SoC Enhanced Edition Cutscenes

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The Enhanced Editions of the STALKER games are a mixed bag. What's undoubtedly an upgrade however, are the pre-rendered cutscenes. The resolution of the original cutscenes amounts to a mere 512x288. The Enhanced Edition has 4K cutscenes. The cutscenes aren't rerendered, but upscaled by GSC with AI from a higher resolution source. The cutscenes of the console port of The Zone Trilogy are NOT re-rendered either. They received a simple bicubic upscale from the same source.

While porting the cutscenes I ran into various issues with the ancient codec the game uses and the lack of documentation for it. With some "creative" workarounds and other trickery, I've successfully ported all 11 pre-rendered cutscenes in Full HD resolution to the OG Shadow of Chernobyl. That's 1306. 25% more pixels per cutscene!

Despite the overall upgrade, GSC’s upscale of these cutscenes was pretty sloppy in places. To fix that, I went through each cutscene, masked errors and “oil spill” artifacts (see comparison images), and spliced my own upscales with the Enhanced Edition’s cutscenes to create the best possible version. I've done similar work for other games.

ALL LANGUAGES ARE SUPPORTED!

Installation

• []Make sure you extract the entire archive into a working directory (not the game folder).

  []Open "1 - Files" and drag the "gamedata" folder into the main Shadow of Chernobyl folder.

  []Make sure the $game_data$ line inside of "fsgame.ltx" in the main game folder looks like this:

  $game_data$ =     true | true | $fs_root$      | gamedata\

  []Update "ui_movies.xml"

• []VANILLA: Open "2 - Config" and then "Vanilla". Drag the "gamedata" folder into the main Shadow of Chernobyl folder.

• MODDED("ui_movies.xml" already present in gamedata\config\ui): Open "2 - Config" and then "Modded". Run "UI_Movies_Patcher.bat". A backup of your existing "ui_movies.xml" will be created and then the patch will be applied.

If I see enough interest, I'll do Clear Sky next.