Lykaon

[Benzenzimmern]

Lykaon

In this thread I would like to post my progress so you guys can see what I do right now and comment on it. Criticism always helps.


I am working on different weather settings right now and I made a short video about it (I disabled particle clouds so the sky is more visible).

 

[Benzenzimmern]

 

[Odinsauge]

Don't know what to criticize, it looks great.

 

[Cethu]

Love the morning sky! But i think the diosrtion effect during the rain looks a bit too unrealistic on meshes.
PS: Thanks for all the tutorials on wiki and yt - a priceless help for beginners like me (waiting for more)

 

[Benzenzimmern]

This distortion effects (you can see it very good on the house in the last scene) is very buggy, so I completely deactivated it now. It also improves the framerate. I just didn't recognize it while I was recording the video.

 

[ghost55]

One thing that would make it a lot easier to play would be a map (or at least on objective marker) of some sort. I keep getting lost in the middle of the forest.

 

[Cethu]

Well, it wouldn't be a proper forest if you couldn't get lost in it

 

[Benzenzimmern]

I wanted to do a map but things that should work didn't work for Lykaon. The short answer I got was "Your level is too big " and the long answer was that someone might find a solution. ^^
But it shouldn't be a problem after a while, since npcs tell you very exactly where you have to go if you listen well (or you can always just open the Journal by pressing "J" )

 

[Kilrogg]

How big is your level?

 

[Benzenzimmern]

The "playable space" is 1500 world units big, but of course it looks even bigger with backround meshes for forests, hills and mountains.

 

[Kilrogg]

I'm guessing 1024 is the max to ensure everything works properly.

 

[Benzenzimmern]

Yes, I guess so. The Witcher 2 was never made to have very big levels. It was more about details. But I am sure that there is a solution to this problem.

 

[yubyub96]

Hey Benze, I have to say I love your mod, its amazing, the forest is gorgeous!
I have two suggestions and one is more of a question:
1) the first quest you get, the harpy contract, feels weird to me, you just got to the town and you find this man in need who asks you to kill the harpy, I felt it was too quick to get such a quest, perhaps it will be more like,"something attacked me, it went into the forest, go investigate and I will pay you, then, ok you know it was a harpy, kill it and I will pay you on behalf of the town merchants"
2) can you make a better performance version? I perfectly know you will but i want to ask you as a fellow ( noob ) modder I am, how do you make a mod have a better performance?

Thanks for the great mod!!

 

[Benzenzimmern]

1) The story of the quest (and most of the other quests) is still a placeholder. CD Projekt told me the release of Redkit three days prior and I didn't have a lot of time to throw together the demo. There will be a better reason in the finished version.
2) I will. The secret is to only load your groups when you need them. So before Geralt walks through the town, I don't have to load the small village behind it etc. or you do a separate instance for the town like they did in The Witcher 2. I don't want to do that and I don't want loading screens for interiors, so I will work a lot with view distance. Always check your meshes so they don't have a view distance of 0 (0 is about 2000m).


The barber

 

[Benzenzimmern]

With all this bad weather my level seems to get darker and darker. But I like it.

 

[BritishSpy]

How do I run this? There was no readme file in the .zip.

 

[Benzenzimmern]

You run it like any other mod. When you download the Redkit patch to play mods, you will see this page. There's all the information you need to run it: http://redkit.cdprojektred.com/index.php?c=download

I hope you have fun.



Don’t feel like creating a mod? If you would like to play others’ creations, please, make sure your Witcher 2 is updated to Patch 3.3. When it's done follow these steps:

1. Download the latest patch 3.4 and install it.

2. Create folder called “UserContent” in your Witcher 2 folder in Documents, e.g. *Documents\Witcher 2\UserContent - this is where you will put the downloaded mods. Make sure you have enough space on the partition with My Documents to store mods there.

3. After the mod is downloaded, unzipped and copied into UserContent folder, run userContentManager.exe which can be found in the Witcher2/bin folder. There make sure you have checked the box next to the mod that you would like to launch.

4. You have two options:
4.1 Save and Run - this will save your mod choices and boot the game.
4.2. Save and Exit - this will save your mod choices and exit the User Content Manager.

5. Once you’ve chosen the mod and run the Witcher 2, go to New Game/User Content and select the mod you’d like to play

 

[yubyub96]

Hey benze, would you make a tutorial on optimizing mods? I'm currently stuck because I want to add tree shadows so the forest looks realistic but it kills my laptop, i have lots of trees but with render distance of 500.
Those screenshots look great! you seem to be making an amazing work with the mod.

 

[Benzenzimmern]

You could set the shadow distance to "Medium 35".
If your forest is really dense you can go to the asset browser, filter mesh and search for "shadow". Search for meshes like "forestshadow" and drag them onto your level. Now disable shadow for your trees, enable shadows for "forestshadow" and scale it to the size you need (most likely pretty big). The mesh does all the shadows for you and it looks very convincing while the framerate cost is very low.

But a general tutorial on how to optimize mods is pretty difficult, since there are a ton of different ways to achieve that. Making a lot of different partitions (there's a tutorial on that) for different parts of your level or even interiors like in The Witcher 2, using "Occluders" and in general looking at the view distance of every mesh you put into your level, so it only will be displayed when it needs to be displayed. This is most likely the most important thing.

 

[Benzenzimmern]

The Force of Nature

I worked a lot on the weather and the environment and it still is not perfect, but I think I am pretty close to what I want to achieve. I have yet to find out how to set the direction the trees are bending so they only bend in the direction the clouds take.