Remaster

1One switch, and a clean way back

Everything new hangs off visual in config.ini. With it off (and no blur running), the frame takes the exact path it took before: world straight into the backbuffer, stock shaders. With it on, the world goes into a scene target in the backbuffer's own format, gets post-processed, and only then the HUD is drawn on top, so no text ever gets bloomed, blurred or vignetted.

The mesh shaders got the same treatment. The remaster code lives in #ifdef VISUAL blocks, and the stock program is compiled from the very same text without the define, so the preprocessor hands the GPU the old shader.

Two shader programs, one source of truth. Like a skater with a regular and a switch stance.

2"Motion blur doesn't work": the mystery

It did work. It just never ran. The game's only blur is SetScreenBlur, and outside the menus the only thing that turns it on is a special trick with the Cool Specials cheat on. When it did run, it blended the whole frame, HUD included, so your score ghosted around the screen too.

So now there are two blurs, both on the 3D view only:

• The game's screen blur (the cheat's trippy trails): same look, but the trail is kept in its own texture and the HUD stays sharp.
• Motion Blur, new: real per-pixel camera motion blur. Each pixel's world position comes back from the depth buffer, gets projected with last frame's camera, and the difference is the blur.

The catch with camera blur in a third-person game: the skater moves with the camera, so a "the world is static" blur would smear them. The fix is a distance fade, and samples that land on something close are thrown out, so the skater never bleeds into the background.

Camera cuts (a jump of more than 10 feet or a 40° turn in a 60th of a second) skip the blur, so the replay camera doesn't smear the whole park across the screen.

3The skater finally gets a shadow

Plot twist: on the Xbox, the THUG engine renders the skater's shadow into a texture and projects it onto the level. In this port that code was stubbed out, so the skater hovered over the ground like a ghost. And the shadow direction came out as NaN, because the light getter it asks was a stub returning a zero vector:

The new shadow is a small depth map of the skater, rendered from the game's own shadow camera (it slants along the level's main light, goes straight down in the air, and fades as you get higher). It's applied in screen space from the scene's depth, so every surface gets it exactly once: ground, walls, decals, curbs. The skater writes "don't shadow me" into a spare channel, so it doesn't land on their own body.

Twenty-two years later, the skater is finally standing on the ground. Physics remains optional.

4A little extra light (on top, never instead)

THUG2's levels are lit by baked vertex colors, and they're good. So the remaster keeps them as the base and only adds:

• Hemisphere ambient: a fill light in the level's sky or fog color from above, 35% of it from below.
• Wrap diffuse on skaters and peds, from the level's lights, which this port never fed to the shaders before.
• Specular, tight and small, only on materials that were already shiny: flagged specular, or environment mapped (chrome, cars, wet stuff). No shiny concrete, no oily skin.

5Fake HDR, real vibes

There's no HDR buffer, and no need for one. The post chain is four steps, each skippable:

1. Expose: scale the scene a touch (1.05).
2. Bloom: a bright pass at half resolution, a second downsample, a gaussian blur. Only things marked as glowing take part: the brightest baked light and additive effects (light beams, glows), so white walls don't start radiating.
3. Shoulder: a filmic roll-off for the highlights; blacks and mid tones are untouched.
4. Grade: lift the blacks a hair, take the saturation down a hair, darken the corners a hair. Then dither, so the gradients don't band.

No eye adaptation, no temporal tricks, no history buffers to lag behind the replay camera. A handful of fullscreen passes, and it still holds 120 fps at 1080p.

6See more of the park

Field of View goes from 55° to 85° (72° is the game's). It's applied in the game's own camera, not just the renderer, so the game's own culling and screen projections stay in step with what you see. The front end and cutscenes keep the original framing.

7The knobs

The menu flips whole features on and off. For fine-tuning, everything lives in config.ini, read when the game starts. The game only writes the section when you change something in the menu; switching a feature off sets its values to neutral, switching it back on restores them. Values outside the ranges are clamped, unknown keys are logged.

8Where it lives

The remaster came with the engine from the THUG1 port, where it was written for THUG1's levels. On THUG2 it runs as is: same shaders, same knobs, THUG2's baked lighting underneath. Before-and-after shots of THUG2's cities are coming as the levels become playable.