ImmersiveVC (GTA Vice City DX11 Graphics Mod) (Patreon)

ImmersiveVC is now live for GTA Vice City.

A complete graphics overhaul, built from scratch on DirectX 11. Not an ENB, not a ReShade preset. The sky, the lighting, the shadows, the reflections, the water and the weather are all rebuilt and computed live from the game's own data, and no game file is modified or replaced.

What is in it

Sky: a procedural sky dome computed from the sun's position, volumetric clouds, a moon that keeps its phase, and sun rays through the finished image.

Lighting: directional sun and moon light, street lamps read straight out of the map files, per vehicle head and tail lights placed from the model's own dummies, police light bars, and the Ocean Beach lighthouse with a real volumetric beam.

Shadows: cascaded shadow maps with a penumbra that softens with distance, a separate shadow map for headlights at night, ambient occlusion, contact shadows, and removal of the dark strips Vice City baked into its geometry.

Reflections: screen space rays, a world space environment cube, and a planar mirror for water and wet roads. Car paint as metallic flake under a clear coat, glass as its own material.

Water: the sea replaced with a moving surface, and pool water replacing the painted, motionless vanilla quads.

Rain: rainfall anchored in the world so it stays put when you turn, wet roads and puddles that reflect the city, droplets on the lens that really refract what is behind them, and water beading on car bodywork.

Post process: HDR and tone mapping, bloom, motion blur, colour grading, FXAA, and a VHS look if you want one.

Everything sits on an in game panel on F11 and takes effect as you drag it.

Requirements

GTA Vice City v1.0 and the Vice City Essentials Pack. On any other version the mod will not load at all, so make sure to downgrade your game to v1.0 first.

Windows 10 or 11. Nothing else has to be installed beforehand.

Installation

Drop the files from Main Files next to gta-vc.exe. That is d3d8.dll plus the two runtime libraries that come with it.

It cannot coexist with another mod that also replaces d3d8.dll.

Performance and known issues

The shadows are not where I want them yet. They can still pop in and out when the game itself stops drawing the object casting them, and the fix I have for it does not catch every case. I am keeping the work on them going into the next updates.

Police light bars can stop lighting the world after a long session, and a restart brings them back. I know where to look and it is first on the list.

I didn't test the mod in cutscenes yet, that comes in the next updates.

Optimisation is its own piece of work and it carries on from here. This is the first version out in the world, so I will be tuning performance across the coming updates, with your reports in hand.

This is the first release and it is only the beginning. If something looks wrong, or you have an idea for what should come next, tell me. Every report genuinely helps.

Thanks for the support and feedback!