Alchemy.

Anyway thanks for taking the time to read and answer my long comments, in the end I absolutely enjoyed your mod and the amount of details with it is actually impressive, especially when combined with Sikkpin Shaders mod :D
I don't think I could play the game with te vanilla textures anymore now.

I had the same issue, and found out disabling "windows compatibility mode" resolved it. Don't know if it'll work for you, but that might be a possible fix.

It's really weird :/
Your textures don't affect the game's performance at all, yet it seems my game can't load them all, it always fails so, either crash or make objects disappear and then crash, and as I said changing the texture quality each time seems to be the only solution, but doing it ingame tend to lead to crashes as well.
I actually did change the size of all textures that are 8k and 4k to 2k, just to see if that would change anything, and well...it actually works better, loading levels works well, but it's still unstable when going to a new checkpoint or a new level, or even just reloading. One thing that seemed to work was to toss the prefabs textures away... but at this point the mod would be less interesting without those files.
It's a real shame because your mod is great, but I can't use it...

Edit: actually, it's quite a wild guess, but the only thing I didn't try is to disable the "windows xp service pack 3" compatibility mode, I have it enabled to use EAX. I don't see how it could do anything to this mod, but either it's just pure luck or it's really doing something, because trying the game with it disabled seems to work...although I don't know if I would sacrifice EAX to use an hd mod :/

ReEdit: Ok...now I am sure this is the fix... this time I deleted my silly amateurish texture resized version of your mod, and used your untouched files, to be sure I even added my other texture mods that change the blood and some effects and the sikk shader mod, and loaded the game without windows compatibility mode, tried to play 3 levels, reloading often, I quicksaved and reloaded often, etc, I did everything to get a single glitch and nothing !!!! :'D
Even more funny EAX seems to work slightly better, I also realized some music wasn't playing when using the windows compatibilty mode... So it was just a damn silly mistake on my end...

So my appologies for thinking the issues were tied to your mod and not some silly modifications I made. Now I feel I wasted my time changing all those textures resolution..but well, t'was for science xD

So in the end the only issue remaining are the 2 warehouse textures that are pixelated, after comparision I can tell that it's because the originals are pixelated as well, I actually tried to use a simple denoise filter on the texture with a simple picture software and it worked great, so if you're interested in fixing this only issue your mod probably has I'd say just edit those two (named "MW_Corrugated02_D.dds" "MW_Corrugated03_D.dds", located in "HDTextures_2.Arch00/materials/Industrial/Warehouse"), and that's it.
Once again, you did a great work, and I hope I didn't waste your time, at least not as much as I wasted mine resizing your textures, but that's how much a great work you did, wouldn't have done so much to make it work otherwise :)
Also, you're right, while doing my silly editing I saw you optimized the texture as much as possible, lot of texture are only 1024x1024 or lower or 2k, etc, not everything has a high res as I first thought.

Hi, first off great work ! :D
Couldn't imagine someday someone would finally make an hd textures mod for real, I admit at first I didn't notice it much and thought people were right saying F.E.A.R wouldn't need better textures, it's only when I started playing and progressing through the game that I thought it's a damn must.

Some problems tho:

_with the display option "force restart" on the game either crashes when reloading ingame or it bugs out until it crashes. With the option off reloading is fine but it still crashes randomly or glitch and so on. Also if setting texture quality to minimum before loading and changing it back to maximum works, it makes the game unstable when I do it again while ingame...wich is a shame because it would have helped to solve some of these issues...

_when I proceed to other levels sometimes the game doesn't render the hud and the menu, if I don't pay attention to that the game will crash anyway, so I have to use alt+f4 and proceed to the texture quality trick.

_some textures seem to make some areas appear more lit than than they should be, and some very rare textures aren't better than the originals and feels unneeded and (it's even more rare) worse (for exemple one texture in the wharehouse level, since I don't know how to say what it is in english I searched the texture file name: "materials/industrial/Warehouse/MW_Corrugated03_D.dds", this one is very pixelated), also because of the increase in details of some textures they seem to be less reflective (I mean it's less noticeable), some floor tiles for instance, but I still prefer the increase in detail so it's not really an issue here. Most of your work is awesome tho I am not saying you did a poor job at all.

I think I covered every issues I have with this mod, sadly I really want to play with it but this issues really make it tedious, for instance I reload almost all the time to try out different ways to play or to do the most badass thing possible, with this mod I am always afraid that the game will freak out when I reload, so I am having less fun in the end. Also if having the game crash some times is okay, it gets quite anoying when it does it a lot :/

I think one possible solution could be to try optimise the textures, so the game can use them as safely as possible, either reduce the number of textures your mod has or decrease the resolution for some of them, I think some textures might not need such increase in resolution, and some vanilla textures could still do the job well. But seeing the amount of textures you upscaled I can imagine that would be tedious to do :/
Also, seeing your original mod was also made for extraction point, do you plan to make an hd texture mod for extraction point as well, or was it just for the main game ? I am not a big fan of extraction point (it's the story I think), but I would definitely try it again with such mod...if it doesn't have the same issues tho (just realized vanilla Extraction Point is already less stable than the main game)

Anyway thanks for your mod, it's still awesome, and sorry for the length of my comment ^^'