FUEL: RESHADED

FUEL: RESHADED reworks the shader files to add rain effects (things get wet in rain), better lighting (corrected lighting model, enhanced shadows, AO under vehicles affect plants / water / tire tracks), and other things. The goal is the make the game look and run as best as it can.

What's it do?

Rain Effects - things get wet in rain (ground, vehicles, etc). Pretty self-explanatory, but makes rainy weather way more immersive.

Path Finder - dynamically green highlights roads in dust storms (cheat to make races like Dark Dust more bearable). Only kicks in as haze increases. So, don't see it when little to no haze. When haze increases, tire tracks on dirt roads highlight and asphalt roads highlight.

Darker Nights - can set how dark you want night to be (day/night transition is still awful, though.) Certain things will remain bright, like lightening, moon, flares, etc.

Lighting Model - fixed Asobo's oddly coded lighting model. Their model was doing some funky math to add a base light value, but also flattened out bump maps / normals in shadows. New lighting model keeps normals looking decent in shadows, adds a bit of specular to shadows to simulate light rays bouncing off other surfaces and into shadows, enhanced shadows with a smidge of environmental reflection to add more highlights and volume ... ground and plants also have specular to make the "sunny trail" follow you and be a bit more prominent when racing around in grassy fields. Ambient Occlusion under car now darkens plants, water & tire tracks. (Minor detail, but adds to the overall aesthetic when screenshotting). Chrome and clear-coats are sorted out better to look more natural in lighting.. and reveal underlying patterns / textures. (EG: The valkyrie's muffler is not chrome metal, it's carbon fiber. But, FUEL's original chrome'ing formula applied too much environmental reflection and made it look silver-chrome.)

Water - headlights impact water at night now, making it easier to see (instead of the dark mass it used to be). Water uses more robust lighting model now. Water speculars / shinies now shimmer some in shadows to account for ambient light reflecting off other surfaces. Shadows in water are softer to account for light scattering in water and bouncing off water particles to soften shadows. Lakes & Oceans get greener in rain storms to simulate algae bloom & aeration of foam in water.

Screen FX - optimize frame post-processing effects, added an anti-aliasing option, tweaked motion blur to not be so aggressive at the top of the screen (so you can actually see where you're going now), Tweaked Dynamic Eye Adaptation / Luminance / Brightness to be halfway bearable now when flying in and out of shadows. Bloom is tweaked to look nice without being completely outrageous by making cars glow in the middle of the day for no reason. And, if you hate all of that, there's flags to disable it all built into the __setup.h file.

Optimization - tweaked code to try to be as efficient as possible while also adding in new features. FUEL has to FPS cap at 60 to run properly. (Any faster, and AI vehicles will go too fast and make winning some races impossible). The goal is to get the game to run at 60 FPS as maxed-out and as smoothly as possible. So, optimizing the shader code under the hood was also a priority.

Options - Everyone likes options. So, there's a setup file to tweak them in. You can turn some features that folks most commonly hate on and off (eg: Dynamic Brightness / Luminance, Bloom, Screen Dirt / Water, etc). You can turn Path Finder perk on and off. And so forth.

Where do I get it?

It's hosted on modDB...

https://www.moddb.com/mods/fuel-reshaded/addons/fuel-reshaded-v30-2020-march-05

How do I install / use / uninstall it?

INSTALL

• Download file
  
• Go to your FUEL game shaders folder (eg: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\FUEL\shaders)
  
• Select all the files in there
  
• Right-click and "Send to... Compressed zip folder" (to make a backup .zip file of the original shaders
  
• Move that .zip file some place safe (or just leave it in the shaders folder, as long as you keep it)
  
• Delete all the old shader files from your shaders folder
  
• Unzip the new shader files into the shaders folder
  
• Start up FUEL and let it recompile shaders (might take a minute or so)

NOTE: if you're using FUEL: REFUELED with the option to skip shader recompile, you'll need to switch shader recompile back on to get the new shaders to compile. You'll need to keep recompile on as you mess with settings in the "__setup.h" file. When you finally have everything the way you like it, you can turn off the recompile option again.


USE

• Open the "__setup.h" file in a text editor (eg: Notepad++)
  
• Change the 1's and 0's on certain options to turn them on / off
  
• Setup file has instructions and is pretty self-explanatory.
  
• After adjusting an option, save the file
  
• Start FUEL
  
• Wait for it to compile shaders again (may take a minute)
  
• Enjoy

UNINSTALL

• Select all the shaders in the shader folder
  
• Delete them
  
• Unzip the original shaders from your .zip backup

If you didn't make a backup, but are using Steam, you can go into Steam and have it check the integrity of your game files. It will update the shaders to the originals. But, it will also update anything else altered. So, if you have FUEL: REFUELED installed or have messed with any other files, it'll overwrite all of that. Only restore using Steam file integrity check as a last resort.