Well, you gotta love the modding community of a game. Guru3D’s member ‘TheWorse’ has released a new version of his mod for Watch_Dogs that introduces dynamic shadows from the headlights of all cars. This is a graphical feature that was missing even from the E3 2012 build of Watch_Dogs, and it was a feature that its absence annoyed some GTA IV fans.
Guru3D’s member ‘Dead Squallit’ has created some annimated GIFs, showcasing these new dynamic shadows.
Moreover, here is the list of what ‘TheWorse’ aims to achieve with his mod:
-A full functional, working and stable defaultrenderconfig with all settings modified so if you don’t have a very powerful pc you can run it as well
-Stuttering fixes (Lod and shadowmapsizes values among others)
-Fully working headlight shadows (Still not perfect due to ubisoft lack of optimization, headlight shadows wasn’t a feature since e3 2012 if I remember correctly)
-HeadLights Volumes and different settings for them (And the possibility to choose between)
-E3 Bloom as well as other presets included
-(MAYBE) Edited Particles settings
-(STILL FOR TESTING) Edited .lua shaders config.
-(STILL TO BE FOUND) DoF settings.
-(STILL FOR TESTING) Modifications to the Lighting (HBAO+, ReflectionsIntensity, etc)
-Higher density for civilians.
-ColourGrading changes and the possibility to use DigitalTrips settings.
-(STILL FOR TESTING) StreetSpotlights changes and maybe Lightvolumes
Those interested can download TheWorse’s mod from here. Do note that a new version of the mod is planned for release tomorrow, as a number of gamers reported some flickering issues with the game’s smoke during daylight. Here is the changelog for the latest version of the mod:
-Added several changes to the fog, now it should be more visible (Not final)
-Added another bloom preset (People said E3 Bloom was too strong)
-HeadLight’s now produce shadows (Fixed now) including all Vehicles(Train, bikes, cars, trucks)
-Added my xml settings which reduces stuttering
-Rain modifications including shadow map sizes, ammount of rain in scene, reflections quality, etc
-Cascade Shadow Maps with Bilateral blur(Higher quality than default shadows)
-LoD Value changes to improve performance
-Other several Tweaks.
Enjoy!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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But it looks like there is no way to get the bokeh dof and postprocess back.
i think the only way at this point would be using an injector like sweetfx or enb if it ever becomes compatible.
Im more curious if this config can fix the stuttering to the point its actually playable and not immersion breaking. The extra effects I dont need as long as I can play it smoothly at 60 fps I am happy. But the daytime lighting changes(less washed out) is definitely needed.
I don’t care about playing at 47fps ,if you want more ,lower the graphics ,i don’t even want the entire 2012 things ,i only want the Bhdof ,postprocess ,lighting ,dinamic fog during rain and lightsources and Aiden’s face from 2012 ,i don’t care about the anamorphic lensflares.
Of course ,if we could get a mod to have 2 inventory wheels ,one for wapons and another one for hacks ,that would be epic ,like the 2012 demo and feb 2013
that would definitely be nice. as it is, the selection menus are some of the weirdest to navigate due to how the mouse is handled lol.
You’re right – after some 30 hours of gameplay I never got used to selecting weapons and items (or navigating in-game menus). I’m convinced that’s proof-positive that menu system is decidedly NOT PC gamer-friendly.
But then, Ubisoft doesn’t make PC games.
You can lower the texture quality to medium even, in order to eliminate
that. High textures, in 1050p, with all else on ultra, no AA, goes close
to 3GB vRAM. After that, vRAM usage goes downs, which probably
means it shifts some of that into system memory or even the HDD/SSD.
Out of curiosity I turned everything up to max with 8xMSAA at 1080p. Got 3.8GB of vram usage on my GTX760 4GB. Insane, given the game doesn’t actually look that hot.
It’s an open world game with no loading screens and everything is streaming in when required, dynamic events, AI, environment effects. I don’t see what people are complaining about, the ultra textures are far better than any other open world game and MSAA has always been VRAM intensive
I guess the world itself just feel blands to me. In going for realism they’ve given the game very little “style”. You can make the textures as detailed as you like, a boring place is still boring.
And I still don’t see why the assets in this game would take up so much more than similar games. I feel like with the extra RAM on the new consoles the developers have just been lazy about optimizing. (same with other games like Titanfall and Thief)
Or maybe the game is simply caching extra stuff when there is more memory available. I think Windows does the same thing when you have a lot of system ram, putting stuff you are likely to access in RAM since that space is not being used for anything else.
At least it doesn’t need a “HD” texture pack and texture mods, unlike some games I could mention. :p
And do any of them go over 3GB of vram usage? Probably not, unless it’s a fan mod that’s way over the top.
Though I’m feeling vindicated in my decision to get a 4GB card last fall when everyone was like “you’ll only need 2GB, don’t waste your money!” I knew the extra vram on the consoles would eventually push PCs over 2GB… but I expected it to take a little longer, and expected to be more impressed with the results.
yeah well, like I said before, it’s that time now, Watch Dogs is the start and we know consoles can use 3GB+ for graphics memory.
