VtM: Bloodlines - High Poly Patch

[Drog Black Tooth]

Well, since nobody wants to help me code the Arcanum patch I got bored and decided to help Wesp5 with his patch instead. Because I'm a good person. And want to help people.

Anyway, I just re-installed Bloodlines a couple of days back after watching that cringy love letter video on YouTube. It's still the best shit game, I love it. However, there's a jarring issue all too apparent on modern systems. It has a Half-Life 2 style LOD (level of detail) system in place, basically models (both NPC and static) start rapidly losing polygons as you move a few steps away from them. Everything constantly switches between low poly and high poly (each model has 5 versions in total). Like that cop going down the road starts with a buttonless shirt and then his shirt suddenly has buttons as he moves closer to you. Or that almost naked chick under a street lamp, her boobs constantly change shape depending on how close are you to her.

I couldn't play like this. No way in hell.

Half-Life 2 has a "r_lod" cvar which controls this. Setting it to 0 (or -2 and lower) completely disables this tomfoolery. But no such luck in Bloodlines. It almost seemed as the cvar does nothing. And yet...

I attached a debugger to the game, and just for fun took a look at what the fuck does access r_lod if anything at all. And sure enough, there were two subroutines that did. And it turns out, Troika fucked up (as they often did) and the code only checks for r_lod 1 and r_lod 2, not even r_lod -1 which is the default value!

Anyway, I made it so that r_lod is always reported as 0, which it couldn't do before. Now the game always loads highest quality geometry and no longer fucks with it. There's no god damn "pop in" effect anymore! The polygon count for the whole scene will increase a few times. This would be very taxing on systems of the day, but nowadays you can do it, even with 32x CSAA, no less.

Best shit patch I've ever done. Even better than my famous Arcanum sprite mirroring disabling patch.

tl;dr HOW TO INSTALL

DIY:
Open engine.dll in a hex editor. Change 0x01 to 0x00 at 0xA6791. (OR you can do it in memory with Cheat Engine or something, the address is 0x200A6791)

Download:
This is a pre-patched engine.dll from Wesp5 patch 9.6. Put it to your \bin folder.

Fucking enjoy already. Go look at some high poly vampire boobies.

 

[Jarmaro]

True hero you are

 

[Anthony Davis]

This is pretty amazing. Any before and after screens anywhere?

 

[Mustawd]

Men, post screens plz.

Great job as always drog.

 

[Kalin]

Bloodlines modesty mod plz

 

[Lazing Dirk]

Nice. I can't say I ever actually noticed it before, but I suppose I'd better edit it since I'll probably notice it now. I did notice the animations suddenly becoming jerky when further away though: pedestrians gliding along with about 2 or 3 skeletal changes per second at best. Any chance it fixes that too?

 

[SCO]

Unlikely. That's probably a optimization of the AI/animation routines. But who knows. Man, this game really needs a open source port.

 

[Drog Black Tooth]

This is pretty amazing. Any before and after screens anywhere?

Here's a couple of before/after screenshots. You can see that the whole scene is different, including the shadows, the manhole in the background and some detail on walls/pillars. The prostitute (and her boobs) is the most obvious tho, her boob shape constantly changing is what pretty much prompted me to do this patch.

before: http://i.imgur.com/RiEt9Hh.jpg
after: http://i.imgur.com/jYwwEZA.jpg

before: http://i.imgur.com/Rk35kXu.jpg
after: http://i.imgur.com/Lz1aOWd.jpg

 

[Drog Black Tooth]

I mean, this is only 1366x768 on my shitty laptop, it should be super annoying at 1080p or more, how the fuck were you guys living with this crap.

And it even affects cars, benches and stuff like that. Like a car would have no shadow underneath and flat wheels and then when you come over it all suddenly pops in. Especially jarring in motion.

 

[SCO]

I lived with it because my laptop is pure trash. Honestly, depending on how it turns out here, i may revert it locally. But i also think it's the correct decision to make it like this by default.

 

[laclongquan]

Never notice this before

Mostly because I use True Patch instead of Unofficial "Patch". So shits like this were dealt with years ago.

Welcome to 2017 2012, scrubs!

To kindle the flame, let me post some words from the big bad Tessera

You might try experimenting with different values for the default FOV settings. The game was originally created for 4:3 CRT monitors.

I find that on a 16:9 or 16:10 widescreen monitor, changing the default FOV from 90 to somewhere between 68 to 72 degrees makes the game look and feel a lot better. On a 16:9 HD widescreen monitor, for example, I have found that a setting of exactly 68.25 degrees gets rid of most of the distorted "fish-eye" effect... and it also ensures that turning your character and other such things looks and feels much more natural and correct.


