Version 1.5.0 supports Mafia: Definitive Edition! (Patreon)

As teased, here is a new release of my R.E.A.L. mod, adding support for Mafia: Definitive Edition!

And a special gift: VR YouTuber extraordinaire Beardo Benjo has agreed to do a preview video of the mod!! You can watch it above, and don't forget to subscribe to his channel for more fun with VR and irreverent beard humor :-)

The other two games in the Trilogy will come later; I will probably need at least a few weeks each. Judging by the progress I made with my framework, which is still in its infancy, I can estimate that when things settle down a bit I might be able to release a new game each month, on average. Of course some games might be easier, and others will take more time, especially huge open world games.

Mod installation has been streamlined somewhat. Install the game and run it at least once in 2D, to create your user profile. Then download the mod zip from the attachment at the bottom of this post (an updated README will come later) and extract it to the game folder, where mafiadefinitiveedition.exe is. Find RealConfig.bat in the game folder and run it. It will ask for administrator permissions: this happens only once when you install the mod, and it's a batch file, so everybody can verify exactly what it does.

The installer will automatically fix the folder permissions (no need to do it manually anymore), and it will initialize the game's graphics options to values that are known to work properly with the mod. At this point you can launch the game again, and this time it should start in VR.

The first thing you might want to do is go to the options menu and adjust the resolution to your liking. For Mafia I directly modded the custom resolutions into the game, so it's much easier to choose a proper square resolution that works well with your headset. The installer sets a default of 2160x2160, but if you have a powerful video card you can push it to 2700x2700 or higher.  On an RTX 3090 I get very good frame rates up to 2970x2970 or so. There are also two standard resolutions (1280x720 and 1920x1080) but they are not meant for VR, I just left them in there in case people want to briefly switch to 2D for a problematic mission or whatever.

Gameplay: everything in the game should work properly (Story mode, Free Ride, Carcyclopedia). Cutscenes are in full 3D with proper FOV, and let me tell you that it took forever to fix them. But it was worth it. The immersion you get from being in the scene, instead of viewing it on a flat screen, makes a world of difference to me. This can be seen very easily with Mafia, by the way, because in this game several cutscenes are pre-rendered, and thus in 2D (unfortunately the entire lengthy intro sequence, until you finally get control of your cab, is pre-rendered). Having some cutscenes in 2D and some in VR makes the difference in emotional involvement quite obvious. A negative note is that this game is much less polished than monsters like GTA V or RDR2, so for instance during cutscenes you will see a lot of weird stuff in parts of the virtual set that were not supposed to be visible by the scripted camera, like floating cigars that smoke themselves, missing car doors and house roofs and whatnot :-D

Game options: CONTROLS> AIM ASSIST must be OFF, and if you want to tweak the graphics options you can (although in this game they all kind of look the same), but DISPLAY> DEPTH OF FIELD and DISPLAY> MOTION BLUR must always be OFF. Unfortunately Mafia: DE has compulsory TAA antialiasing, which never looks great in VR. At times, especially during cutscenes and in certain places like Vincenzo's room, you will notice shimmering around characters and on problematic objects like fences or window panes. That's due to the fact that TAA doesn't work properly with stereo rendering. I might be able to fix it in the future like I did for RDR2, but there are no guarantees, and in any case I can't say that I find it too annoying during normal gameplay.

For a proper, retro experience, reminiscing of times when games were actually designed to be somewhat hard to beat, I also recommend setting GAME> DIFFICULTY to CLASSIC and perhaps even GAME> TRANSMISSION to MANUAL. I dare you to beat "the race" with this combo!

The game is best played with a gamepad (as usual with my mods, motion controls are not implemented or supported). KB/M is also possible, but higher resolutions will make it hard to navigate the menus with a mouse because the game window will be larger than the screen.

If the camera rotating by itself to follow the character makes you queasy, that behavior can be disabled by setting GAME> ON-FOOT FOLLOW CAMERA to OFF. I also use GAME> VEHICLE CAMERA PITCH = LOW, but it doesn't make a lot of difference. Speaking of camera: all the Mafia games have always been in third person, so the camera defaults to being behind your character or following your car. Only while driving, the game also offers a hood camera, which looks kind of ridiculous in VR. I modded it to place it behind the steering wheel, and the resulting effect feels much more natural, almost like proper first-person driving. To cycle to this in-car camera press Left D-Pad when you get control of your cab.

A final note for YouTubers and streamers: I'm aware that my RDR2 mod was hard to capture on video, because the game was hogging all the GPU resources for itself and precious little GPU time was left for video capture and encoding. So, with Mafia I'm exposing a user control that you can find in the mod overlay under the MDE1 tab, called "GPU Throttling". It defaults to 80%. Lower values will throttle the GPU less, giving you more power and thus higher VR frame rates, but the rest of your system might feel very sluggish, especially when you're pushing higher resolutions. Moving the slider further to the right will limit the GPU resources used by the game, which might hurt your VR frame rate a little but should hopefully make for smoother capture and streaming.

Enjoy your life as a Mafioso!!

UPDATE: 1st person mod (don't use it). There is a Script Hook-based 1st person mod on the web, and some people are asking whether it's compatible with mine—or have already messed up their game by trying to install it. I discovered it too when I started working on the game, and before releasing I did try my best to make it work together with mine. As things stand now, however, I definitely recommend NOT using it. You've been warned :-)

The first person mod does three things basically: 1. it replaces the character model with a headless one, 2. it changes the vehicle camera offsets stored in the .sds files, and 3. it uses Script Hook to force the on-foot camera so close to the character that it looks like you're in first person.

1. is a good idea, but unfortunately the game only has headless models for a couple of outfits, so I decided against it because it's weird that you're dressed one way when in third person and another way (uncorrelated with the mission or your Free Ride choices) in first.
For 2. I apply custom camera offsets directly in my mod, and unlike those supplied by the other mod they are adjustable in the overlay, so changing the .sds files is no longer necessary (and it conflicts with my mod, resulting in a camera position somewhere in the backseat).
Finally, 3. is the biggest problem, in part because Script Hook breaks some of the adjustments that I did in my mod, but mostly because putting the on-foot camera so close to the character makes it act all weird, as at times (quite often during combat) the game gets confused into thinking that the camera is on the opposite side of the character, and so the camera begins to spin wildly. Also, stick rotation changes from continuous to stuttery.

As you know, above all I strive to preserve the original beauty of the games I mod, and as it stands now the first person camera just ruins the experience. If you really must try it despite my advice, at least don't install the tables.sds file that comes with it or your in-vehicle camera will be messed up. And if you already installed the 1st person mod and now want to get rid of it, you can either delete the game folder completely and start from scratch, or carefully perform the following steps when the game is not running: delete dinput8.dll from the game folder to disable Script Hook; have your launcher verify the game files, in order to restore the original tables; extract my mod again from the original zip; run RealConfig.bat.