Blogs - skurtyyskirts

Over the past month, I've been diving into more games to play with RTX-Remix, and spending a lot of time on the RTX-Remix GitHub page, especially the Issues tab. I've been opening tickets for problems I've encountered and brainstorming ways to improve the toolkit. One notable ticket was for Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness, addressing an old issue where Lara's playermodel wouldn't appear in most levels. With help from nv-ajaus at Nvidia, who pointed out a fix for the bridge.conf file in the .trex folder, I managed to resolve it. This success inspired me to undertake a complete game capture and start Remixing.

This part of my workflow is the most tedious. Capturing the entire game means playing it from start to finish, slowly moving around, and pressing the capture button to grab every texture, model, and room. The strain of replaying the game in one go was eased by using the trusty TRAOD SCU by Slobodan Ratkovic, which let me fly around and skip missions faster, making it easier to capture those hard-to-reach areas. The TRAOD Restoration Project by reborninshadow also made my playthrough smoother. With the complete game captured, I could finally start the upscaling process.

Enter PBRFusion by NightRaven, a new and extremely impressive upscaler that I'll be using a lot in my future projects. It offers PBR, including normal, height, and roughness maps. This upscaler uses ComfyUI, a tool that Remix will incorporate in an upcoming update. This gave me a great chance to familiarize myself with ComfyUI's functionality and interface.

Just when I thought I was wrapping up, PappaSlask helped me get Max Payne 2 working with RTX-Remix! He's the head project lead of the Max Payne RTX Remix mod that's currently in the works. I played through the entire game with the runtime installed. It was my first time playing Max Payne, and I can see why their team is so passionate about Remixing it.

I added a few more games to the collection that are compatible with RTX-Remix. I got Deus Ex (2000), Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, Max Payne 2, and Just Cause on the Steam summer sale. Getting them up and running currently. It'll be my first time playing all of them, and it looks like they're all playable all the way through with just the runtime installed. I'm about halfway through Star Wars Republic Commando with only the runtime installed and it's working perfectly. For me personally, seeing an old game being rendered with path tracing is the most incredible/graphically drastic thing I've ever experienced in video game graphics in a very long time. Even without any upscaled or added PBR to the game, the path tracing alone is enjoyable and makes the game feel fresh. Path tracing really has me by the throat, I've been wow'd by graphics in the past, but this is the most incredible thing I've ever seen. I remember the jump from PS2 to PS3 was INCREDIBLE to me, this stacks up to that feeling.

I'll be experimenting with these games in the coming months, I think I'll start off with Deus Ex, I'd like to complete the game soon. I think I'll start a rolling capture of my first playthrough, and make multiple saves so I can upscale and reload a section to get a feel for how these new games will look with added PBR, and to get a feel for what they'll be like to work with in the Toolkit. Most of my time with remix is spent in the toolkit, so it's nice to have time with the runtime, because what other modders have said it's true - we really don't play with our mods, we spend more time creating them and moving on to the next one, or spend time updating them. I really enjoy making mods/finding the next project to start working on.

Well, back to work I go! :)

My computer has had no rest for 2 weeks

Over the past few weeks, I've been slowly but surely upscaling Half Life 2 and it's episodes, along with CounterStrike: Source. And I'm happy to finally say, they're all completed. The vast majority of the leg work getting these done were thanks to the already available game-captures that were available for these games. I started with Half Life 2 and CounterStrike as these were vastly used in Garrysmod. Theoretically, if you have the Half Life 2 RTX PBR mod and the CounterStrike: Source PBR mod packs installed, you should have a practically PBRified experience in most of the maps available on the Steamworkshop. I hope they've been useful, it's nice to know they're readily available. My computers been working literally nonstop around the clock from upscaling, and ingesting, to uploading. I only have 10mb upload, so I'd leave my computer on overnight to get it to upload. From all the packs, the upload failed 4 times.

I'm currently working on experimenting more with Hitman 2: Silent Assassin. It's a very easy game to work with in the Toolkit, and the hashes seem stable enough to accept all of my placed lights. Anything that's Remix friendly usually gets the most of my attention. I want to work on Battlefront 2 more, but the hashes are so unstable and it just doesn't like to accept most changes. This is discouraging because what happens in the Toolkit 80% of the time doesn't translate into the runtime. But atleast the lightsabers work with emissives. I posted the receipe on how to get lightsaber and blaster emissives working in the RTX-Remix Discord in the Battlefront 2 project thread.

