Radium News - Nov. 2016

Hey everyone, I have good news regarding Radium. Although I have been busy things have been smooth sailing as of late and I'm pretty excited with how Radium is turning out.

Radium is being rebuilt on top of Absolute Nature 4.01, though we will have many custom elements of our own. Absolute Nature 4 looks amazing, sparing one error with a certain bed not appearing, which I can live with. All scripts that were previously CoC based are now based on vanilla scripts. This was done due to the fact that we're back making Radium for the vanilla game instead of Call of Chernobyl. Never fear though, as shortly after the release of this mod I will be releasing a dev kit which will include everything we've done, including all CoC-based assets. The main reason for this change for vanilla is that we were never quite able to get CoC-type elements stable enough for the vanilla game. This also means there are a couple of things that are going to be cut from Radium, but they aren't things we ever told you guys about so you will have no reason to miss them.

Notice the texture detail in the above screen? This is due to switching to 64-bit Rendertargets. This is done internally as well as a small change in the shaders. It should not affect performance on graphics cards that can run Radium to begin with. You may have heard of 64-bit Rendertargets from the new Skyrim launch. Basically, all textures, bump maps, etc. are twice as "precise" as they were before, which ends up creating a great level of detail that previously was unattainable. Even many vanilla textures now look quite good.

Some other big rendering changes is that I have decided to let Marty MCFly's MXAO ambient occlusion shader be the default SSAO shader in the game due to how well it fits with Stalker. There is also optional volumetric and height fog which adds a lot of atmosphere, working sun shafts in DirectX 11, and the game is now "gamma correct" in that through the code and the tonemapping the game now uses a Gamma correct image of 2.2. You'll notice almost all games use this. I have also added in ACES tonemapping, which you may have heard of from Unreal Engine 4, though we use a simpler technique that has the same effect. With that said, we also support 10-bit HDR on Nvidia cards (and I would like to do the same for AMD cards too, I'll look into it), though you will need a 10-bit color monitor to support this feature.

Thanks to Loner and others on Facepunch the mod will also include a HD models pack that replaces Stalkers in the game with better looking and more varied models. Loner also plans on tackling more textures in the game and Koma will be tackling sounds in Radium to give everything a nice, unique take.

I'm very excited about what we have in store for you guys. I will try and make sure News is no longer as infrequent and that we have more new things to tell you more frequently.