Wolves of Steel - Any way of restoring original environment and textures?

[Compans57]

I sucessfully downloaded and installed the full mod tonight. Firstly thanks to all for improving vastly the gameplay and mechanics of this thing.

I have to say though, that I miss the original graphics and feel of color and light in the stock game. In particular clouds, sea, light, smoke and the textures of other boats and harbors. I sailed into Kiel and the feel seems completely different. Many of the boats in harbor looked flat and somewhat cartoony.

Any way of keeping the game innovations of TWOS and keeping the stock graphics, or am I being a spoiled brat?

I don't know if the original textures and light dynamics were hard coded into the game? If not, would it be possible for me to download (I'm on a Steam installation) the original game again and copy files to a new folder and overwrite TWOS after reinstalling it? If so does anyone know the appropriate files?

Just a thought.

Thanks.

Compans

[gap]

Hi Compans57,

I will try to be short.

The "cartoney" ships that you are seeing are probably ships imported from older SH games (SHIIII and SHIV). Some of them miss ambient occlusion maps, specular maps and other stuff which enhance the three-dimensionality of stock SH5 ships. Moreover, they are stored in an older file format than vanilla ships, a format that SH5's graphic engine still support, though its shaders are not optimized for rendering them as well as units of the new format. While I will agree with you that they might look better, they still add a lot to the game in therms of variety and gameplay challenge. You could try removing them manually, but you would miss an important feature and, what is worse, you would risk continuous ctd's if they are scripted in the campaign.

As for the environmental factors, rest assured that TWoS environment is a big step forward compared to vanilla both in therms of variety and of visual quality. You are probably playing one of the first campaigns, in the Baltic and during winter. If you think that environmental colors are too pale and that light is not "vibrant" enough, well, you are right, but you should know that this was made on purpose to reflect the mostly cloudy weather of Nordic winters. As the season change, and as you move South, in the Mediterranean, South Atlantic and Indian Ocean, you will surely notice how the quantity of light will gradually increase and colors will becoming more vivid. Conversely, in vanilla game environment factors are lesser varied, and no matter where you are, you will always have almost the same colors. You could in theory revert to vanilla settings, but since the files involved are many and with many correlations between them, that's not an easy tweak either and you would loose more than you are gaining from it.

[Compans57]

I see your points Gap, but my problem with megamods is it's all or nothing.

One of the pleasures I get from sub sims is the feeling of sailing in and out of harbor in real time and having a look around. The stock game's experience of this was excellent but...shame about the appalling gameplay. As I understand it, some harbors are newly built for this mod, but have older ones like Kiel been changed?

Visual 'improvements' are often a matter of taste.

Is there any way to import the original smoke and clouds back? Maybe the clouds are still in the game somewhere as you describe?

As I mentioned, I don't want to be a crybaby about this but it'd be nice to have a choice.


Cheers,

Compans.

[Compans57]

Just reporting back after several hours of the Mod. I take it all back! This looks gorgeous. Just sailed into the Baltic sunset. Very atmospheric.


As an aside, how do I get colors back for various neutral, enemy, friendly shipping symbols on the map? At present they're all grey. Or is this because it's first mission and war's just been declared?