NUCLEAR SNOW

-== NUCLEAR SNOW by save - stalker-game.se ==-


WHAT IT IS:
NUCLEAR SNOW is a graphical overhaul of Stalker, where the world mostly is
black and white with strong contrasts whilst some objects, effects and blood
is highlighted with color, making even more contrast between the edited graphics.
The movie Sin City has been used as a reference (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0401792/),
which should give you an idea of what to expect.


THE CHANGES:
-Retexturing of over 3000 textures
-Stronger bumpmaps
-Stronger parallaxmaps
-Bigger bloodmarks
-Bigger bloodpuffs
-Light from headlamp extended
-Weathercolors altered
-Fireparticles extended
-Modified Carrymod2 inserted, compatible with Carrymod3


HOW THIS RESULT WAS ACHIEVED:
Several tests were made before I came up with a somewhat good result. What I had
to do was to change many textures, sky, ground, foliage and actors to be able to
see how the result might end up, so before making the final overhaul, there were
plenty of hours photoshoping and batchrunning.
The final retexturing took me several days, mostly because of the different settings 
for every texture to not loose alphachannels and to get a good result on the image -
amongst the other textures.
So, when I ended up with my favorite result, I recorded it in Photoshop as a macro 
and then ran it on a couple of files at the time, mostly the same group of textures, 
just to not loose track of where I was editing. To be able to edit and save into 
Stalker's textureformat I used Nvidias DDS-plugins for Photoshop.
After that, the fun part took place, I started editing some images, like blood, artifacts 
and some other textures, to achieve the strong contrast in a gamescene. Then some shaderediting
and lightcolorchanges in the engine took place, and finally it ended up with this result.
Some time was also spent on looking for the grasstexture, which GSC has hidden well, thank
you nokturnal over at oblivion-lost.de's forum for pointing them out.

So, hopefully now you'll be able to play this with the amusement it was intended to give.


INSTALLATION:
To make this mod run correctly, all you need to do is to extract the folder 'gamedata' in the
rar-package to your STALKER's rootdirectory, for instance: C:\Program Files\THQ\S.T.A.L.K.E.R.\gamedata\


NOTE: 
This mod should be installed on top of Carrymod3 (or just leave out the file
system.ltx if you install Carrymod3 afterwards). 
It is not compatible with any other mod that changes textures on ground, 
sky or models, it will run but it will not retain the intended overall look.


WHAT IS?
Carrymod: One of my earlier mods making the character able to lift more stuff from the ground.
This was inserted to make it compatible with the rest of the mod, if you don't want it - it's
easy to see where the mod starts and ends in the file system.ltx.
http://board.oblivion-lost.de/showthread.php?t=9742

DDS-Plugins: Developertool created by Nvidia which acts as a plug-in to Photoshop. It lets you
open and save DDS-files - which is the format that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. uses for its textures.
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/photoshop_dds_plugins.html

Photoshop: An imageediting program. 
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/photoshop/