HarrietOrtega

Is that with the RDR texture toolkit or the Nvidia Tecture Toolkit? From what I know the Nvidia toolkit should be able to but from a brief read of a forum post here, it seems to do a "thing" regarding colour spaces. I'm new to this so I'm just feeling my way through.

Looks like we're both doing this, I'm on the fence about whether to continue though. I started going through and converting the upscaled animals aio from upscaled textures mod but I'm constatntly asking myself why I'm putting in the effort. That loud voice keeps yelling at me because there aren't any batch methods to do this...as you said, it's beyond tedious. I can batch out the format conversion with photoshop and nvidia texture toolkit but saving them back to .ytd with rdr texture toolkit has me pulling my hair out...coding a AAA game in assembly would be an easier process. As an aside, does anyone have a working link or fiile for the Codex toolkit for RDR? It's been removed on Nexus and all the links go to mediafire, when I try to download it, it keeps failing.

I have to disagree here because these issues, at least for me, are present no matter the size of the mod. If replacing the skydome with a 3mb modded file or replacing a hundred KB or so xml causes a resource issue for the engine that breaks it's intended functionality then that is absolutely shocking. Also, the issues I mentioned happen if I clear my mod list completely but still have asi loader and scripthook in the directory, essentially doing nothing...there's nothing to load, so where would such a resource issue come from? Again, I'm not stating this as fact, but the way the game is hooked is just something to consider as one of the causes along with the others.

Found out something interesting today. Sorry if it has been mentioned or discovered before. I was doing my usual setup of waiting in a random spot for a train and alongside it, trying to get the right SSDO and screen shadow settings to fix the incredibly blurry grass and textures. I remember thinking, I don't remember having this issue a few weeks ago and I was pulling my hair out for days trying to fix it. Anyway, I was standing on the hill opposite Valentine station and I quit the game to remove a couple of mods then loaded back in to see if the trains would come. Now I'd been using Special K, sometimes alongside Reshade but when I'm testing I just load the game normally. So immediately as I loaded in, there was a train with passengers pulling into the station. I quit, and fiddled with some settings in the visualsettings.dat and loaded back in to see if the train spawn was a fluke. Except this time I accidentally booted via Special K. Not an issue I thought. When I loaded in, the train was gone. So I quit etc etc and so forth. After a little while of seeing the train pulling into the station, then not, then seeing it, then not...I realised that everytime I saw the train was when I was not using Special K. It was repeatable, everytime I loaded through Special K, that train was gone. Alongside that, I realised that when I was using Special K, the clouds, grass and textures were extremely blurry, without Special K, the grass, clouds and textures had lots of detail and definition. It was such an odd thing to discover. A while back in this thread someone was talking about scripthook possibly being one of the issues causing the spawn bug and I'm inclined to agree because special K hooking into the game was clearly causing some strange behaviour. Also I have noticed that in my game, when using mods with scripthook and asi loader, no matter the version, was causing draw distance problems. When moving forward and looking into the distance there would be a sharp cutoff where the shadows and ambient occlusion would stop , way way waaaay before the default cutoff distances set in visualsettings.dat, beyond that the terrain and models would be fully lit, or should I say unlit. As I moved forward that demarcation line would move and the shadows would render in with it. Literally watching bright unshaded green trees and grass slowly get covered in shadow as I moved forward. When I removed the files and loaded the vanilla game, that sharp and unitended shadow cutoff was gone. Terrain and models were shaded correctly into the far distance and tree imposters and billboards at the horizon were as well, the engine was rendering as intended, not with half the distance into the horizon completely unlit or unoccluded. I also remember having the exact same issue in Guarma, except it was the path up to the waterfall where you meet Dutch on the cliff. At a certain distance from the waterfall, that area would be completely black, like it was covered in smog. The water was see through black untextured...it was as if you had set the SSDO and screenshadow entries to 1000. When I loaded into the save vanilla with no mods, the waterfall, cliffs and rock faces were shaded and textured normally. So long story short, I can't say for definite that hooking into the game is one of the root causes of this spawn issue but in my game it is quite clearly having an effect on the way the game engine is rendering assets. I'd be interested to know how many people complaining about savagely blurry textures over the years were running special K or reshade and whether those issues disappear without them.

Sorry, I forgot to mention the details. If you download the Vestigia mod, install it with LML and inside the VESTIGIA folder you will find folders named 'global' and 'strings' along with 'install.xml'. Keep these and delete the other folders. Now inside the 'global' folder will be a 'systemsettings.ymt' file. Keep that file and delete everything else. So now you should have two folders named 'global' and 'strings' inside the 'VESTIGIA' folder and inside 'Global' will be one file, 'systemsettings.ymt' and inside the 'strings' folder will be 'strings.gxt2'. Three files in total. The systemsettings.ymt file changes the maximum setting of various graphical settings from High to Ultra as well as unhiding some advanced graphics options that are not in the vanilla settings. When you start up the game, the game will add these new settings to the advanced options in the graphics menu but before you do any of this, make sure you back up your save and your settings file (found in documents/rockstar games/red dead redemption/settings and profiles if you didn't already know) I'll not be held responsible if something botches your game. However it shouldn't at all. If you want to revert the changes, just delete the VESTIGIA folder and the game will revert the settings file back to vanilla.

