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Texture, Sky and Lighting Overhaul (V2)

A much improved version 2 of my tweaks to lighting, weather, ground and road textures, trees and skybox to get things looking as realistic and pleasing as possible.

In general I'm shooting for realistic, characterful, attractive, and not being too dark to play no matter the weather.

The look is a fair bit more bright, contrasty, colorful and less foggy than default, and gives much longer view distances too.

Lots of major reworks including HDR skyboxes, much better balanced tree colours, new road textures and lots more.

Compatibility note: As this takes advantage of some fairly fancy texture compression features of Direct X 11.1 to get the HDR skyboxes, it will not work correctly in the Windows 7 mode of the launcher, only the Windows 10 mode

What does this mod update/change?

Skyboxes
Weather/Lighting/Fog settings
Ground Textures
Road, Runway and Path Textures
Water Settings
Some Resource Textures
Some Tree Textures & Tree material settings.
Road Dust Particles

Installation:

1. Subscribe to this mod and wait for it to download.

2. Right click on the game in Steam, select Manage > Show Local files. You will be taken to the game folder, usually '\steamapps\common\Soviet Republic\media_soviet'.


3. Find the folder with the mod. To do this, open another window with the same address that you have open now, then go up a few levels to the folder '\steamapps\', then go to the subfolder with the mod '\steamapps\workshop\content\784150\3228447902 '. (If it's not there, maybe Steam hasn't downloaded it yet, launch the game and it should download and create the folder)

4. Copy the folders from the Media_Soviet folder in the Media_Soviet.zip file into the Media_Soviet folder of your game install. (if you have terribly slow internet you might want to make backup copies of the original folders in your install)

To be clear, the folders you should be copying should have names like grass, paths, tiles_normal etc. and they should be going into the Media_soviet folder of your game install. Windows will ask you if you want to overwrite some files, if it doesn't ask this it means you're copying it to the wrong place!

For updates you have to copy the current data again into the appropriate folder as before. If your mod folder does not contain the Current Data, you will need to unsubscribe & resubscribe the mod once so that it downloads the latest version.

Uninstall:

Just do a verify integrity of game files by right clicking on Workers and Resources in Steam and going to the installed files tab.

If this doesn't work for any reason, just delete these folders (grass, particleeffect, paths, resources, tiles_normal, trees, waterriver, weathers) from your media_soviet folder and then do the verify integrity.

Update 26/04/24

Lots of tweaks to lighting and sky brightness to stop sunsets from being so bright etc.
Improved road markings
Nicer (more yellow) fall grass
Assorted other small visual tweaks.

Update 27/04/24

Fixed some missing road and path related material files, should fix overly dark paths and overly bright gravel roads.

Update 06/05/24

Fixed missing red lights on buildings/broken Christmas lights (!)
Updated decorative gravel path to match normal ones.
Replaced the dirt under fresh earthworks to better match other dirts
Tweaked fall ground textures a bit
Tweaked water a bit
Fixed gravel piles looking too black. (wrong normal map)
Retoned the first layer of gravel under roads to look less like tarmac.

Update 30/06/24

Changed texture format of ground/path textures, might fix some missing texture bugs?
Minor lighting and water tweaks.

Update 25/05/25

Fixed particle related crash with Early Start DLC steam trains.

Recreated day1.ddsx, which *might* fix some people's black sky issues? Hard to tell as it's always worked fine for me. If anyone with a black sky could let me know what GPU they're on and if their drivers are up to date.



REMEMBER YOU WILL NEED TO MANUALLY COPY THE FILES TO MEDIA_SOVIET AGAIN!

Other things I do

I did a reskin of the entire UI & Resources icons of Soviet Republic, if that's your kind of thing. (New V2 version out now!)

https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3407335176








I'm also a game developer as a day job, if you like really detailed games about cars and engineering them, check out Automation: The Car Company Tycoon Game



If you like what I've done, please consider contributing to the staggering amount of coffee it took to do the late nights on this mod <3 - https://ko-fi.com/daffyflyer




Maps in the screenshots are Tannheim Valley and Petersplatte - Advanced Realistic Start


Compatibility note: As this takes advantage of some fairly fancy texture compression features of Direct X 11.1 to get the HDR skyboxes, it will not work correctly in the Windows 7 mode of the launcher, only the Windows 10 mode.
May also not work with older GPUs, your GPU must support DirectX "Feature Level" 11_1. Note that there are DirectX 12 "Compatible" GPUs that only actually support 11_0. In theory any NVidia GTX 900 series or AMD HD 7000 series cards or newer should work fine (though there may be weird exceptions). If you get black skies, this is why.