Dev Update: ImmersiveVC (GTA Vice City DX11 Graphics Mod) (Patreon)

Download here: https://www.patreon.com/reevemods/posts/168433938/Available now for Enhanced and Ultimate Supporters. It will be released for Basic Supporters a month from now.

You can see the mod in action here: https://youtu.be/1CkzaM_OuLY

This one is a new project rather than an update, and it is the first thing I have built without ENB underneath it. ImmersiveVC replaces Vice City's own renderer with DirectX 11 and puts the whole lighting, shadow, reflection and weather pipeline on top of that. It is a single file next to the exe. No game files are replaced and nothing is overwritten.

Building it this way changed what was possible. Vice City's world geometry has no surface normals at all, which is why the game could never light a wall, and no depth it could read back, which is why nothing could be lit after the fact. Both of those now come out of a G buffer the layer builds for itself, and almost everything in the trailer follows from that: per pixel light from street lamps and headlights, shadows cast by headlights at night, rain that stops at walls, wet roads that reflect the city.

A few things I am especially happy with:

The water: the sea and the wet roads reflect the whole city around them, including what is behind the camera (this is where most of my time went)

Per pixel lighting: every street lamp, headlight and police bar really lights the world around it, which the original engine could not do at all. I did not think this one would be possible when I started.

Sky, clouds and fog: the fog takes its colour from the sky, so it turns pink with the sunrise on its own. I still stop and watch it happen.

What is next?

ImmersiveIII, the same thing for GTA III.

ImmersiveSA rebuilt from scratch, without ENB. Everything I learned making this one applies there, and the ENB layer has been the ceiling on that project for a long time. It will take a while, and it will be worth it.

For now I want to hear how ImmersiveVC runs on your machines. This is a first release of a large piece of work and your reports are what shape the next one.

ImmersiveVC is in early access for supporters. The $10 tier gets every new version on release, and each version reaches the $5 tier a month afterwards. A free public release follows later on.

Thanks for the support and all the feedback!