I've tried the zzz_MaximumMeow_P.pak but I think I might be doing something wrong because the game runs very poorly now. I've played, without the mod, over 5 hours at maximum settings 4k uncapped and around 100 fps. After installing the mod, I'm barely hitting 40 fps and it's constantly stuttering. I don't know if I have to do anything else apart from copying the file to \Steam\steamapps\common\Stray\Hk_project\Content\Paks\~mods. Is this mod extremely demanding on the GPU? Can I enable/disable certain settings?
I read the instructions and could not find any answers to this.
Edit: btw, I'm on a RTX 3070 Ti with a Ryzen 5 5600X
Edit 2: I suspect it could be a memory issue. My GPU has only 8 GB of RAM and it might be running out of it. I have also tested running the game with the launch parameter -dx12 without the mod and it also runs like shit.
dx12 runs faster than dx11 with this mod and the words 8G and 4K are not even kind of compatible; 12G is BARELY enough because of the game's extremely low draw distance.
Well, I'm playing at 4K in every game without any issues, Stray included. And very often between 100-120 fps. But, for some reason, with this mod I can barely hit 30 fps and it stutters like mad.
I downloaded the .ini version and none of the settings worked because the dot in [System.Settings] should not be there. This resulted in the game running with ray tracing by default (dx12) so it crippled performance.
Another setting which has a huge performance impact is r.VolumetricFog.GridPixelSize=4 I had to increase it to 6 on my PC for the game to run smoothly.
To enable Screen Space Global Illumination (SSGI), r.SSGI.Enable should be set to =1. This setting has a huge performance impact and will cause the cat's shadow to leave a ghosting trail. r.SSGI.Quality=4 is the highest setting.
The steam launch parameters I am using are: -dx12 -NOTEXTURESTREAMING -NoVerifyGC NOTEXTURESTREAMING required a lot of VRAM.
To use GTAO instead of HBAO, I removed these lines: r.HBAO.Enable=1 r.AmbientOcclusionLevels=3 r.AmbientOcclusionSampleSetQuality=1 r.AOAsyncBuildQueue=1 r.AOMaxViewDistance=16384 r.AOMinLevel=0 r.AOScatterInterpolation=1
Ground-Truth Ambient Occlusion (GTAO) is a technique used in real-time applications, such as video games, to enhance the visual quality by simulating how light interacts with objects in the environment. It's a type of Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO), which approximates true ambient occlusion using per-pixel depth information rather than scene geometry.
The mod looks great, but I'm having issues with the fur. For me, the fur in cutscenes and gameplay just looks like TV static and is really distracting. I don't know if it's an issue with my hardware, or if this was intended, but any help would be appreciated. It doesn't look this way in your screenshots so I'm quite confused. I tried the maximum blur version and it mostly removed this issue, but of course, I much prefer the normal version. Thank you and great work.
You have to pick your poison; the reason you don't see it in the screenshots is they were originally 8K, which means you can take the aliased version to alleviate the sharpness, or you can take the original version which is meant to be run at 4/8K exclusively.
I can't install this. I've tried the three files available, I've put them in the correct folders, replaced the files, and all of that. But when I enter the game, everything looks the same. I took some photos before installing the files, and after installing them; everything looks exactly identical, I only noticed some extremely subtle changes in reflections and water. There are no changes to the color, the shadows, or the lighting. When I install the .pak, my fps go lower; and when I replace the .ini files, my keybindings and settings change but that's all. I've tried installing both at once, but it's the same. Is there something I'm missing? Thanks.
1. If steam or any steam game is installed in programfiles or programfiles(x86) it shouldn't be 2. Make sure your user account is the admin account 3. No family/friend share
Thanks for the reply. I do have family share enabled. I remember it was a pain in the ass to get it to work correctly, so, instead, I decided to download the game from outside Steam and install the files in that separate folder, to see if this would fix the problem. But after trying this, everything stays the same; it's the same problem. Do you really think family share might be causing this problem, and why? I do use it a lot, so disabling it permanently is not an option for me.