I’m still trying to figure out the logic of releasing a game with such huge textures… and not bothering to implement decent anisotropic filtering.
Ubisoft till now i cant play this damn game, nevermore…preordering an UBI game!
First they implemented the bloom from the E3 demo, now the dynamic shadows for cars. Modders are a force to be reckoned with. Embarrising though that they are doing all the work that Ubi should’ve done in the first place for the PC version
Indeed. I would love a section on Steam like “mods” officialy that modder get paid for!
Sadly it would open up to developers complaining that others are benifiting from their work , I would love to help mod devs any day through their site, this way I beleive it would work as anybody could argue that it’s a non related profit of mods hard work and time.
Check the Workshop.
That aint even 10% of nexus community efforts. so…
Are you dense?
yep! woul really love it. but Corrie has a strong argument!
They didn’t want to as it would have made the new consoles look worse. This proves it’s not about time and money.
Exactly, thay dont wanna upses MS/Sony or they would come bite them in the as*!
So they just keeps their as*ses up and beying f*ck all over as they pay these clown devs.
If only the consoles could f*ckn die allready!
its funny how ubisoft sit there and scratch their stupid heads and complain when pc gamers get fed up getting ripped off so they turn to pirate bay lol bunch of morons. every game they release on pc has 100% chance of being gimped and 85% chance of being un playable, even on 5000 dollar gaming rig. got burned on ac4 black flag, far cry has iffy sli problems but playable and i pirated watchdogs because i dont trust ubi now and sure enough it was a disaster lol still is, my wallet thanks pirate bay. whats the point of buying a game you cant finish or run on ultra because you only have a 4770k @4.6ghz, 16 gb of g skill trident x memory @2400mhz, 2 x evga gtx 780ti 3gb classys, all watercooled,asus maximus vi formula motherboard, samsung 840 pro 512gb ssd, with gsync so f*ck ubisoft absolute disgraceful devs. battlefield 4 runs on ultra with 144fps. absolute zero reason 1 or 2 780ti’s cant handle 1080p with ultra settings.
Yeah it really is. If those damn devs could put out games like this from the begining, f*ckn morons they are!
Sounds about right. People will complain no matter what.
If they wanted they would have worked on it to make it run without eating FPS like monster..
It’s the dev job to optimize the code man, it’s not a piece of unmodified option we add to the game and tadaaaaaaaa !
Then they never (as always) should speak about PC leadplatform >:(
Auto aim. Mouse Acceleration etcetc.
The biggest performance issue right now is that the game uses the unified memory concept for consoles which is utterly insane for PC (we have shared memory). The game also has a memory leak.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/05/31/watch-dogs-graphics-problems/
It’s all really sad.
Add to that having to get it somehow running on the 360/PS3 and it would have been a real nightmare. I really don’t envy these developers trying to do cross-gen games.
You are partially right BUT:
A better & more powerfull hardware and miles ahead in terms of support why not offer something different across platforms? Why “cap”? Why hide functions? Why not make something that justify the price(or the disgusting practice of the “cut content to sell later”)? Why not do something that deserves the word “Great”?
I see you comment down there as I write. Nailed it. So in conclusion:
Yes, they cannot win, and seeing things as they are, why they should?
Because you can’t sell “next-gen” consoles to the ignorant masses if everything else surpassed them already.
They actually want you to hack the game to get the most out of it.
/s
id settle for the LEAD pc version that was finished before release since the game gone gold to be properly tested and not stutter not to mention controling like a pc game with proper mouse support and not like you are emulating thumbsticks.
Now we are talking.
I knew this kind of stuff was all there…incredible that they had to downgrade even that kind of details.
great now i can play a nice looking bad game
Hehe.
It’s not a bad game. It might not be your cup of tea, but many of us think it is great. The game got lots of 8s and 9s from reviewers as well.
gta 5 for pc will be better, i bet when you hit a pedestrian they wont fly 20 feet up in the air with zero blood as well. i get zero satisfaction from running over pedestrians in watch dogs. id also like developers to start acknowledging sli exists if they cant optimize so one 800 dollar card cant even handle ultra @1080p. ubisoft pretty much says to its pc fans hey sli isnt optimized because you are the minority ohh and single cards arent optimized because were lazy pieces of shit that were too distracted by sonys balls being in our mouths so you better go buy a titan z or another 780ti ohhhh wait thats sli nvm just wait till modders fix the game cause were too busy counting console version sales….ps i own a ps4 by the way
ill call it average, its ok, but nowhere near as good as the hype.
Well, shit. There’s a “next-gen” game somewhere in there but Ubisoft decided to hide it. This does not make me feel good about the next 10 years of the current console generation. 🙁
Its OK Mod cuz I can Play now on Ultra with Shadow High and not droping to less than 33fps but still UBI have to do something 🙂
PC master race FTW
Now THIS ONE is a mod, the difference is pretty clear. The other XML bullshit from kadzawhatever did nothing.
