Resident Evil 4 HD Project mod remakes The Island, prepares for something 'BIG'

Plus an impressive haul of behind-the-scenes improvements.

This time last year, the ever-impressive Resident Evil 4 HD Project remade Salazar's Castle to great effect—and followed up with the action horror game's opening village level shortly after. After teasing their work-in-progress dynamic lighting adjustments on The Island last month, project lead Albert has now marked the final zone as complete, as are a glut of "boring and time-consuming mini-tasks".

In this blog post, the creator also promises something "BIG" in due course.

Speaking to the time-sinks, all text and textures in the game's inventory menus, Merchant shop, map, file organiser and more have now been reworked in all six languages the game supports. Albert has also optimised hundreds of cut scene repeated textures.

Of the latter they say: "As some of you know, there are certain textures repeated in most cutscene texture .pack files (like Leon’s face, all of Ashley’s textures, Ada and Ganado textures, etc.) I’ve included them inside the 07000000.pack file (a 'master' pack file which is loaded at the start of the game). So, the same texture that was repeated more than 100 times is now just one single texture. All the repeated textures have been replaced with dummy 4×4 dds files.

"A lot of cutscenes use stage textures, but they were copied again inside the corresponding cutscene texture .pack file instead of using the stage texture .pack file. I’ve redirected these texture calls to the stage .pack files and all the repeated textures inside the cutscene texture .pack files have been replaced with dummy 4×4 dds files, too. I have no idea how big the cutscene texture packs would be if these 2 last points hadn’t been possible. I’d say the final version won’t reach 1 GB (only the cutscenes textures I mean), which makes me think that an non-optimized HD version would easily reach more than 5 GB in size."

If any of that's difficult to parse, this side-by-side cut scene comparison vid should be easier on the eyes.



More information on all of that, and past RE4HD updates, can be found over here. And don't forget to check back soon for the aforementioned "BIG" announcement.