Fallout II Visually Enhanced Patch (FKA Hi-Res Patch)

Hello,
Many years since my last post, Sorry about that, just kind of dropped off the face of the earth for a while there. Life y'know.
I came back to it after a while intending to fix up the code in order to publish it. But instead it kind of evolved a bit.

It's not really ready yet, there are likely plenty of bugs. I probably would have sat on it for several more months but I check in here once in a while, and with sfall now having it's own HRP and the fallout clone by alexbatalov coming along, I thought I should get this out there before it becomes completely redundant.

Anyway, Feature list:

-Rendered with DirectX 11( the HRP used DirectX 9)
-32 bit graphics, frm's(fallout graphic) with different palettes can sit side by side. Support for a 32bit frm has also been added, although there is as yet no program to create these. An 8, 24 or 32 bit BMP can be used in place of some of the interface graphics.
-The interface can be scaled to better fit your screen (beyond 2X which was the only option in HRP).
-Game and World maps can be scaled independently, zoomed in and out by way of the mouse wheel.
-A new way to represent lights in-game for a more natural appearance, original lighting is also improved without the palette limitation.
-Improved fading effects between screens.
-Transparency effects when hiding rooves and item and critter visibility when using the fog of war feature(not fully implemented yet).
-Other stuff I can't remember.

And finally the link to the repository on GitHub where you can grab the first pre-release and source code.
https://github.com/mattwells77/Fallout_II_Visually_Enhanced_Patch

 

I'll have to make a note of that somewhere.

I have the scenery casting faux shadows, It's not working very well yet, I meant to disable it, but must have forgot.

I'll check it out, I've replaced a lot of the world map functions. Pretty much any function that displays anything. I'm sure I've broken a lot of sfall stuff.

What's your screen res?

I can probably dig it up if it's really wanted.

 

I really need to document some stuff at some point, here's just a couple of things.

Coloured lighting is setup but there is no program to implement them on maps just yet and the way I'm doing it might change if big issues pop up. Light colour is currently being stored with the map objects light radius, it ‘s a 32bits value and the light radius has a max value of 8 hexes(4bits), which leave plenty of room to store colour RGB. The big issue here is that unmodified fallout reads the whole value as the radius.
At the moment you can test colour lighting on the PC by changing "PC_LIGHT_COLOUR" in the ini.

The Interface bar has a new option. You can used a horizontally tiled graphic to fill the empty space on either side, this graphic is called "HR_IFACELFT_EXT#" for left and "HR_IFACERHT_EXT#" for right with # being the option number. It can be used by itself or with the usual side graphics "HR_IFACELFT#" and "HR_IFACERHT#". Or you can just make the sides a colour by setting "IFACE_BG_COLOUR" in the ini.

I'll upload the old HR patches to Github at some point, I have to do a bit of work on them first. I was using CodeBlocks as my IDE back then so I need to set them up in VS and get them to compile at least. They will just be for reference purposes, I don't plan to do any further work on them.

@QuantumApprentice
The binary may not work on Windows7, maybe with different compiler options. I’ll have to check it out.

I don’t have a lot of free time this week to get stuck into things but I appreciate the comments and bug reports.

 

No, that's probably not going to happen until/if it becomes a part of sfall.
I don't think this patch is going stand as a separate entity. It's not really meant to be a replacement for the old hi-res patch either, more of a tech demo I suppose. It's more my own personal playground, just a bunch of stuff I thought would be cool. I wasn't even sure if the bulk of the community here would even want it. My aim here is to clear the worst of the bugs and finish a few outstanding thing like Fog Of War.
I don't really want to be the one adding this to sfall either, I'd be happy is the sfall crew just raided it for parts and ideas.
To be honest this is a bit of unfinished business for me. I should have made the hi-res patch open source way back when and it continued to bother me that I didn't. My real intention here is just to polish things up a bit then quietly disappear again.

 

I’ve uploaded the source code for the High Res patches for fallout 1 and 2, I've added a link in my sig.
It was a bit of a mess and took longer than expected, as all things do. I intended to upload the mapper2 HPR as well, but it’s in a real sorry state so that will have to wait for a later date.

I’ve also updated the release package for VE to v4.9.2, also in my sig.

Not much has changed, haven’t had a lot of time for this lately.

I got rid of the automatic base creation for shadow casting scenery which wasn’t working very well. You can add base/foot images for these which are just frm files with the extension renamed to “bas”. They need to have the same name and dimensions as the frm they are adding a shadow to. I’ve included some examples in “ve_fixes.dat” for some of the trees and stop signs.

I also lowered the bar a bit for computer compatibility, you still need a directx11 capable card and at least win-vista. It would be interesting to hear from anyone who’s got it working on these systems as I’ve only tested it on win10. If it’s not working for you the “debug.log” might shed some light. VE errors start with “f2_ve ERROR!:”, you will need to enable debugging in sfall to see these.