Gothic 2: Against All Odds – Development Update on the DX11 Mod

Friends, since I have more free time after finishing work on the storyline of the Brotherhood of the Sleepless, I decided to continue optimizing the script code and the engine.

The work done has paid off. I managed to achieve almost perfect smoothness of the hero’s movement in the city, even under maximum load in terms of exteriors, interiors, and the density of the city crowd.In the DX11 settings I enabled VSync and set the limit to 60 fps. Resolution – 2560x1440, hardware – a modest i7 6700, Nvidia 2060 card, and a REGULAR (non-SSD) drive. On SSD it’s just a treat. FPS results are shown in the screenshots. The city of Khorinis has always been the place of the biggest FPS drops, even in the original game — not to mention heavy mods like B2, L’Hiver, NB, Odyssey.In addition, interior and exterior objects have much more polygonal models compared to the original and even NB. Overall, I’m satisfied with the results, but there’s also bad news.

Starting today, I’m discontinuing support for DX7 (the original) for our modification and from now on I’ll be focusing exclusively on working with DX11. Whether I’ll restrict the launch of the modification without DX11 I don’t know yet. Perhaps through an ini option I’ll leave the possibility to play without DX11, but no complaints like “unsatisfactory cutscene appearance” on DX7 will be accepted anymore.

I just realized that if we want to move forward with optimization and with the visual aspect of the modification, with shaders and other DX11 goodies, the old DX will only hinder and slow down our work. So that’s it… RIP.

Take care! Talk to you soon…