Progress Report - r102

This is very simple room that is quite small so there's no much to talk about. In general the original lighting was very bright and now it looks darker and scarier. For me that vanilla "cave" background sound reused around the game, benefits from a darker environment.

The song played in the typewriter room was replaced by a new one, however that iconic song can appear later in the game somewhere it is not gone. A new wooden box model was added and the barrel is darker to fit the lighting, most ETM are pointing to the room texture pack so it can be easily edited to have granular control if needed. The chair model was also missing some geometry and was fixed. 

Ink Ribbon Functionality

In the outside new 3d models were added, instead of a 2D image like before. It features the Sunset Time, but still have a few details missing like EFF compared to the main village playable map, so it may not be a 100% clone but it is close, from inside is very hard to notice the difference. 

The same trick as in r105, now it features fully 3D models

I had to disable the blue skylight as it was hitting the interactable doors and I don't know how to make LIT ignore ETM while still liting SMD. Those models in the outside now rely on SMD ARGB to be lit as a workaround for the the skylight being turned off. The flashlight doesn't lit outside models.

One destructible ETM hanging lantern was replaced by an old gas lamp, the transparency is broken for the glass, I find really hard to get transparency working with EFF and struggle with it. The other one that spawn some items when destroyed was removed and some of the ITA removed.

Hanging Gas Lamp

Some quotes were added to the Merchant, it will talk about the wolves encounter in the Main Village Sunset Time, that happens prior to this room. I've generated these lines with AI back in 2025, this can be disabled by AEV or improved by just replacing one .wav in the .xwb file. 

Merchant Dialogue

This event will happen only once, it doesn't sound convincing as a real voice, the intonation is a bit weird even for a non English speaker, and I had to generate multiple versions and pick the best ones. That's why it may sound like separated quotes combined rather than a normal voice line.

But it was a $5 service so for the price is ok. I've made it not skippable due to some issues, like overlapping the original audio, even when the take is cancelled with ESC it keeps playing during the navigation in the "shop", getting mixed with the comments and other Merchant sounds.

A cool new feature about the Merchant is that it's is now one life, which means if we kill it will not respawn in subsequent areas. This have to be edited for every single room with a merchant, so for now it only works up to this area. We have a side-loaded .ESL that removes the default merchant and a AEV-ITA spawns the new one which is linked to the previous rooms. 

Fun fact is that throughout the game some of the Merchant placement simply makes no sense, like that first one in the Island, I will probably tweak it in the future, repositioning, adding and removing as needed.

"What am I doing here?"

New pool reflections were added, these look better in motion, the screenshot can't capture well how it is in-game. It has some issues and may not have the physics of the old water, but the EFF water that has physics is also strange and moves too fast, it feels like gelatine and only looks good when the water drops hit it and create small waves, but other than that water is really broken in this whole game.

Using "Improved Water" in RE4 Tweaks can make this physic looks less bad, but still strange. There are just a few place which I found the water beautiful like r108, r20a and the wet ground effect in r205. The new pools here are ported from r205 room btw. 

There's also the fact that some of these water effects can't be properly edited, because they are scripted somehow and that prevents us to change the size and coordinates, at least I couldn't find a way.

New charcoal models were added for the Merchant Blue torches, it fills the empty space, so something is burning now, instead of a magic flame it was before. Still in the Merchant Area, some effects from above like light shafts were disabled, it simply doesn't match the new dark environment.

Charcoal Pile for Merchant Blue Torches

Next to the last ladder where before we had nothing just a black hole, new models ported from r108 were added. 

This room in HD Project was merged with the optional secret room made by albert, it still there but at some point I'll split them to improve size of the SMD, and also to reduce the memory usage as it still loading textures from the custom area even if we aren't there.

Images