The L.U.R.K. team wants to provide the best possible experience from Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl, we don't plan to skew the scope of this game, because I, like many others, fell in love with the game because of the story, the realistic gameplay, and the atmosphere. I plan to preserve and improve on that concept to the best of my abilities, and our team has vowed to do so as well. Which is why we took it upon ourselves to provide that experience. We want to fulfill a niche that's otherwise unfulfilled in the modding community. We want to bring as many features to Stalker without damaging or changing the original theme of the game. While improving upon that concept with features that were dropped off the development cycle from GSC, such as stealth AI, and a strong foundation for balance, as well as dynamic A-Life, and an unprecedented visual presentation that no other Stalker Overhaul can touch.

Post news Report RSS Weather 2.0

In the midst of a myriad of changes, ranging from introducing new graphical rendering methods, hearing complaints, and simply learning about weather and graphics in general, it was important for us to completely restructure our weather system.

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Weather and Graphical Infrastructure 2.0
Ever since the release of L.U.R.K. 0.9, there has been praise, and complaint of the graphics, and some complaints weren't without reason. Complains such as overly dark ambient light (shadows), convoluted and hard to see distant landscape, sun positioning errors, purple fog bug, inconsistent graphical quality, poor morning weather, and various other concerns have been addressed.

That's not to imply by any means, that Weather 2.0 is a mere culmination of fixes. We're presenting for the first time, our second overhauled infrastructure for both the lighting renderer, and the weather system.


The Major Changes are as follows, bullet-ed for convenience:
  • Shadows and ambient light sources are calculated based on sky color, rather then sun color.
  • Overhauled fog renderer for cloudy weather, less sunny contrast.
  • Shadow Jitter, tapers the sharpness of shadow calculated by surface distance.
  • Morning and Evening Transition is much more fluid.
  • Post Processing Filters for Sun Color.
  • Sun plays a more active role in lighting.
  • Ambient Lighting is much less overcontrasted.
  • Mipmaps fade to enhance the visibility of distant geometries.
  • Color maps are more consistent, elegant, and fluid.
  • Grass sprites are blended.
  • Optimization from 300mb memory usage, down to 100mb
  • Tons of attention to detail


Without any further ado, the weather system 2.0, in tandem with our overhauled lighting engine. Please provide feedback and response with your opinions and thoughts.



Please note that even the previous update regarding weather hasn't contained our new, overhauled system, and only served as a summary layout for new users. Containing images of a modified variant of our previous build.

To put things into perspective, here's an old image from 1.0552:


You'll notice that the normal maps are convoluted, the shadow contrast is nearly pitch black, the normals have too much strength from a distance, and many other issues are prevalent in the existing public build that aren't show in this image. As opposed to..

The new L.U.R.K. 1.1: Weather 2.0 Build:


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Post comment Comments
robotfiend
robotfiend

Awesome. Keep up the good work!

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CommunistCake
CommunistCake

My eyes. They are *******.

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SIGILL
SIGILL

Rofl! I think you should see a doctor.. xD

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Hendar23
Hendar23

Very nice.

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tnathan475
tnathan475

amazing, no other word for it.

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FrankCastle1911
FrankCastle1911

I think the graphic quality is even better than Call of Pripyat! I cant wait for this mod!!!

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PunisherPT
PunisherPT

Call of Pripyat have good grafics in DX10...
But with this video the weather is avesome!!!!

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PeeWee_89
PeeWee_89

Even better in DX11 :)

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Team_Clarky
Team_Clarky

This is truly amazing work L.U.R.K. team...

You have done yourselves proud, cant wait for 1.1 release!!

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JPJ5624
JPJ5624

This has to be the greatest mod I've ever seen. The amount of work put into this is astounding! The other mods can't compare!

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Team_Clarky
Team_Clarky

hahaha can the world handle such an epic moddd :P

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0rpheus
0rpheus

Oh wow, this looks gorgeous! Simply beautiful

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Hidraga
Hidraga

кульно

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