OH GOD MY CAT THE FUZZ OH GOD WHAT HAVE YOU DONE HE'S SO SHARP AND POINTY
An AA friendly pak will be uploaded as soon I've run through the game to make sure nothing broke, so you can has both quality and migraine.
Dx12 performance sharply increased despite GI and GI based shadows. weird. Also transparencies fixed.
EDIT: dx12 more faster betterer increasedier At the current time, -dx12 runs 12-20% faster than dx11 on 2xxx, 3xxx nVidia cards and 6xxx AMD cards.
To Do List:
1. Child of Satan smeary blur pak. You people are disgusting. 2. experimental super aggressive streaming pak : this will eliminate stuttering on CERTAIN systems. Not all, possibly even not many.
Simple fact is the game's spooling and decompression (which is forced in realtime, no preloading once the game is launched) is based on the ps5's absurd I/O chip as the baseline metric, and until RDNA3 and CDNA4 are available, nothing on PC will be as efficient aside from absolute bleeding edge brute force enterprise set ups. Do not expect miracles.
Strange even though I have raytracing set to 0 in hkgameusersetting.ini and -dx12 on It still seems like I only get 15-16 frames in-game. Is your .pak file set to raytracing=0 as well? Didn't feel like making my own to override yours to try if that works but idk. Almost certain you said this game is broken as far as raytracing goes, so I wouldn't think you'd have it set to 0...
I have no idea what your hardware and settings are so all I can say is try the pak under -dx12 and see what your results are, which given the dl size and my work schedule is probably faster than waiting for a response?
The likelihood is that BlueTwelve wanted to implement ray tracing as an option or perhaps future feature but couldn't decide on what flavor they were going to use or simply tried the default UE4 featureset as an experiment... *shrug*
Given that they still have a bunch of problems with fatal error/d3d device not found on APUs and cats falling through maps, fairly certain optimizations or feature creatures will be low on the list of to dos.
I'm curious as to what they tried to implement but seeing if their streaming scheme can be smoothed out would prolly be a more worthwhile addition, if anything can be actually done from a strictly external variable level until such time as whatever encryption they used is solved or decrypted. (if ever)
To answer the other part of your question the raytracing scheme they started with is obviously incomplete, you've got normal noise everywhere and weird halos, never mind all your frames is belong to us.
You mention turning off AA in the game, but it's weird, when I apply these, it still looks like AA is applied? Like if I add the AA remover from PCGW myself, it looks really bad, like the fur on the cat is flicker city. But with this, somehow it isn't super flickery? Wondering how you managed that.
Also, some "on vs off" screenshots might do better to showcase what's been changed.
WSGF doesn't have injection for Stray yet, so what the game is actually going to do is anybody's business. Half the pcgw entries on this game are also blatantly incorrect.
The flickering is more probably due to shadow setting differences between dx11 and dx12.
Stray does not have full implementation of dx12 and may not ever support it fully.
Regarding what you stated around folding the configs in to a .pak- I read what you replied to Baxder and it made sense to me (I think). Is there currently a way to do exactly as you stated? (though I'd imagine if there was, you would have mentioned it) I noticed the Stray Splitscreen mod includes a "config" .pak as well as usage of UnrealModLoader to inject a separate mod .pak. I haven't actually used that mod, but it made me think about what you said.
Cool! Hope it works out. This is interesting stuff for me. I'm by no means a modder but I've been having some fun messing around in this particular instance (..ADHD). Managed to pull all of the default ini files out of the original Hk_project-WindowsNoEditor.pak using UnrealPakTool to check out the full list of variables that are being set. Was also messing around a bit with the console enabler mod to view and change some individual cvars in-game.