OMG!!
Glad that I havent start playing it really yet as I just the other day got my GTX 780 and have been overcklocking it to get it where I want so now im set, let this F*CKER out and I will game 24/7 LOL!
Yes you really gotta love these modders, what geniuses!
PcRules thats damn straight and maan what a powerfull card this 780 is and overcklocked it’s a f*ckn monster 😀
all this post is missing is a picture with you licking that 780 while you oc it. Stop bragging like a tard.
Hold on I will upload it ..LOL!
Alright that wasent my point as what the heck, it’s nothing really special I know as many have those 780TI and SLI bla bla you know!
I am just so F*CKN happy and for me it is super special, coming from an gtx 570 🙂
Congratulations Bro 😀 Im happy with mine XFX DD 7970GHz ED lol easily OC to 1200/1700 and thats Monster also 😉 but im Playing games on Default cuz if you have Hi-End you don;t have to OC it to gain perf. cuz preformance is there already
If I downloaded this other mod will replaced like bloom…
Not sure why they call it “dynamic shadows”, shouldn’t they be saying “dynamic lights”? o_O
How bad is the performance hit? And have people managed to optimize the game more? It ran like crap and looked like crap for me.
dynamic lights we had since quake 2, dynamic shadows are a different thing. When the light moves and illuminates around it it’s called dynamic light, when the same thing happens but shadows are drawn accordingly those are called dynamic shadows. So you can have a dynamic light without having dynamic shadows.
Hrm. I sort of get what you are saying. I’m probably going to have to google this and read in more detail to get why that is any different, though.
so yeah, you can have a light that is moving illuminate around it but without casting shadows, a dynamic light. When that light casts true shadows as it moves around objects then you have dynamic shadows. usually when a level is rendered the shadows from the light sources are calculated and “baked in” the level as lightmaps.
Oh yeah, I know all about baked lighting. That’s all we had when I was making Half-Life 1 maps. RAD would take *forever* on a big map with my little old Pentium II x_x
Wait, I think I get it. You aren’t talking about geometry, you’re talking dynamic things like props and actors. They are not only lit up by the dynamic light, but occlude the light to cast shadows in real time?
I thought some games had that, e.g. DOOM 3.
Well to clear up the confusion, the dynamic shadows from cars’ headlights were missing from the PC version of Watch Dogs, this was disappointing as several years older games such as GTA IV had this feature, now some modder does the work Ubisoft should have done.
John papadopoulos, What was the point in using gfycat in your article if you’re going to link the gif and not the webm version? Being on mobile I didn’t appreciate the 95MB of gifs.
gotta love the pc community
Keep them coming!
This is incredible, this should be all over the news. The dynamic shadows is a HUGE addition. This gets me thinking whether someone will make a mod to add real-time reflections.
hello men, i have a nvidia 660 2gb, and after using your mod i think that i hace better perfomance, do you recommended me something to fix suttering?
Some of the most mature and open minded conversations I have seen on this site in some time right above here.
I agree with all of you. Its a lose lose for Ubisoft unfortunately. From the second you begin a console targeted game, things will end up like this. It sucks but its the way things may go for a little while longer. Hopefully it wlll be somewhat better after the 360 and ps3 porting phases out.
Shoot I might pick this game up after a year or two as it seems to be screwed up without the proper mods……
Maybe just maybe one day a game will get launched and be close to what the developer originally promised/”planned for!!” So sad that the modding community “has to” do things just get a game to where it should have been. Don’t get me wrong I praised the modding community, but this having to do things to a game in order to get them to run properly is sorry.
Thank you very much “TheWorse” the game looks much better now even in daylight but let’s hope that optmization patch will come from Ubisoft soon to be even better!
This is one of the reasons I didn’t plan to play this game at release. Once the tatented modders in the community improve the game by leaps and bounds, I will play it then modded!
I have to say TheWorse is doing an amazing job and even lower entry PC owners such as myself are seeing the benefits of this mod. The added DOF has actually helped increase my performance when playing as well as eradicate the horrible LOD pop in I was suffering in some areas. He’s far from done with it yet also.
http://youtu.be/24S4tbZ-J2c
Only problem is now will Ubisoft’s “amaze patch” completely undo all the hard work he’s done when it finally releases.
Yes…yes….mod this game to hell. I like it.
Dynamic shadows don’t change some of those insanely tough chase missions though. Can we have a mod to stop the cops from all being Terminator 2 good?
If anything Carlos I find them a little too easy to give the slip. Just drive like a mad man throwing yourself off everything you can and hacking, blocking communications and head for that outer circle. Job done in no time.
Maybe I’m just getting slow in my old age. Oh crap I hope it’s not that.
shadows from car lights is very nice. Also shadows from chopper spotlight! most excellent.
Which proves it was there all along ubisoft just downgraded.