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Caticorn

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Caticorn

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About this mod

A fully-featured shader stack for new and nostalgic players alike to experience Half Life 2 in a way that hits right. Ambient occlusion, ray tracing, indirect lighting, light scattering, remastered color and value curvature, and much more deployed for an immersive experience true to the original artstyle. No ENB required.

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This ReShade preset is aimed to modernize and remaster 'Half Life 2: Update' as much as possible without use of a total overhaul or more extensive mod than ReShade, while retaining the original intended art style. For new and nostalgic players alike to experience Half Life 2 in a way that hits right.

It is a "universal" shader stack designed for authenticity and immersion rather than to show-off cherry-picked screenshots, meaning it enhances all scenes without detrimenting any parts of the game from details lost to overly-dark shadows, or overexposure/oversaturation, HDR intoxication or bloom fog, et cetera. Despite improving contrast, and adding dark shadows and some bright lighting, the final result has no increased blackclipping than the untouched game, and less white-clipping/oversaturation. It is the antithesis of the "Instagram filter on steroids" ReShade look. 

This is a higher-end, mostly-unoptimized preset in lieu of a no-compromise approach. At 1920x1080, it runs at a minimum of 60 FPS on my GTX 960 and i7-7700 @ 3.6GHz system, typically hovering between 90 and 120 FPS. For better performance options, see the respective "Requirements and performance tweaks" section of the README.

All information here is expanded in detail in the accompanying README.txt. Honestly I went way overboard with the manual and it's practically a ReShade tutorial. I struggle with verbosity.

Note: This preset is designed for Half Life 2: Update. It works just fine with Half Life 2 official and the episodes, but is particularly calibrated to the visuals of Half Life 2: Update.

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Features:

Ambient occlusion, indirect lighting and ray tracing (in the form of screen space reflections), light scattering, and soberly enhanced bloom are deployed to modernize the visual realism of Half Life 2: Update.

Color and contrast are remastered, in particular the yellow/orange/pink oversaturation often found in Half Life 2: Update. Color detail is enhanced in shadows and highlights, while mid-tone colors are pulled back to make room for vivid indirect lighting and bloom, resulting in a more dynamic color scheme. 

A myriad of different subtle shader passes are used to enhance clarity and detail. A complete list of shaders and their descriptions can be found in the accompanied manual. 17 shaders are deployed in total, none of them in vain.

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Quick Installation for experienced ReShade users:

  • Install DX9 ReShade for Half Life 2: Update, loading out all shader packages except for the legacy shader package.

  • Run HL2:U, DISABLE in-game antialiasing, and on the ReShade menu's 'D3D9' tab check "Copy depth buffer before clear operations", and then load the preset. Ensure that MXAO and SSR have depth buffer access by confirming they work via toggling them off and on. If one works the other will, too.

  • Finally, adjust your brightness (technically gamma) in the game's video tab by adjusting the slider until "barely visible" is (you guessed it) barely visible (yet still legible) with ReShade enabled. Depending on your display's calibration, this may be a notch brighter than the unaffected 'barely visible' with ReShade off.

It's recommended to make sure you aren't forcing ambient occlusion in GPU firmware in case it's layering up. Nvidia ambient occlusion in particular looks notoriously bad.

If you have any strong visual artifacts that seem immediately wrong (oversharpening, blurriness), see the Troubleshooting section (VI) and Tweaking sections (IV and V) in the accompanying README.txt.


Detailed, painstaking installation for newcomers worried about hecking it up:

  • Install 'Half Life 2: Update' and then run ReShade. In the ReShade installation, select the HL2:U executable, and then select DX9.

  • You will then be prompted with a list of what shader packages to loadout. For simplicity's sake, install all shaders of all shader packages (double-clicking each checkbox) EXCEPT for the legacy shaders (the last/bottom option). There is no performance degradation from installing unused shaders.

  • Start the game. If ReShade installed correctly, you will see the ReShade notification at the top. The first time you open the ReShade menu (HOME key) it will greet you with a short tutorial page. I recommend setting a toggle key in the ReShade 'settings' tab (I use INSERT).