As for how I did it, I used UnrealPakTool and followed along with this YouTube video: #UnrealEngine - UE4 GEMS - Unpack, modify & Pack the *.Pak files However, keep in mind that you cant actually pull the majority of the actual data out of the .pak aside from the configs, presumably because there is a level of encryption on the actual assets- so when you go to extract the .pak using the tool, you'll notice a lot of errors. This is also why you cant use UnrealPakTool to extract the .pak, edit the files, and recompile it. Maybe there's a way to modify specific files in the .pak using the tool, but I haven't figured that out (and I have a feeling you cant).
You might be able to simply create an override by paking a direct copy of the relevant ini's as a _P mod, however. I'll be up to my john brown hindparts modeling for the next week but after that I'll see if it can be done simply as straight override, which is how the same mod I have for Jedi Fallen Order works.
You can use the use umodel to view the actual models in the game and extract them @shiftkun. I'm not quite sure what the workflow on modifying materials or meshes and getting them back into the game is going to be, however.
Thanks for posting the configs! I'm wondering if modifying those along with some of the materials will allow raytracing to become optimized-ish and work beyond console commands.
EDIT: Yes! Simply pak'ing up the files with the folder structure you posted and making it a _P mod does work! Have to see what this allows for now that we can go beyond "simple" console commands.
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I read the instructions and could not find any answers to this.
Edit: btw, I'm on a RTX 3070 Ti with a Ryzen 5 5600X
Edit 2: I suspect it could be a memory issue. My GPU has only 8 GB of RAM and it might be running out of it. I have also tested running the game with the launch parameter -dx12 without the mod and it also runs like shit.
Another setting which has a huge performance impact is r.VolumetricFog.GridPixelSize=4
I had to increase it to 6 on my PC for the game to run smoothly.
Here are my engine.ini settings
[SystemSettings]
r.RayTracing=False
r.SceneColorFringe.Max=0
r.SceneColorFringeQuality=0
r.Tonemapper.GrainQuantization=0
r.Tonemapper.Quality=0
r.SSS.HalfRes=0
r.SSS.Scale=10
r.SSS.SampleSet=4
r.SSS.Quality=1
r.HBAO.Enable=1
r.AmbientOcclusionLevels=3
r.AmbientOcclusionSampleSetQuality=1
r.AOAsyncBuildQueue=1
r.AOMaxViewDistance=16384
r.AOMinLevel=0
r.AOScatterInterpolation=1
r.ShadowQuality=5
r.HFShadowQuality=3
r.Shadow.CSM.MaxCascades=10
r.Shadow.RadiusThreshold=0.01
r.Shadow.FadeResolution=8
r.Shadow.DistanceScale=1.5
r.Shadow.PreShadowResolutionFactor=1.0
r.Shadow.MinResolution=2048
r.Shadow.MaxResolution=4096
r.Shadow.MaxCSMResolution=4096
r.SSR.Quality=4
r.BloomQuality=5
r.SSGI.Enable=0
r.SSGI.Quality=3
r.DepthOfFieldQuality=0
r.ViewDistanceScale=10.0
r.SceneColorFormat=4
r.MaterialQualityLevel=3
r.Fog=1
r.FogDensity=1
r.VolumetricFog=1
r.VolumetricFog.GridPixelSize=6
r.VolumetricFog.GridSizeZ=128
r.VolumetricFog.HistoryMissSupersampleCount=16
r.StaticMeshLODDistanceScale=0.001
r.MipMapLodBias=-15
r.DetailMode=2
To enable Screen Space Global Illumination (SSGI), r.SSGI.Enable should be set to =1. This setting has a huge performance impact and will cause the cat's shadow to leave a ghosting trail. r.SSGI.Quality=4 is the highest setting.
