So, it's quite safe to say AHD v1.0 has gone down quite well and while I'm sure many people are delighted to play SoC in true HD without having to look at muddy textures and outdated visuals I haven't stopped there. AHD v1.4 will include further significant improvements and fixes which will include:
1. Remade by hand alpha channels for a substantial amount of textures greatly improving their rendered appearance in-engine.
2. Vanilla SoC fixes: New normal and parallax maps for surfaces that don't have any at all but should.
3. Further vanilla fixes: Textures that had normal\parallax maps but by default aren't assigned now are.
4. Even higher resolution textures for some surfaces to compensate for how the GSC devs scaled the texture to the surface it is assigned to.
5. Significantly cleaned up and brand new Parallax maps so surfaces only have the details parallaxed that should be, avoiding depth inaccuracies and errors and correcting the "goosebumps" look on many surfaces.
6. Added a fake Phong reflection effect for human NPC visors and goggles.
7. Integration & balanced customisation of SRAP v1.2a (I've patched the issues it had).
8. Diversified human and mutant NPC behaviour.
9. 4K human NPC textures.
10. Other small necessary fixes.
With all of these changes, improvements, and fixes it'll then be down to all of you Stalkers to catch any anomalies I might have missed ;o)
One thing very much worth noting is that AHD v1.4 will fully pivot to being as original X-Ray (1.0) friendly as possible. This means "out of the box" it will include the 2K vehicle and NPC textures to stay as far within around that 3.5GB memory limit as possible. This means the 4K vehicle and human textures will be available as separate additional downloads.
Finally, here are a few screenshots and a video showing some examples of the visual improvements AHD v1.4 will bring.
Completely reworked parallaxing
Completely reworked prop buildings remastered and using parallaxing
Human NPCs (that needed it) now have brand new correctly mapped textures. 2K variant pictured.
Video quality I'll get addressed soon, damn AMD always breaking their video encoder driver portion in some way or another.
Looks good, bro.
Thanks :o) AHD isn't intended to be a total conversion mod the purpose of it is to give people a complete vanilla experience done to modern standards addressing only issues that need addressing for a rounded gameplay experience, eg; traders being able to repair weapons and armour. AHD is for the purists, and first time players that don't (and shouldn't have to) want to deal with all of the original SoCs gameplay shortcomings.
Just don't replace the vanilla textures with completely different ones and we're golden. Upscaling is just fine.
The aim of Absolute HD is to use at least 99.9% of the vanilla textures. Only extraordinarily poor quality textures that can't be reworked with a combination of by hand work and AI have more extreme measures taken but even in those cases anything done is made with the source material in mind to produce a replacement as close to the original as possible.
Very nice.