NCF - Special Edition

The relevance of this post is questionable, but who knows, maybe it will be useful to someone. A couple of years ago, I decided to refine this mod because many creatures didn't fit the atmosphere of the original for me. It was due to some minor details that stood out. Not least because the creature icons were without a background. I added a "neutral" gray sky background to all of them. There were still two more noticeable problems: some textures with strong dithering and incorrect texture scaling (or excessive contrast). When I started going through all the textures, I found many issues: - Redundant duplicate images that weren't in texture format. - Unnecessary saving of semi-transparent channels where they aren't used, which doubles their size. - Empty transparent textures of enormous sizes that could be reduced to a minimum. - Lack of "mipmapping," which caused severe dithering when moving. (I don't know how it looks on 4K monitors, but on my FullHD monitor, it was very distracting.) - Unnecessary saving of "mipmapping" on transparent textures. - "Uncompressed" textures that are practically indistinguishable in quality if compressed. I thought I would do this relatively quickly, but I ended up getting incredibly bogged down, spending too much time on it, which I hadn't anticipated. Because I had to repeatedly adjust the results, and often got stuck on things that few people would ever pay attention to. Then I abandoned it for a while, occasionally returning to unfinished files. But since all these piles of duplicates cluttered my disk, I decided to finally sit down and resolve this issue once and for all. I did everything for myself; I didn't plan to release it, so I edited it to my taste. There were some controversial decisions. Sometimes (rarely) I reduced the main textures because I hardly noticed any difference in quality, but this significantly reduced their size. (Saving memory. By the way, five years ago, I wrote here that this mod crashes and only works on EWA. It turned out that the original .exe file wasn't patched to increase memory). Some large creature textures were actually scaled up (but there aren't many of them). (The monsters ended up being slightly darkened; I would add a bit more whiteness back, but I don't want to deal with it anymore). I changed the color tone to my liking (Rarely. For example, pink bugs were made into a more "natural" magenta). I am not satisfied with all the results; it can still be refined... But even as they are, they are definitely better than before. The deer had its legs lightened to remove the dark spots under its eyes. I tried to add texture to the horns and darken them slightly. Well… I combined all the creatures into one .pak file, which also allowed me to eliminate many identical duplicates. And I combined all the textures into another file and the icons into a third. Thus, 3 files: 1) All NCF creatures without textures (their files) 2) All their textures 3) Icons If you just need to add creature icons with backgrounds, you can simply put "NCF_creatures_FIX_ICO.h5u" in UserMODs. To add updated textures on top of the old ones, put "NCF_creatures_FIX_+_Texture" in Data. And to maximize space savings, without unnecessary files and duplicates, use all three files ("NCF_creatures_FIX_-_Texture" in Data) instead of the original files (starting with NCF_number of the creature). The total size was reduced from 940 MB to 545 MB.

Screenshots

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https://disk.yandex.ru/d/4XUwn_3WpD4Cvw