  • In the game's options menu, under the 'Advanced Video Options' on the 'video' tab, maximize all settings and effects, while making sure to DISABLE anti-aliasing completely - disabling AA allows the most important shaders to function by enabling their access to the depth buffer. The shader preset has its own anti-aliasing and you can force supersampling/upscaling through your GPU firmware if possible. 

  • Open the Reshade menu (HOME key) and at the top of the 'home' tab, load the accompanied .ini file. Head to the 'D3D9' tab and check "Copy depth buffer before clear operations". Ensure ReShade has depth buffer access by toggling off and on the MXAO (ambient occlusion) or SSR (ray tracing). If one works the other will, too. After this you won't need to ever open ReShade again unless you wish to tweak settings.

  • Finally, adjust your brightness (technically gamma) in the game's video tab by adjusting the slider until "barely visible" is (you guessed it) barely visible (yet easily legible) with ReShade enabled. Depending on your display's calibration, this may be a notch brighter than the unaffected 'barely visible' with ReShade disabled.

It's recommended to make sure you aren't forcing ambient occlusion in GPU firmware in case it's layering up. Nvidia ambient occlusion in particular looks notoriously bad.

If you have any strong visual artifacts that seem immediately wrong (oversharpening, blurriness), see the Troubleshooting section (VI) and Tweaking sections (IV and V) in the accompanying README.txt.

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Quick notes:

This preset's antialiasing shaders are enabled by default. If you have the GPU to spare, supersampling through your GPU firmware is recommended as it is superior to even the best post-render antialiasing. In which case you may want to toggle off all or some of the AA shaders. Note that this can increase sharpening artifacts. The AA shaders can be toggled with the Delete key and the sharpening can be toggled with the End key. To retain an easy installation process (simply loading the preset in ReShade with no additional files), no HUD/subtitle masking is used to save text from the AA filters.

Depth/geometry based post-shaders (in this case ambient occlusion, ray tracing, indirect lighting) may occasionally cast a shadow or reflection where they don't belong. For instance details on far objects overlayed over nearby semitransparent objects like smoke, or screen effects like being underwater or flashblinded. However, since you are only seeing these conditions a relatively small fraction of the time, the trade-off of much added realism during the rest of the game is easily worth it. Special masking companion shaders (ReVeil) are deployed to minimize these artifacts.

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Recommended companion mods:

  • Besides ReShade, the only graphical Half Life 2 mod I consider indispensable is an AI 4X texture pack, which are easily found across the web and easy to install. I strongly recommend an AI pack rather than a community-developed texture pack, to retain the original Half Life art style. This ReShade preset is specifically designed for the factory art, and if you are willing to deviate from the vanilla art, you're better off with a complete HL2 overhaul such as MMOD, which changes every aspect of the game. MMOD looks and plays marvelously; it's just a different game.

  • Half Life 2's HUD is tiny on higher resolutions, and the tiny crosshair dots are affected by AA shaders. There are a few easy mods floating around that scale HUD with resolution so that your crosshair and ammo/health aren't tiny.

  • While not graphical, I also recommend an edited skill.cfg file to modernize the combat gameplay. This text file (technically .cfg file) adjusts things like hit points and weapon damage. If you don't like how Easy difficulty makes you a bullet sponge, or how Hard difficulty makes enemies bullet sponges, or how Medium makes you both bullet sponges - you can balance the gameplay to your liking through adjusting such parameters by editing this file. buffing headshot multipliers and AR2 damage while making the Combine stronger really changes the gameplay to be much more tactical, forcing you to take cover and think out gunfights rather than letting your HEV suit take all the damage while you run out and Rambo everyone. There are a few skill.cfg files floating around. I might tweak and release mine, but it's easy to find and edit it yourself to suit your playstyle. Don't make it too easy for you.

Otherwise, Half Life 2: Update is itself quite a comprehensive HL2 mod, including many well-needed fixes that Valve still hasn't patched up in HL2 official.

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Thank you for checking out my shader stack. I hope it gives this 17 year-old game enough of a facelift for an immersive playthrough that hits right.