Version 1.5.1: first person Mafioso! (Patreon)

You asked for it, I wanted it, the game needed it... here it is: on-foot first person camera for Mafia: Definitive Edition :-)

This release has so much new stuff that the post will be about a mile long, so to lighten things up I also embedded a fun video above. It's not yet for the first person version, but it's so hilarious that I just had to post it. Ian's a barrel of laughs!
 

• First person: it was really hard to implement, or to use a more accurate word, it was really hard to fake. The game doesn't have an actual point-of-view camera, or if it does, it's so well hidden that I wasn't able to find it. All it's got is a follow camera that always looks at some point near the character. So, what I had to do was tweak dozens of parameters, relative offsets, bindings and whatnot in order to make that camera behave more or less like a proper FP camera would. The result is by no means perfect, but in my opinion it's good enough to be enjoyable, so I decided to release it.
  
  What works well is that, unlike the 2D 1st person mod that you can find on the web, camera movement and rotation are not stuttering but perfectly continuous. Also very important for VR, there are no sudden 360° camera spins during combat.
  
  What doesn't work so well is that my heuristics for hiding the player or not (depending on where you're looking, the character's speed, the current gameplay state, etc.) aren't always accurate, so it might happen that you see flashes of the inside of Tommy's head, or on the contrary that Tommy is invisible when you should be able to see him, like for instance during execution animations.
  
  Despite everything that can go wrong, though, one of you guys wrote a few days ago that first person "really takes you back and teleports you to another place and another time"... and I agree wholeheartedly. I have started a second playthrough of the game with the first person camera, and I catch myself noticing lots of small details that I had missed during the previous run. In third person, I follow/lead Tommy through his adventures. In first person, I spend my time looking at the paintings hanging on the walls of Salieri's bar or gazing up at the sky-high vault of the church.
   
• Shooting: I'm quite happy about this. I finally found a way to make Tommy's weapon arm point in the direction where you're aiming. It used to be a nuisance in 3rd person not to have the weapon follow your gaze automatically, but it would have been a game-breaker in 1st because the weapon would actually get in front of you and prevent you from seeing your target :-)
   
• Installation: due to the numerous behaviors that I had to change, and the fact that many of the game parameters cannot be altered in real time, the first person camera must be chosen when you run RealConfig.bat. It cannot be toggled on and off during gameplay. However, the installer can be run as many times as you want (after quitting the game of course). It's no longer necessary to restore the installation files from the zip every time. Also very important: to prevent the game from taking control of the camera when you walk around, GAME> ON-FOOT FOLLOW CAMERA should be set to OFF.
   
• Steam version: people who bought the game from Steam noticed an issue where the mod overlay could not be activated or interacted with using the gamepad. The overlay only worked with the keyboard. Thanks to the help of Cercata, a Patron now and a dear friend since the times of my first NOLF2 mod, I found out that Steam hijacks all controllers and takes over all APIs that are used by games to communicate with input devices, and that behavior cannot ever be disabled by the user. It seems a little extreme, if you ask me. Anyway, this release of the mod employs countermeasures that should work around this "all your input are belong to us" attitude. Steam Input still needs to be disabled for the game. I'm looking forward to your feedback! Also for Steam users: I had already fixed a game bug that would cause the FOV in cutscenes to be slightly off, leading to some subtle amount of pupil swim, but the fix didn't work for the Steam version: now it should.
   
• Various improvements: I got rid of the obnoxious black bar that would be drawn right in front of your car when selecting it from Carcyclopedia or the garage.
  
  Thanks to feedback from several Patrons, I found and fixed a couple of missions where the double-trigger gesture would erroneously activate the mod overlay during gameplay. Now the correct behavior (which is for the double-trigger combo to work only when the game is paused) should apply throughout the game.
  
  The previous release had an issue where the cinematic black bar(s) would flash for one frame at every camera change during cutscenes, and fade-ins/fade-outs would sometimes draw a box in front of you instead of correctly darkening the whole scene. Both problems should be fixed now.
  
  The installer (RealConfig.bat) now has a little more intelligence in diagnosing possible system problems that could prevent the mod from installing correctly, and it should be able to find the game settings folders in a more reliable way even for very peculiar Windows configurations.
   
• TAA shimmering: I'm sorry but that's not fixable for this game. The engine implements TAA in such a way that object matrices for the current and previous frames are all mixed up in the same buffers and are found at offsets that vary for each material used in the scene. What that boils down to is, it would take forever to reverse engineer every TAA-related aspect of the engine, and the fix would have a huge performance cost. It's just not worth it.
  
  The best work around, since TAA cannot be disabled for Mafia: DE, is to increase the resolution as much as your card can afford, because shimmering becomes less and less visible with higher resolutions.
   
• GPU Throttling: after several interesting exchanges with some of you guys, especially Terry Damm, I decided to expose a new control in the Red Dead Redemption 2 tab. It's called "GPU Throttling" and it takes the form of a slider going from -1 to 100. -1 means disabled; 0 to 100 is the relative amount of throttling to apply, with 49 being the default that was used in all previous releases. What is it for, you ask?
  
  In my mod, I apply a certain amount of throttling to the GPU in order to leave some resources available for VR, otherwise RDR2 tends to be very greedy and suck up all processing power, which in turn causes hiccups in the VR compositor timing.  The GPU throttling amount has always been predetermined, and it worked well for most users. However, given recent measurements, I decided that from this release I would expose a user-adjustable control to fine-tune it.
  
  If you're in luck, there might be some almost magical results: on my PC with the (O)ptimized preset I get 77.9 fps from the benchmark without the mod attached, and 84.8 fps with the mod fine-tuned to the perfect amount of GPU throttling and VR stopped! So the mod can actually make the game run faster :-D
  
  Which sounds absurd at first, but in fact only means that RDR2 was not optimized to run on the latest generation of GPUs and/or the latest versions of NVIDIA/Vulkan drivers. Recent cards have an incredibly complex way of throttling performance internally to stay within the power budget, so changing a few timings here and there can easily lead to an unexpected boost in fps.
  
  YMMV of course. The rule of thumb is: lower values of the slider will give you higher game frame rates but might lead to some stuttering, in VR and/or in your capture window if you're streaming gameplay video; higher values of the slider will get rid of the stuttering at the cost of a reduced average frame rate.
   
• If this is your first time installing the mod: please refer to my post for the previous release for detailed installation instructions. Particularly important: select your favorite square resolution in-game and set CONTROLS> AIM ASSIST to OFF. But please do read the whole post, it's full of information that you'll want to know sooner or later :-D
   

You're the best, guys! Thanks for following me down the rabbit hole, keep rocking and enjoy!!!