PROCEDURE:

First of all, open up the config.cfg file (located within the VTMB\Vampire\cfg folder) in Notepad, and search for the line that says r_anamorphic and make sure that it is set to r_anamorphic "1" in order to enable widescreen resolutions.

After you do that, you must run the VTMB ResPatcher utility included within the TPG package and have it patch the game engine, so that it can display widescreen resolutions properly. The VTMB ResPatcher utility will add the necessary code to the engine, so that it can display additional resolutions that the default engine is incapable of (such as 1920 x 1080 HD widescreen). Before doing this, you will need to know whether your widescreen monitor uses 16:9 (HD) or 16:10 resolution. Then it's just a matter of clicking on the correct button in the ResPatcher utility... either 16:9 or 16:10, depending upon your needs. Then click on "Patch It!" to apply the actual code to the game engine. After all of that is done, you can shut down the ResPatcher and you'll never have to use it again. Those changes to the engine are permanent (they can, however, be reversed or changed by once again using the ResPatcher utility).

Even if you think that you have already done all of that stuff, I would do it again... just to make sure. And don't forget to add the startup switches to your VTMB desktop shortcut, in order to force your desired resolution. The details on how to do all of this stuff are included within the TPG package. Just look for the appropriate ReadMe files in the Utilities sub-folder.

Okay... you've done all of the above. So how about pushing it a little further..? Modern video hardware is capable of enormously better performance than anything that was around back in 2004. So let's really push VTMB and get it to look its very best.

Try these tweaks, for starters. Here are my preferred tweaks for running VTMB on a modern widescreen monitor. Simply open up your autoexec.cfg file (or create one, if you don't already have it) and add the following lines to the end of that file:


lod_Enable "1"
lod_TransitionDist "1200"
cl_v_geometric_detail "10"
default_fov "68.25"
cl_ragdoll_collide "1"
r_lod "-5"


Those tweaks are a good part of the reason that my VTMB screenshots look so much better than most other people's screenshots. Even the old alpha Source engine was capable of FAR better graphic detail than anything else that was around at the time. By adding the above lines to your autoexec.cfg file, you'll be pushing the engine to render all of its graphics in pretty much the best detail that it is capable of.

There are even more tweaks than those... it can get pretty extreme, if you really wanna dig into it... but those tweaks will add so much more detail to the game that you'll be quite surprised at just how good it can look. Back when VTMB was released, if you tried to add those tweaks to your game files back THEN, you would almost certainly either crash your video card completely, or else you'd end up trying to play the game at such a low frame rate that it would be effectively impossible to play. But as I said... today's video hardware (even a relatively cheap modern video card) is about 20 times more powerful than anything that was around back when VTMB was first released. So these days, it is perfectly safe to go ahead and push the ol' VTMB engine to its limits.

I also recommend opening up the control panel for your video card and setting anti-aliasing to FORCED, prior to playing VTMB. The Bloodlines engine will not activate anti-aliasing on its own... so it needs to be forced via your video card's control panel. At very high screen resolutions, I find that either 2x or 4x AA is plenty for this game. At lower resolutions, you may wish to go even higher, at the expense of graphical detail.

On my own system, I set my video card to 2x AA forced, prior to playing VTMB. When I am done playing, I switch my AA settings back to "Application Controlled."


So to sum it up:

(1) Make sure that you have gone through all of the necessary steps to set up VTMB to run in perfect widescreen resolution. This only needs to be done once... but it also needs to be done CAREFULLY.
(2) And naturally, make sure that you have selected the correct widescreen resolution for YOUR video monitor (16:9 or 16:10).
(3) Add the tweaks that I listed above to your autoexec.cfg file, to force the VTMB engine to render its graphics at a much, much higher quality than its defaults.

My condolence, Drog~
Although with the obscurity of True Patch and the prevalence of Unofficial "Patch", your work will still has its use.

 

[Goral]

Well, since nobody wants to help me code the Arcanum patch I got bored and decided to help Wesp5 with his patch instead. Because I'm a good person. And want to help people.

Infinitron DarkUnderlord VentilatorOfDoom Crooked Bee JarlFrank

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...rsion-of-the-unofficial-arcanum-patch.112998/
Why won't you make a news post about Drog's grand plan? That way many more people will see it at least and the chances of him finding some help will greatly increase. You post shitty news about shitty RPGs but you won't post this? WTF? What do I need Codex for then when I can read all this stuff at IGN? And sometimes with less shilling (if it's Obsidian or inXile game). Decline.