I've fixed the pop in issue by increasing the LOD Scale in systemsettings.xml from it's max of 2.0 to 6.0 with it's default as 2.0, step size 0.5 alongside adding entries for: <lod_mult_hd> <lod_mult_orphanhd> <lod_mult_lod> <lod_mult> <lod_mult_grass> with values between 10.0 and 40.0 in "base modifier" sections at the top of the timecycle_mods_1 and 2 xmls and also removing all the following entries for the aformentioned from the file. There are entries that adjust every graphical thing in those files and the timecycle files and sometimes that is undesirable for those of us with better machines than this was developed for. Beforehand I was literally watching rocks and bushes pop into view 2 meters in front of me, two steps back...disappeared, step forward, pop in, it was ridiculous. Play around with the values and find the right combo...for me, I had to push the lod scale all the way to 5.0 to get objects to fade in properly...you'll know when you hit your limit because, well, the game will just crash.

I wanted to comment on this specifically because I remember going on the hunt to try and find the specific scripts responsible for the train spawning and schedules and I did come acrross some files (there are hundreds upon hundreds of scripts) that had some interesting stuff in them but I don't know enough about the programming side...and even if I did, most of the game files still have hashed entries and no one in the rdr modding discord seems interested in dehashing the files/entries that would maybe shed some light on exactly what the engine is doing with the trains and spawns. I've tried to get info related to how to go about trying to brute force dehash files (I have a LOT of free time) but I can't find out how to do it. All I know is that the hashing is done with a JOAAT "Jenkins One at a Time" algorithm. The rdr programming side info is locked behind gatekeepers and discord I've found and there's no incentive, it seems, for anyone to take a crack at this issue because it's not worth it. It's food for thought, the answer, or at least a partial one, is buried somewhere in those files along with, perhaps, an answer as to why increasing or decreasing any of the script, stack or heap size pools in the gameconfig.xml crashes the game at startup. I've had this bug up me that the script and stack sizes might do something but any changes to the ones that I think would matter breaks the game. So that's where I'm at, getting sucked back into this again!

Maybe it is prudent that you all come together and cement a test conditions as well as control conditions for people to follow. You can't get reliable test data when everyone is doing things differently and there is no control. So stop the back and forth, come together and see if you can outline some form of test and control conditions that others as well as yourselves can follow, without that, nobodies data and results means anything...just my thoughts.

I really appeciate this response, I use your mod and it's a shining example of hard work and dedication. Thanks to you both for making and maintaining one of my fav mods!

Yeah, I'm not very vocal on forums but reading the comments section (if it's not locked like you said) it's so sad. I just don't get why you would make a mod and not fix it if it's broken etc...there's no pride in the work it seems or to try and understand what it is you are changing and the roll on effects it can have down the line. Makes me so mad. oh and Discord...everything is friggin Discord.

This is true but developers know that their game will be messed with, I'd actually go as far as saying that all developers would support and release tools for the games they create if it weren't for the publishers and higher ups. I firmly believe that and it's always a good thing, Valve and Epic wouldn't be anywhere near where they are now if they had locked down their game engines and kept their mod tools to themselves 25+ years ago They don't have to support it at all and I'm not miffed about it, infact I really like the challenge of trying to decipher the data so I can add ONE additional blade of grass to the entity batch without creating a localised black hole. Sorry I'm ranting, I'll get back on topic, promise 🙂

Oh yeah, don't get me wrong, what they've accomplished is insane. The amount of game assets alone is terrifying and a lot of work obviously went into the game. BUT, it's still a big pile of poop. I have tried playing unmodded several times but the blurry textures on my triple ultra wide...well, it just looks so rubbish that it takes me out of the game completely...then I do a cry.

Yeah it's definately a tricky one. I bought this game years ago and I've been messing with the files since day one. I've not even played the game a 1/3 of the way through because I'm constantly tinkering with it...but one thing I can say, I've been modding games since Unreal and Half-Life hit the scene and have seen a lot of game engines come and go...the rage engine and it's implementation is shocking to me. I've never had so many problems with an engine, it's completely unstable...beautiful but unstable. On several occassions I've just thought I might just delete it altogether because it's just been a trial of attrition to play more than 10 minutes without a crash.

Actually, I did do exactly that when I came across this thread and discovered my game had this issue. I stripped it bare and loaded everything one by one, loaded a save etc etc. For me .asi scripts have nothing to do with this issue and even with the spoonbills test, st.Denis trams were empty along with all other issues reported in this thread. When I redid the texture mod dir's and install.xmls, the issue doens't seem to be present for me anymore but that's just my system, I can't speak for others. Also, to be extra vigilant, I deleted my save games incase there were "footprints" on it left by mods I removed and started a whole new game fresh for troubleshooting.

Just FYI, have you noticed the size of the files in wickedhorsemans mods? almost 50mb for each ytd file, plus all the *+hi files have 0 bytes. When I was sorting out that mod and the others, I was quite confused to say the least. However, to what you've said. I don't seem to have any of the issues you have described, the only difference is with the method...and I'm very inclined to think that the replace folder in LML works slightly differently than explicit fileReplacement with the install.xml because I experienced all the above when using the stream method and the replace folder. I mean, it's even possible that fileReplacement works slightly differently to fileReplacements, I don't know. I suppose the only one who can really answer that is the LML developer themselves.