Game:

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl (2007)

Duration: 4:24

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S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl is a beautiful game that has aged very well for a 15 years old game, partially because it was very ahead of it's time when it came out, but did you know that the most up to date versions you can officially play are actually visually downgraded compared to the original release?

There were some effects, including the one showcased during the video, that were removed with the 1.0004 patch due to severe performance concerns at the time (early 2007!), which is a shame for future hardware that could have handled those effects much better.

Most of those effects have been restored a while ago in more modern versions of the engine for Anomaly or Lost Alpha, but never for the original vanilla Shadow of Chernobyl at least as far as I know, and I still think that the original game is really great and deserves to get those effects back as well.

Thankfully though, a mod released recently called "Shadows Addon", which does several different things, restored some of those effects for the vanilla engine and some other variables later restricted by patches.

By just getting the xrRender_R2.dll from the mod and replacing the vanilla one by it, the "Grass Shadow" option in the official in game menu (controlled by r2_sun_details) now works again and as intended, and shadow maps, which were originally limited to 4K with -smap4096 in the exe launch options, are unrestricted again and can now go above this value, 8K with -smap8192, and even 16K with -smap16384.

It is important to increase the resolution of the cascade shadow map, because for grass shadows to match grass distance radius, you will ideally need to extend the first cascade from default 12 to 40, with r2_sun_near 40, and if your shadows are 4K or especially below, it will look too pixellated.

The "Shadows Addon" mod is also supposed to restore the player character shadows on the environment, which look phenomenally immersive, but sadly for the moment I couldn't figure out how to re-enable it, the mod was released recently and I've tried to contact the modders to get more info just yesterday.

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