Proper Shaders 04-26 (public access) (Patreon)

(old version from April, much has been improved since then)

Note: due to license, Cloudworks (from June version) is already added to this update too!

Update: April version, with all fixes, visual and stability improvements I did for the whole month, and, mainly, HBAO, soft blurred shadows and global vehicle reflections. Keep following comments and Discord for more updates for next days.

No time to record a new video and so. I prefer to add more features before doing a new video (very soon this month I'll add the water shader Jéssica is helping).

Keep with the old premiere post:

The second version of a mod that revolutionizes the graphics of GTA San Andreas.

New short video: https://youtu.be/ywMmVQ7pgTk

Video from last month (the shadows have been improved drastically):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uCiIDZdUNE

With the goal of stability, compatibility, and optimization, this is a graphics mod that's actually playable, for gameplay, not just for taking screenshots.

Well integrated into the game (e.g., separate values ​​for day and night), non-intrusive and highly customizable, similar to my MixSets mod: if you don't enable anything in the .ini file, this mod will do practically nothing to your game. There are no minimum requirements; if you want, you can use it only for soft particles and fix z-fighting - you have total control.

This is a proprietary mod; not a preset or modpack!

You're not on a Patreon page from those people that just edit .ini files from a mod (like ENB, ReShade, RenderHook etc) and share them to make money off of it for years, even without updates. This mod is being created by me - If you're stumbled upon this and you don't know me, I'm the owner of MixMods, the largest GTA website in Latin America; I've been creating mods for GTA San Andreas for 15 years (any game mod for 22 years), and I'm the modder who has created the most technical GTA mods in the world.

Why this is big?

Until yesterday, the only person in the world who had created something like this for GTA San Andreas was petrgeorgievsky (not counting the MTA:SA shader framework), but both SA::Render and RenderHook never became complete and stable because, in my view, the project was worked on from top to bottom (recreating parts of the game's rendering, and the rest of the work was limited to fixing bugs), instead of bottom to top (taking the original, functional game rendering and only enhancing it, without reinventing the wheel). Furthermore, this mod uses some patches (like PS2 pipeline) and best practices from SkyGfx, and is even partially compatible with it.

What can you expect from this version?

Even though the goal is stability, compatibility, optimization etc, we're still talking about the first alpha test version, so expect something not totally functional yet, as there's still a lot of work to be done (I worked on it for only 3 weeks yet! With some helps from Jéssica Natália). Read the Readme file in the download, as it contains all the warnings about potential problems. I still have to work every day on my GTA-like game "IMPUNES", I'm very busy, so I can only work on Patreon for a little over a week a month (usually the last week), but I still intend to fix critical bugs at any time, and I always reply on supporters' Discord server and Patreon helping people.

Current progress

Dynamic 4 cascaded per-pixel shadows (NVIDIA's PCSS)

Shadow mask technique with gaussian blur option

Ambient oclusion (SSAO, HBAO)

HDR simulation with tonemapping (ACES or Timoty)

Auto exposure

Bloom

Sun rays

SMAA

Simple dithered sky shader

New horizon fog

Improved z-fighting

Soft particles

Player mipmapping (automatic)

Shaders lit by directional light

Stochastic procedural texturing

Animated wind shader

Support for unlimited TXDPs (TXD parents) files in .ide files, which helps this (shadermaps) and other texture mods.

All 11+ thousand game textures are already configured with proper values for roughness, stochastic and shadows casting.

In progress

Deferred rendering

Per-pixel lighting

Volumetric clouds

PBR sky shader with sky blend

Roughness mapping

Ambient occlusion mapping

Normal mapping

Metallic mapping

Water surface

Underwater

Decals projector (replacing the vanilla decals system, from CPU to GPU)

Screen space reflections

Planned

Lens flare

Volumetric height fog

Screen space global illumination

World rain surface

Vehicle rain surface

Parallax occlusion mapping

Specular anisotropic hair

Subsurface scattering

Advanced car paint and dirt

Temporal anti-aliasing

Improve wind/vegetation shader

Terrain splat maps shader

Download version 04-26. For beta supporters on 01.05.26 (DD.MM.YY) and 01.06.26 for the public. Possible bug fixes will be updated in the same post (check comments and Discord).

Sharing is prohibited until specific dates.