Pale Dawn

Description

This mod is my attempt in making Grim Dawn visuals less aggressive, so everyone can finally see, how beautiful the world actually is. To achieve that, I reviewed all game textures, upscaled them, and reduced saturation. Also, every texture got its own color profile with modified contrast, exposure, and gamma. The last step was reducing colors used per texture, to bring the overall palette closer to great games of old. My primary source of inspiration was Diablo II, of course.

I also modified every lighting preset, and every day/night cycle preset to make sure that textures are shown the way I intended.

Right now, only the main campaign is processed, and it will take 2-3 weeks to deal with DLCs.

A note about using AI:

1. I used Real-ESRGAN locally to upscale the textures, but the calling code and result checks were done by me.

2. I used ChatGPT to generate .bat scripts for ArchiveTool.exe and community tools calls (Because I'm working with Shell scripts, not batch).

3. I used ChatGPT to generate the header image (ikik)

Installation instructions

The mod comes with two modules, and each goes in its own place.

1. Textures archive is extracted to "My Documents/My Games/Grim Dawn/Settings" folder, where you'll have texture sub-folders like this:

2. database.arz, Levels.arc and fx.arc should go to the game folder, where you should create "mods" subfolder, if it's missing:

3. To make sure the game is actually using these overrides, you must add an additional parameter "/basemods" to the game (example for Steam version):

Main features

 - All game textures (minus icons) were upscaled at least twice the size, and each texture was modified to reduce number of colors used, increase contrast if needed, and adjust gamma. Rocks and stones a grey now, which IMO greatly improves visual clarity.

 - In-game lighting was modified: outdoor areas have original RGB proportions, but extreme outliers were removed (such as green tint in Act 1 Lab). In-game bloom was significantly reduced, and day/night cycle presets and adjustment color presets too.

 - Random barrier generation for base game was turned off, no more wiggling about the dungeon to find the exit.

 - Optionally, camera pitch angle was changed to a higher value and is fixed now (PoE 1 camera style).

 - Optionally, riftgate and personal rift colors are changed to blue (in memory of D2).

Requirements

This mod is a standalone mod, and doesn't depend on other mods, BUT REQUIRES ALL THE DLCS!. I'm sorry, I don't have time to ship different Levels.arc versions for every setup. I cannot guarantee it will work properly quest-wise if you don't have all the DLCs.

Note that the mod is incompatible with other mods changing database or world files.