Vanilla Plus Terrain Mod

Vanilla Plus Terrain

Acknowledgement

Huge thanks goes to WallSoGB for all the help.

Description

Vanilla Plus Terrain is a xNVSE plugin and shader replacer that improves the way the game renders terrain in several different ways:

1. Adds specular to the landscape, meaning it won't look as flat when the sun is at low angles.
2. Specular also works for LOD - if you want to make use of it, generate LOD with format for normals set to DXT5 and make sure to have "Bake specular" enabled.
3. Per-pixel fog, which gets rid of the annoying "blocky" fog on terrain when fog is very close to the player.
4. Replaces ILS (Improved Lighting Shaders), upping the pointlight limit to 24, meaning you definitely won't miss any (or at least most) lights on the terrain.
5. Also fixes the issue with Pip-Boy light sometimes missing from terrain (same as ILS), by sorting the lights by distance from the camera.

Specular as you might know requires a glossiness map in the normals texture. Curiously, most landscape textures in vanilla come with this already. I have also prepared a small optional normals texture pack for those landscape textures that miss it, obviously using the same resolution and compressed.

If this wasn't enough, it is fully compatible with GECK out of the box (pointlights are currently not rendered on terrain in GECK, but a fix is coming with the next GECK Extender version).

Technical Note

You are probably asking if adding as many lights and specular doesn't cost a lot of performance. Yes, some impact is expected, however, great amount of care went into optimizing this to the best of my, Wall's, and D3D9's capabilities. Compared to ILS, for example, the shaders are better optimized, and there are four different variants for different light counts that further alleviate potential performance issues.

For users of New Vegas Reloaded - update to version 4.3.0.

Requirements

1. New Vegas Script Extender (NVSE xNVSE)
2. Shader Loader - NVSE
3. LOD Flicker Fix - NVSE

Installation

Install as normal. Load after LOD Flicker Fix - NVSE.

Source Code

1. GitHub