Widescreen Gaming Forum

G'day
There seems to be no info on this great site about the recent gfx patches/hacks into the STALKER game which gives you stunning gameplay images. Basically, one guy made 3rd party shader code (Float32) for the entire game plus new textures and other tweaks such as sharpness = bombastic picture quality improvement..

Now, the new shaders also give better fps and smooth performance in all detailes and dynamic lights maxed out in the setup so the natural question is anybody tempted to give it a test in surround, i.e. make a triplehead test be it in Matroxblackbox or SoftTH?


For details/screenshots/HD videos check these forums for id "grahf" "Jonelo" and "decane":

http://img404.imageshack.us/img404/8461/10571486xi8.th.jpg
http://forums.guru3d.com/showpost.php?p=2379168&postcount=866

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=235774
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=219684&page=37
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=219684&page=36
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=219684&page=35
(The light/color chemistry might be interested to Destructo-Bot and other pros here)

Home of the Float32
http://www.thefloatingpoint.org/main/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?2760.0#post_2809

Home of the "Texture sharpness" and other mods:
http://board.oblivion-lost.de/forumdisplay.php?f=98
http://www.gsc-game.com/index.php?t=community&s=forums&s_game_type=xr&sec_id=17&offset=-120

And the local thread with the 1.003 GSC widescreen patch and Racer_S patch:
http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/node/5564

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The main widescreen and TH2GO Stalker threads are here
(can we hope for the 1.0004patch FOV hack as well !?!):
http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/node/#comment-
http://widescreengamingforums.com/node/5564
http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/node/7553
(HUD tweak)

//keep in mind that widescreen has been supported by the officials devs from the patch 1.0003 on..

STALKER is an amazing game and there are several mods that really up the visuals with my favorite by far being the realism graphic mod:

http://stalker.filefront.com/file/Realism_Graphic_Mod;80082

But more important than any mod are the tweaks you can do to the user.ltx file ... the difference between a vanilla .ltx file and a tweaked one is night and day ... Be sure to back up your original (and if you want to try the mod above, DON'T use the .ltx that comes with the mod--it's terrible. Just use the mod itself)

For some reason I can't get the float mod to work on my setup--don't know wy but I'd like to check it out. I would stay away from the "sharpness" mod though--that's just an artificial way of adding false "detail" to the image by sharpening the edges of the image ... something graphic purists hate. You're not really seeing more detail, more like more distortion!

The last version of Float32 is part of the official 1.004 update patch, which has been already released both US/int lang. versions by the game publisher..
http://www.stalker-game.com/en/?page=patches#patch0004

In fact there are people running all sorts of combinations:

- Float32 and everything stock
- Float32 and some better sky textures
- Float32 and some better sky textures and all sharpened textures
etc..

Just skimm through the supplied forums and tweak it accordingly
to the best guru's examples if your particular hw allows for it..

I think the gfx is now just stunning and even all the dynamic lights and shadows run on affordable hw like X195.., 7900 cards in 720p or higher..


So because of the fps improvement I'd like to see some TH tests of it anybody?
thanks

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edit: the last versions of Ffloat32 didn't make it to the release of this
official patch, i.e. it's recommended to install it independently..