Fakefactory's Cinematic Mod V7.0 (Part 1/6)

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FAKEFACTORY CINEMATIC MOD V7 FULL
Build 7.0HDR (RC1)

for Half-Life 2 / Half-Life 2: Episode One / Half-Life 2: Episode Two
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TO PLAY THIS MOD, YOU MUST OWN HALF-LIFE 2 / EPISODE ONE / EPISODE TWO FULLY INSTALLED AND UNLOCKED!

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Remember to activate "High Quality" graphic settings in the options dialog.
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PURPOSE OF THIS MOD:
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- Raise the quite outdated graphical appearance to a state-of-the-art level
- Give the HL2 trilogy a more stressed, darker and minatory look
- Complement the atmosphere with a emotional cinematic music soundtrack, that fits the action on the screen
- Replace the low-resolution textures with high resolution counterparts and more detailed environments (hires melones!)
- Complement the storyline with the unused content from the original games
- Refresh the look and feel with optional new HD models
- Add more replay-value



CHANGES SINCE CM 4/5/6:
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- The first FINAL Alyx Hires models
- Reworked sounds and music
- Almost all textures reworked or updated
- Added Hires-Detail-Overlays
- Added HDR to HL2 (See below)
- Fixed two potential crash-bugs
- One pack for all episodes



HDR for HL2
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Not all HL2 maps are true HDR, because not all sources are available. For all other maps i used a technique, that i call "Entity injection". Technically i've used clientcommand entities and tonemapcontrollers to achieve a hdr-like type of blooming on those maps. This type of bloom is much more realistic than the old bloom mini-mod, because the effect is controllable inside the map for different settings at certain locations. You can call it HDR V0.5 or Bloom V2. Its some kind of super-enhanced bloom that gives a near-HDR look on the old HL2 maps. Some of the map-settings aren't final (i'm still at the fine-tuning phase)



HDR AND THE OLD VALVE MODELS:
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With HDR enabled in HL2 some of the faces of the OLD ORIGINAL VALVE CIVILIAN models are appearing too bright sometimes. This little glitch will be fixed with the next version. The Hires models faces are looking right.



CHARACTER PIMPER:
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By  default  most  of the  optional  HD-models  are disabled.  You  can use the "Character Pimper" to switch between HD models and original VALVE models.

The  Alyx HD-model  was  built  from scratch,  all  other  models are based  on massive modified  POSER7 models  and compiled  with a  rewritten studiocompiler, that is  allowing a  much higher  polycount than  VALVE's original compiler. The facial animations   were build   with 3DS  MAX  and  exported with Cannonfodders VTA -exporter.


USING OLD CM6.x Alyx Hires models in this version
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The V7 Alyx models are completely reworked with enhanced skeleton and facial animations. The older CM6 models are not longer used. If you want the older models from your CM6 installation, make a copy of the CM6 Characterpimper "repository" folder and the CM6 "hl2\materials\models\Adriana" folder before you uninstall it.

After installation of CM7 is completed, you can copy the old content to the V7 directory, BUT DON'T OVERWRITE V7 FILES! I strongly recommend to use the new CM7 models. They are optimized for the Orangebox engine. I will release recompiled V6 models as a update-patch in the near future.



SOUND DROPS OR CRACKLING:
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If sound crackles occures, you can fix this by setting the snd_mixahead value in the autoexec's of CM's subdirectories. You will find the autoexec.cfg in the:

FAKEFACTORY_CM\hl2\cfg
FAKEFACTORY_CMEP1\ep1\cfg
FAKEFACTORY_CMEP2\ep2\cfg

directories. Try different value like snd_mixahead "0.2" or snd_mixahead "0.4" for increasing the buffered time of soundsamples. This will fix crackling or dropouts, but can lead to slightly asynchronous or delayed sounds.



MICROSTUTTER AND HEAPSIZE
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If you encounter microstuttering ingame (animations), try the heapsize command.

Add -heapsize {bytes} to the shortcuts, i.e.:

Shortcut: Cinematic Mod EP2
Target: ....launcher.exe" -heapsize 512000.

But NEVER set the heapsize above [YOUR INSTALLE RAM / 3] or 512MB



SETUP.EXE AND VIRUS-WARNING
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Setup uses a tool called SetACL for setting write permissions to the mods screenshots / cfg / SAVE directories. Some antivirus software could warn about possible malware. This is a false positive.



TECHNICAL INFO:
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This  mod's  binaries are   modified  for memory  allocation   beyond 2 GB.  To prevent STEAM from overwriting this  binaries with its own copies on each start, the mod ist  using a little  launcher,  that reroutes  STEAM's original binaries to >NIL.

Start  this  mod  only  with  the  shortcuts  in  your  start menu (that  were created  during installation)!


HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS:

- DX9 capable graphics hardware with minimum 256 MB VRAM. (512 MB recommended)
- 3 GB RAM (4 GB recommended)


SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS:

-    Fully installed STEAM Client;    You can't start the mod without STEAM running.
-    Fully installed and unlocked HL2 / EP1 / EP2;    Make sure, you have started those games in the past.



32 BIT WARNING:
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This mod was developed and tested on 64 Bit Windows. It is  NOT supported on 32 Bit  Windows, because  of the   limited Userspace  with 32  Bit systems.  You can try it on 32 Bit, but prepare for crashes.

On some 32 Bit  systems it  is possible  to overcome  this limitation with some boot.ini  switches  for  raising  the  userspace  limit.  I'm  not going  into detail   here, because those tweaks are   dangerous and should only  be
done  by people,  who are knowing exactly what they do.

ADDENTUM FOR VERSION 7:

V7 of this mod uses much more Hires textures than the previous versions. This means: The engine has to cache a peak-value of >2GB texturedata at runtime. It's almost impossible to play this mod crash-free on 32 Bit systems without lowering the graphics settings.



USED SOFTWARE FOR THIS MOD:

Adobe Photoshop CS2
3DS MAX 8
E-Frontier Poser 7
Microsoft C++ Visual Studio 2005
Powerbasic 8
VALVE Source SDK
Sony Soundforge 7
Sony Vegas 7
Crazy Bump 5
Cannonfodders SDK tools
entspy
vmex
Autoplay Mediastudio Pro
Setup Factory


USED TEXTURE RESOURCES:

Majang.com
3d.sk
Dosch
environmenttextures.com
Own photos


USED MODEL RESOURCES:

contentparadise.com
efrontier.com
daz3d.com

Note on 32/64-bit versions: After extensive email discussions with VALVE and the Half-Life Coders, FakeFactory came to the following conclusion: The Cinematic Mod will run on 32 Bit but it's no longer supported on 32 Bit systems, because of the limited user space with 32-bit Windows. Don't blame Valve or Fakefactory for this problem. It is a fundamental problem on all 32-bit platforms that can not and will not fixed with an engine update.