Edit : Updated article here.

It's been almost 2 years since the initial release of ALOT for ME3, almost 1 year for ALOT for ME2. A lot (pun not intended) has changed since these days, and I think this kind of article will be an interesting read for those who want to know more about the ALOT project.

It also helps me put things into perspective. These years have been a hell of a ride !


I. Beginnings

In the beginning, there was me and my love for modding. When I got into playing the Mass Effect trilogy, I found that lots of texture mods had been made for the 3 games. The biggest problem was that they were scattered all over the Internet (Bioware Social Network, Nexus, ME3Explorer forums, mainly), which meant spending hours scouring forums to get an exhaustive overhaul.
Another problem is that most texture mods had been made with Texmod compatibility in mind. Texmod is a tool that is used to load the textures directly into the RAM, and replace the game's textures directly, without changing any game files on the hard drive. A useful tool, but not adapted to large scale modding. It's main issues were long loading times (10-20 mn to boot ME3) and the limitation in the amount of textures that could be used simultaneously (2 GB).

Thus began this project, initially as a personal quest for a higher resolution ME3. Seeing the commitment of this community to modding, I felt the need to contribute to it myself, using the little I knew of modding then. At the time, my goal was to gather all the high-resolution texture mods I had found (about 500), then merge them into a comprehensive, easy to install mod. Which meant using ME3Explorer to install textures, and merging all mods into one package. When faced with mutually overwriting textures from different mods, I tried to keep either the highest resolution one, or the one closest to vanilla if both were the same resolution. It happened for a few hundred textures, I basically went through them one by one.



II. Ongoing development

ALOT was very well received on it's initial release, and I learned a lot in the first few weeks. Many bugs to fix, mostly due to my incompetence :D. ALOT matured quickly, from initial 1.0 to 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 and finally 5.0. Many bugs were fixed, new mods were added. In the same time, ALOT for ME2 was released. After the success of ALOT for ME3, it was pretty natural to want to enlarge this project to the whole trilogy. ME1 being already covered by CDAMJC's amazing MEUITM.




III. ALOT 2017

Time passed, and I felt unhappy with the state of ALOT. Many minor bugs and inconsistencies remained, and many textures felt like they needed a remake. I was joined by 2 fantastic people, who helped me immensely in this task : AlvaroMe and aquadran.
We laid everything bare, and started anew. First by building a complete database of all the 3 game's textures. There's something you must know about the way textures are used in the ME trilogy : many textures (not all !) are reused from one game to the other, sometimes identically, sometimes with just minor changes. Quite often (not always !), textures are downscaled from one game to the next.
The most notable is the transition from ME2 to ME3, where countless normals (depth textures) were cut in half.

We wanted to start the overhaul with a standardized vanilla base, ie highest resolution vanilla textures where applicable. To detect potentially portable textures between all 3 games, we used 2 techniques :
- A theoretical comparison of textures, using their names and CRC hashes. The spreadsheets we came up with are available publicly here.
- An empirical comparison of the textures, using the full PNG dump of the textures and an image comparator (dupeGuru).
In both cases, manual double checking was required to make sure all portable textures we found were indeed portable. False positives were infrequent, but present.
aquadran developped a nifty tool to quickly blitz through the list of potentially portable textures we had. Without this tool, manually double checking would have taken weeks. We could do it in a week-end. Thus, we had our "vanilla+" base to start working with.

Then came the comparison between ALOT's textures and the vanilla textures. The goal was to find and eliminate or fix all textures that were either buggy or strayed too far from vanilla. In the same
time, we flagged textures that needed to be redone, for later use.

All this work converges to the release of the most complete state of ALOT yet achieved, version 2017. This release marks a complete change of paradigm for the mod.
- I'm now making my own textures, which I will progressively add to ALOT as I finish them.
- Switch from ME3Explorer to aquadran's Mass Effect Modder (MEM). Much faster and more accurate in texture replacement.
- Simplification of the installation process. With MEM's speed comes also an installer mode, ie idiot-proof mode. Just click the big red button, and MEM takes care of the rest.
- Overhaul of the INI settings, with (finally) proper in-game testing to back these changes up. These INI settings are automatically applied by MEM.
- Switch from the torrent download method to direct download. Direct download is more practical
for users, less practical for me.

ALOT is already the go-to graphical overhaul mod for ME3, we hope it is now good enough to become a necessary addition to any playthrough :). Thanks for reading, and have fun in the high resolution Milky Way !