Gothic 3 - CP 1.75 Coming Soon

[Dhruin]

Looks like an update to the Gothic 3 Unofficial Community Patch will be out within days, offering improved animations and graphics effects. Here are the details via Dark Side of Gaming and head over for the full changelog:

Mad Vulture Games, descendants of the Community Patch Team for Gothic 3, have released the changelog of their upcoming 1.75 Unofficial Community Patch v1.75 for the third part of the Gothic series. This new update comes with dynamic shader caching to reduce stuttering, improved shadows quality, improved animations and Bloom / HDR effects, native support for FXAA, and texture adjustments. This update will be rolled out in the coming days and you can find below its entire changelog. Enjoy!

Thanks, Vurt!
More information.

 

[Acleacius]

Wonder if PB will actually help now, that 'the publisher that shall not be named' is gone?

It would be really nice if we could get the water fixed, the awful darkening that happens at a distance. The water should be much more clear, less texture and mapping equals more FPS and better performance.

 

[JDR13]

I'm surprised that they were able to implement FXAA. I didn't think it was possible with that engine, and it'll make a huge difference. Looking forward to trying Gothic 3 again with this update.

 

[sakichop]

Did they ever fix the stuttering in win 7 64-bit?

 

[JDR13]

The stuttering issue was present in all OSs. It's due to the way the game streams textures, and I don't know if it can ever be eliminated 100%.

 

[JonNik]

Only with at least a partial rewrite of the engine I believe (like PB did for Risen i.e )...

 

[vurt]

Did they ever fix the stuttering in win 7 64-bit?

I'm running x64 and i just tried Forgotten Gods (Enchanced ed.), the C.P is based on some of its fixes, like the shader cache-thing which helps stuttering. There's still some few hitches (maybe once every 1-2 minute). They're so quick they're almost unnoticeable, its nothing like Gothic3 vanilla and improved over 1.74. But Forgotten Gods is also a lot more empty than G3, and game world is smaller, so i'm not sure they're 100% comparable.

 

[sakichop]

Oh I thought I played it stutter free on xp but that was a long time ago, I could be mistaken.

I tried playing it about a month ago and the stuttering was bothering me. Maybe I'm not as tolerant as I use to be.

Anyway, does anyone know if they are fixing it or if it's even possible at this point?

 

[sakichop]

I'm running x64 and i just tried Forgotten Gods (Enchanced ed.), the C.P is based on some of its fixes, like the shader cache-thing which helps stuttering. There's still some few hitches (maybe once every 1-2 minute). They're so quick they're almost unnoticeable, its nothing like Gothic3 vanilla and improved over 1.74. But Forgotten Gods is also a lot more empty than G3, and game world is smaller, so i'm not sure they're 100% comparable.

Thanks for the reply Vurt. I also bought forsaken gods when it was released but have still yet to play it. Is it worth a play through now?

I'm crossing my fingers that there will be much less stuttering with CP 1.75.

 

[vurt]

I havent played it, just installed it for testing purposes. From what i've heard Forgotten Gods is really, really bad, and that's not from a technical standpoint I think i'll rather play G3 again.

 

[JDR13]

I also bought forsaken gods when it was released but have still yet to play it. Is it worth a play through now?

I've never played the "enhanced edition", but I doubt anything they did can save that game. It's a true piece of shit compared to the games developed by Piranha Bytes.

You can polish a turd all you want, but it's still a turd in the end.

 

[sakichop]

That's kinda what I figured.

Maybe one day I will force myself to sit down and play it. Considering my backlog of games though, that day will not be soon.

 

[Moriendor]

I'm surprised that they were able to implement FXAA. I didn't think it was possible with that engine, and it'll make a huge difference.

I believe that FXAA can be made to work with any engine because it is basically just a filter that is applied to the finished rendered image like a post-processing technique. Which is also why the performance hit of FXAA is comparatively minor and why there are quite a few FXAA injectors out there for games that don't natively support or provide any kind of AA (e.g. Divinity 2 Dragon Knight Saga). Due to its nature FXAA can not match the quality or precision of real AA but it seems to create a nice enough illusion of AA to make it a viable solution in situations where you're not getting playable framerates with real AA enabled or where the game doesn't support AA at all.

As for the stuttering in Gothic 3: It's the engine and nothing in this world will ever fix it.

 

[guenthar]

Maybe the people making the community patch should port the game to another engine.

 

[DArtagnan]

Would be a complete waste of time and effort. The stuttering is really a minor issue at this point.

 

[vurt]

Porting to a new engine could take 5-10 years for a small mod team, so yeah waste of time.. there's a reason we very rarely see this happening and when we do, those projects has taken forever.

 

[Ithilien]

Oh I thought I played it stutter free on xp but that was a long time ago, I could be mistaken.

I tried playing it about a month ago and the stuttering was bothering me. Maybe I'm not as tolerant as I use to be.

Anyway, does anyone know if they are fixing it or if it's even possible at this point?

I've played it several times, and I don't recall any stutter the last couple of times. I've never been able to run Forsaken Gods properly though (and I've tried on several systems).

Having said that, the last time I played G3 was on Vista (on a computer that was state of the art the summer of 2009). I don't think I've tried to run it on W7.

 

[JonNik]

I am pretty certain there is quite a bit of stuttering left (in certain transitional points so it is only a nuisance if you are "traveling" distances really).

Or at least there was on my i7960 6GB DDR3 WD Raptor(10.000 RPM)x2 in raid 0 last I tried (3-4 months ago) on Win7 (not that OS has much if anything to do about it). Certainly improved with CP 1.74 over vanilla ofcourse…

 

[DPB]

In my experience memory makes a massive amount of difference, more than any other game I've tried. When I had 2gb (which is actually above the recommended requirements) the game almost used to grind a halt when moving between areas. Now that I have 4gb (well, 3.25gb on a 32-bit system) it's much more bearable. I still quite liked the game though I have no intention of replaying it anytime soon.

 

[KapitanUnterhosen]

Is there a wikia-like site where you can see what all the armor in the game looks like?