Updates to Lego Island 2 are planned. I'm needing to finish up some of the vehicles, see about adding some more lights to some buildings, and overall upgrade Lego Island 2 RTX to PBRify 1.7.0. PBRify had a recent update that does a very good job at maintaining texture integrity of the original texture. It's very smart, and I'd love to see how this new model will do with the project. The water is also something I've been wanting to touch up on. But, these updates might need to wait a little. Remix just announced a TON of new features coming soon. I'd rather master these new tools doing side projects to get used to their workflow and how to best use them before applying them to Lego Island 2 RTX. Garrysmod is perfect for this type of training.

Lots to do, more to come, very excited. :3

My first ever full game RTX-Remix mod is out today, Lego Island 2 RTX! This was a passion project for me. I remember playing this game back on the home family desktop growing up with my brothers and sisters. I'm sure it didn't run that well back then, and we probably had the fog distance pretty close to us. I remember the install taking FOREVER. Most game installs were back then. Booting it back up now and seeing it was nothing like how I'd imagined it and remembered it in my head growing up, and I knew RTX-Remix could fix that. I hope you all enjoy, and I hope I've done Lego Island justice.

Download now!

As each release of Remix comes out, I feel like my knowledge of how to use it grows with it. With 0.3 I learned the install process, the compatibility process and API wrappers, with 0.4 I had completed learning all of the upscalers and implementing those workflows into my projects. And now with 0.5 I'm learning more of the anti-culling techniques and remedy's when fixing a scene, along with scene scale. Culling is such a complex issue because you can't tell if it's Remix that's causing the culling issues, or the game itself. Remix has built in anti-culling options that correlate to the scene's scale size. The default anti-culling settings default to a large scale scene I believe, lowering the settings has completely fixed my culling issues in Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell (an experimental WIP).

Along with the release of Remix 0.5, a HUGE workflow automation improvement was shared amongst the Remix discord by Mechantie. They asked ChatGPT to create a script that would automate the process of replacing the albedo textures, normal maps, etc. by simply running the script. Before this, I had to replace each and every texture by hand. Replacing 1 single texture was a process of selecting 3 textures (normal maps, roughness, and albedo). I assume Remix will implement this auto-replace process natively soon as more updates come out closer to release.

I don't have a particular game I'm zoned in on at the moment. I keep cycling between Garrysmod, Tomb Raider, Battlefront 2 (2005), the COD titles. Each of them have their own hurdles to mount over when remixing, but they're keeping me on my toes. I'm hoping to get into Hitman more the following weeks. The hashes are very stable in these titles, I'm wanting to get better practice with lighting and finding a balance with exposure, intensity, etc. Lots I want to do, so many ideas with so many titles.

My first few RTX mods are out, and I'm pretty satisfied with how they're turning out. I'm getting used to the workflow of Remix and how to use the toolkit. I think the process is pretty straight forward once you've gotten the hang of it. I've been testing out a few games to mod with, and it turns out Source games are the easiest to work with in the toolkit. The trickiest part working with the toolkit is finding stable hashes. A lot of hashes are unstable, and because of that making changes that can be seen within a mod becomes challenging. It's trial and error, but I'm starting to find stable hashes easier and know what to look for.

For a program that's only in a beta release and only on it's second update, this software is incredible. Adding pathtracing to older games (the games I played growing up) is incredible to me and what's keeping me going. The community has a great Discord that's very active, with Nvidia employees that are so helpful and responsive - it's been really cool to see them take the time to answer questions and help us out. They're very open to feedback on their software and I've been able to pass down many ideas on how to better it.

Amongst all my mods, I'm hoping to put the most time into a Tomb Raider 2 RTX mod. An entire remaster of that game is my goal for Remix. I've gotten a few levels remixed, but the project is currently on hold. The project is only playable using a branch of OpenLara - but OpenLara is not currently programmed to work with Tomb Raider 2 just yet - at least not the desktop release. Once Tomb Raider 2's compatible, I'll be right back on the project. I actually prefer that it's worked out this way - this gives me time to practice my skills with Remix so when the time comes to remaster TR2, I'll be ready.