Jonathan Ka vonSeiten
patreon
vonBiomes 19 Special Edition Ready: Xeno Jungles & Lightnings
🕑 Added 2024-07-02 02:55:22 +0000 UTCDear Friends & Supporters!
Another Update for vonBiomes in Early Access is ready for your Mechwarrior adventures! The new mod version 19 brings you a new biome for alien jungles and there is a major upgrade for visual effects built into it: Lightning lighting!
Downloads:
OneDrive: https://1drv.ms/u/s!AvPmUYHEcNJx-CClOKWF-6XqeHUp?e=4txatd
Mega: https://mega.nz/file/BKknTTyD#823Ppw6hBdmPuY3kT9Nq7I8ORo3lZdNJtMP7uivsGI4
(as usual, if Mega hit its transfer limit please use the OneDrive link instead)
New Biome: Xeno Jungle
Strange new worlds in the Inner Sphere, an alien forest biome with much randomization for colors and vegetation sizes. All regular size trees can be easily run down, and even the large ones can be destroyed by some shots. Still, the Xeno Jungles offer good cover, and you can surprise enemies in the overgrown environment.
For the biome, I have extended the vonBiomes material system dramatically, allowing now to mix textures dynamically on objects, add different visual effects, blending masks, and even first texture animations. You can see it in action in the new biome!
Lightning lighting + Mod Option
If there is a lightning storm going on, the lightning now emits light! Visually, that is quite a big add-on and changes so much about how missions with lightnings feel, especially with volume fog enabled. Here is a short GIF recording, with volume fog set active in mod options:
Check it out, it makes a huge difference! For people with flash sensitivity, there is also a mod option to disable the effect for sure. If you prefer to disable the add-on, you can do it with one click on the checkbox.
Volumetric Cloud Update
More variation and fine-tuning for the added volumetric clouds, if you have them enabled in Mod Options. I bought new volume texture source assets and added them to the mod, so the clouds in your missions can now be more different than before.
New Mod Option: Contrast setting
To improve the overall look & feel, I have added a contrast adjustment, which I set standard to the value of 2. You can reduce it (or increase it) in mod options. The new contrast levels make the look & feel stand out better, and the look improvement adds more depth to the view.
Adjustments to the MW5 background mountain textures
I hope that fixes the sometimes blunt looks of the vanilla background mountains with finer texturing and details for both rock and snow. This is a long-wish by myself, since in vanilla MW5, the mountain textures can be quite low-scale and blocky. I hope it works well in the various original backgrounds, too, keeping fingers crossed;)
vonBiomes Night Vision Upgrade
The Night vision effect got its overhaul in the new vonBiomes version. It now even works at broad daylight, and there should be no over-brightness and light bleed anymore.
Other Stuffs
As usual, adjustments and fine-tuning is part of the process. I tweaked lighting settings here and there, checked through variables and assets and more work also went into optimization of background objects and settings, so people with not so modern cards can also better enjoy the missions. With all the random and procedural stuff going on, it is sometimes challenging to pin particular situations down, but I hope further optimization helps the big picture.
Welcome new and thank you all!
A big welcome goes to all the new supporters here on Patreon, thank you very much for joining up! If you are not yet part of the vonMods Discord Community, here is an invitation link: https://discord.gg/e5JNDpjT5y
Please let know you come from Patreon, and I can enable your backstage access to the #supporter-wip channel with regular screenshots and updates!
I hope you have also enjoyed the previous vonCommander/vonHUD update in mid-June.
As a next step, I will try to (finally) build an upgraded version of vonMission to make some progress on that end and also get back into vonHUD to extend and improve it further.
Thank you all for your ongoing support, it is the recharging my jump-ship batteries each month by having some sunny moments with beer and pizza. Sail ho!
Cheers, all the best to you, and I hope you enjoy the update,
- Jonathan
