Modding is a culture that is clearly not unknown to the Farming Simulator universe. The Giants game can boast of being among the most modded games. But other games have very active communities as well. Just look at sites like Mod DB or Nexus Mods which host over 400.000 mods for around 1.800 games. There are several types of mods, although they could be classified into 2 main families: content mods and technical mods. For the latter, nVidia has just, in parallel with the announcement of the RTX 4000 series, to throw a stone into the pond with RTX Remix.
Graphics mods allow a game to survive over time, improving its visual appearance over and over again over the years. And nVidia engineers know how difficult it is to make graphic mods that work directly on a game engine. Game-specific tools must be invented to actually modify a game, and programming knowledge is often required to add modern effects. Some games are clearly not open to modding, and don't even allow file access. We have seen the flowering of RayTracing mods from the labs of the 3D chipset manufacturer, like the Quake II RTX mod, which took an entire team months to develop. Repeating this process for all renew/refresh all old games is simply not possible due to lack of time. nVidia therefore took a different approach.
NVIDIA RTX Remix comes into play
NVIDIA RTX Remix will be launched soon, making it easier to remaster games DirectX 8 et DirectX 9 supported with fixed-function graphics pipelines. In a compatible game, press a hotkey and the scene around the player is captured.
RTX Remix is able to capture textures, geometry, lighting and cameras through a custom and innovative D3D9 runtime called RTX Remix Runtime. Classic games like Morrowind use the D3D9 runtime to send draw calls (render instructions) to the GPU. RTX Remix Runtime intercepts these draw calls, interprets them, and reassembles them into an identical scene. From there, RTX Remix converts the assets and scene into the open 3D framework Widely adopted Universal Scene Description (USD), which is the basis of the platform NVIDIA OMNIVERSE.
Since RTX Remix is based on NVIDIA Omniverse, these USD game assets can easily be imported into the RTX Remix app, or any other Omniverse app or connector, including gaming industry standard apps such as Adobe Substance 3D Painter, Autodesk Maya, 3ds Max, Blender, SideFX Houdini and Unreal Engine from Epic Games.
Teams of modders can collaboratively upgrade and replace assets, and view each change, as the asset syncs from the Omniverse connector to the Remix viewport. This powerful workflow will change the way modding communities approach the games they modify, giving modders a single unified workflow, enabling the remastering of a diverse set of games without having to learn a multitude of proprietary tools.
When remastering assets for use with ray tracing, every texture and surface requires physics-based rendering (PBR) materials, to allow them to interact naturally with ray tracing light. For example, glass reflects the world with clear details, while laminate flooring has rough and coarse reflections. And the stone, although without visible reflections, is still able to bounce light and have an effect on the scene. Classic games are usually built with simple color textures that lack any of these properties.
Beyond textures, your surfaces also need new details. To improve a classic game, a normal map is needed, or an entirely new surface with real geometric details that have been handcrafted by the modder, both of which take a little time to make.
RTX Remix simplifies and speeds up the process of artistic remastering using AI. AI Super Resolution boosts the resolution of extracted textures up to 4X, turning 1080p-class textures into higher-quality 4K assets. And AI Physically Based Materials analyzes the game environment to add PBR properties to all mined assets. As shown in the screenshots below of Mount & Blade from TaleWorlds Entertainment, a cobblestone floor immediately changes from a flat surface with a basic texture to a detailed stone surface with a roughness map that interacts with light in a realistic way.
In the image below from Bethesda Softworks' The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, NVIDIA artists used RTX Remix to remaster a scene. The team loaded an RTX Remix project shared through Omniverse, and when a member updated an object's material properties or an asset's mesh in Omniverse-connected apps like Substance or Maya, the scene of game synchronized in the Remix window: collaboration becomes child's play. A second artist could then spend their time in the Remix app, meticulously moving each completed item to its perfect position and relighting the scene with the reconstructed objects in mind. It's that simple, the tool allows for around-the-clock collaboration and development with a team of modders spread all over the planet. Previously, you had to wait for someone's work to be completed and submitted. Now there is no lag, and another can pick up where you left off.
A whole suite of production tools makes it possible to truly recast an old game into a new one.
When the RTX Remix Mod is ready, just export and share it with players. They simply download the mod and drop it into the game directory alongside the .exe and launch the game. The NVIDIA RTX Remix runtime does the rest, replacing the old APIs and renderers with RTX's 64-bit Vulkan renderer Remix Runtime and upgrading visuals on the fly. The reader also benefits from the instant addition of NVIDIA DLSS-3, for higher frame rates.
Example with Portal RTX, made using NVIDIA RTX Remix
Just like a real team of modders, NVIDIA developers have collaboratively created an amazing mod using RTX Remix. Every tool and process documented above was applied to create this DLC for Valve's game: PORTAL.
Can we dream of seeing Farming Simulator 15 using PBR textures, global lighting and raytracing? With nVidia RTX Remix, this becomes entirely possible.