 

[Drog Black Tooth]

Never notice this before

Mostly because I use True Patch instead of Unofficial "Patch". So shits like this were dealt with years ago.

I'd be surprised if this was fixed in Tessera's patch, because none of the LOD cvars do anything in Bloodlines. You can't just fix this issue by copypasting some commands from a Half-Life 2 config file.

 

[DarkUnderlord]

Well, since nobody wants to help me code the Arcanum patch I got bored and decided to help Wesp5 with his patch instead. Because I'm a good person. And want to help people.

Infinitron DarkUnderlord VentilatorOfDoom Crooked Bee JarlFrank

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...rsion-of-the-unofficial-arcanum-patch.112998/
Why won't you make a news post about Drog's grand plan? That way many more people will see it at least and the chances of him finding some help will greatly increase. You post shitty news about shitty RPGs but you won't post this? WTF? What do I need Codex for then when I can read all this stuff at IGN? And sometimes with less shilling (if it's Obsidian or inXile game). Decline.

lol

 

[laclongquan]

I dunno, Tessera is a prima dona of a modder, shits like this ARE his obsessions. It got fixed years ago and so I dont notice any strange stuffs like that.

It's more likely to exist unfixed bug in his patch (ie NONE) than there exist a prevalent visual eyesore like that. Knowing his quirk, he would have sleepless nights to fix it first.

Man is prime Codex quality. Pity his skin is so thin, and his mentality is so bipolar, that he could not stand a true Codex baptism by fire.

 

[Roguey]

I barely notice a change even when flipping back and forth, this is some mirrored-sprites-level attention to detail.

 

[Jazz_]

I dunno, Tessera is a prima dona of a modder, shits like this ARE his obsessions. It got fixed years ago and so I dont notice any strange stuffs like that.

It's more likely to exist unfixed bug in his patch (ie NONE) than there exist a prevalent visual eyesore like that. Knowing his quirk, he would have sleepless nights to fix it first.

Man is prime Codex quality. Pity his skin is so thin, and his mentality is so bipolar, that he could not stand a true Codex baptism by fire.

Tessera is a crazy autist who mostly stole and rebranded Wesp's and other modders work.

Great job, Drog.

 

[Drog Black Tooth]

The foreign press is already writing about this amazing piece of modding craftsmanship:

Kolejny powód by odwiedzać RPG Codex i kolejny dowód na to, że to najlepsza erpegowa strona:

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/vtm-bloodlines-high-poly-patch.113118/

Drog Black Tooth, jeden ze starych gwardzistów Codexu i autor nieoficjalnego patcha do Arcanum (sic!) rozwiązał pewien problem graficzny w Vampire The Masquarade: Bloodlines. Wesp5, który jest niemieckim naukowcem-chemikiem, a nie zawodowym programistą (zna pythona i to tyle właściwie) nie mógł sobie z tym poradzić, a Drog zrobił to momentalnie i teraz postacie/samochody nie tracą wielokątów (polygonów) w zależności od odległości w jakiej się od nas znajdują. Teraz gra ładuje "poligony" najwyższej jakości i ich nie rusza. Dla osób, dla których grafika ma duże znaczenie będzie to na pewno spora zaleta. Instrukcję jak zainstalować tę poprawkę znajdują się w linku powyżej, ale prawdopodobnie zostanie ona dołączona do UP 9.7 Wespa.

Wśród naszych programistów nie ma fanów porządnych erepgów? Czemu to tak późno ktoś zrobił?

 

[Baron Dupek]

I still wonder what's his name here.
PS. amazing this shithole inferior copy of digg is still alive.
Maybe potato copy of reddit would be next step but we need people to fuck up design.

 

[Jarmaro]

The foreign press

Wykop.pl

 

[Goral]

The foreign press

Wykop.pl

Joined: Dec 31, 2016

 

[Arthandas]

Joined

 

[Multidirectional]

Great, I thought this shit will never be fixed at this point. I did try entering r_lod -8 command into console because I remember doing same for HL2 back in the day but since it didn't work I assumed it was simply one of the broken things about Bloodlines Source version. My love for the game made me ignore it the best I could but it was always annoying. Thanks Drog!

 

[Drog Black Tooth]

Great, I thought this shit will never be fixed at this point.

Nothing is impossible.

 

[Invictus]

Holy fucking incline!
I thought I was going to get linked to a "higher res titties" mod and this Inclined shit comes up