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About this mod
A complete revamp of Watch_Dogs' lighting with a unique visual style and several new features.
- Requirements
- Permissions and credits
Introduction
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The Fall of Windy City is the culmination of almost two years of research and development into nearly every facet of Watch_Dogs’ lighting system. It features several brand new effects, such as moon shadows, alongside its own unique visual style that gives the game some much needed color while simultaneously emphasizing its darker tone.
Main features
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- City lights are now visible at morning and sunset, making the environment much more interesting to look at
- New indirect lighting method that better illuminates and applies colors to buildings and objects
- Over 20 new sky textures for an unprecedented level of cloud variety across four presets
- Darker and more realistic nights which also feature moon shadows for the first time in a Watch_Dogs mod
- Revamped twilight with dedicated sky textures and custom ambient colors
- Improved water with colors that fit better with the rest of the environment, better reflections and larger waves
- Reworked vegetation with better colors, shading and a new look for maple trees
- Enhanced vehicle lights including subtler lens flares that look better from a distance and smoother cast headlights
- All new color grading that provides significant contrast between bright, colorful days and dark, de-saturated nights
- Real life accurate time scale with sunrise, sunset, daylight and twilight timings based on real data from fall in Chicago
- Improved rendering with better draw distances, rain and texture filtering
- Various fixes to visual oversights in the vanilla game, such as glowing glass, mismatched lamp on/off states, broken lighting presets and more
- Bad Blood is fully supported with no additional tweaks needed
Installation
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Method I: Easy Install
Download the "Packed" version and extract both patch.dat and patch.fat to the data_win64 folder in the Watch_Dogs directory. All done.
Method II: Manual Install
Download the "Main" version. Join the Watch_Dogs Modding Discord and download the Gibbed.Disrupt Tools from the #resources channel (or preferably the updated version pinned in the #wd1_releases channel). You'll also need to install XNA Native in order to unpack the vanilla patch.
- Unpack your patch.dat from data_win64 by dragging it to Gibbed.Disrupt.Unpack.exe
- Extract the contents of the Main folder to the newly created "patch_unpack" folder
- Rename your "patch_unpack" folder to just "patch" and drag it to Gibbed.Disrupt.Pack.exe
If you get an error, move both the tools and the patch files to a shorter directory, like "D:\WD_Tools".
Recommended settings
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Recommended settings
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Graphics preset - Ultra
Ambient Occlusion - HBAO+ High
Texture Quality - Ultra
Anti-Aliasing - Temporal SMAA
Calibration/Brightness - Default (50%)
Ambient Occlusion - HBAO+ High
Texture Quality - Ultra
Anti-Aliasing - Temporal SMAA
Calibration/Brightness - Default (50%)
Notes
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- Do not merge this mod with other mods that alter lighting or vegetation for obvious reasons
- This mod is meant to be used in a clean slate patch, so no support will be provided for any prepackaged mods (i.e. TheWorse, N&RL or Revival)
- This mod is compatible with Living City (but use ONLY the REQUIRED_MOD_FILES from its "loose files" version)
- This mod is also compatible with Police & Faction Overhaul and Factions Redux, but make sure to use their respective patches from the downloads section
- If you find nights to be too dark, use the Brighter Nights addon included in the main download
- The game always uses the same cloud preset when it loads before randomly switching to different ones, but you can change the default one in windy_city.game.xml
- Living City users may want to disable the randomized time of day on load if they get frozen lighting at night (_First_Load_Disable_Timelapse in its config file)
- Lower graphical settings, particularly Reflection Quality, may cause some effects such as fog and rain to not look as intended
- If you want to make your own color grading, be it natively or through ReShade, make sure to delete the default LUT in graphics\postfx. Also, windy_city.game.xml has some extra options for ambient colors that might be useful
Suggestions
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Install these before The Fall of Windy City if you want to merge it with other mods:
Install these before The Fall of Windy City if you want to merge it with other mods:
Relief Mapping - from Living City's "loose files" version
Source Textures Collection
Both of these are already included in the "Packed" version.
Conclusion
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Special thanks to all my good friends in the Watch_Dogs modding community for their amazing support.
I hope you enjoy The Fall of Windy City as much as I did making it!
I hope you enjoy The Fall of Windy City as much as I did making it!