The steam launch parameters I am using are:
-dx12 -NOTEXTURESTREAMING -NoVerifyGC
NOTEXTURESTREAMING required a lot of VRAM.
r.HBAO.Enable=1
r.AmbientOcclusionLevels=3
r.AmbientOcclusionSampleSetQuality=1
r.AOAsyncBuildQueue=1
r.AOMaxViewDistance=16384
r.AOMinLevel=0
r.AOScatterInterpolation=1
and added these
r.AmbientOcclusion.Method=1
r.GTAO.Combined=1
r.GTAO.ThicknessBlend=0
r.GTAO.Downsample=0
r.GTAO.FalloffEnd=75
r.GTAO.FalloffStartRatio=0
r.GTAO.SpatialFilter=0
r.GTAO.TemporalFilter=1
r.GTAO.UseNormals=1
Ground-Truth Ambient Occlusion (GTAO) is a technique used in real-time applications, such as video games, to enhance the visual quality by simulating how light interacts with objects in the environment. It's a type of Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO), which approximates true ambient occlusion using per-pixel depth information rather than scene geometry.
I've tried the three files available, I've put them in the correct folders, replaced the files, and all of that. But when I enter the game, everything looks the same.
I took some photos before installing the files, and after installing them; everything looks exactly identical, I only noticed some extremely subtle changes in reflections and water. There are no changes to the color, the shadows, or the lighting.
When I install the .pak, my fps go lower; and when I replace the .ini files, my keybindings and settings change but that's all. I've tried installing both at once, but it's the same.
Is there something I'm missing? Thanks.
2. Make sure your user account is the admin account
3. No family/friend share
I do have family share enabled. I remember it was a pain in the ass to get it to work correctly, so, instead, I decided to download the game from outside Steam and install the files in that separate folder, to see if this would fix the problem. But after trying this, everything stays the same; it's the same problem.
Do you really think family share might be causing this problem, and why? I do use it a lot, so disabling it permanently is not an option for me.
An AA friendly pak will be uploaded as soon I've run through the game to make sure nothing broke, so you can has both quality and migraine.
Dx12 performance sharply increased despite GI and GI based shadows. weird. Also transparencies fixed.
EDIT: dx12 more faster betterer increasedier
At the current time, -dx12 runs 12-20% faster than dx11 on 2xxx, 3xxx nVidia cards and 6xxx AMD cards.
To Do List:
1. Child of Satan smeary blur pak. You people are disgusting.2. experimental super aggressive streaming pak : this will eliminate stuttering on CERTAIN systems. Not all, possibly even not many.
Simple fact is the game's spooling and decompression (which is forced in realtime, no preloading once the game is launched) is based on the ps5's absurd I/O chip as the baseline metric, and until RDNA3 and CDNA4 are available, nothing on PC will be as efficient aside from absolute bleeding edge brute force enterprise set ups. Do not expect miracles.
The likelihood is that BlueTwelve wanted to implement ray tracing as an option or perhaps future feature but couldn't decide on what flavor they were going to use or simply tried the default UE4 featureset as an experiment... *shrug*
Given that they still have a bunch of problems with fatal error/d3d device not found on APUs and cats falling through maps, fairly certain optimizations or feature creatures will be low on the list of to dos.
I'm curious as to what they tried to implement but seeing if their streaming scheme can be smoothed out would prolly be a more worthwhile addition, if anything can be actually done from a strictly external variable level until such time as whatever encryption they used is solved or decrypted. (if ever)
To answer the other part of your question the raytracing scheme they started with is obviously incomplete, you've got normal noise everywhere and weird halos, never mind all your frames is belong to us.
Also, some "on vs off" screenshots might do better to showcase what's been changed.
The flickering is more probably due to shadow setting differences between dx11 and dx12.
Stray does not have full implementation of dx12 and may not ever support it fully.
?[SystemSettings]
to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Hk_project\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor\Engine.inir.PostProcessAAQuality=0
and when I did that, it absolutely turned off the AA. I did not change between DX11 or 12, all I did was add the line.
0 is not off, it is number of additional passes per frame.
r.DefaultFeature.AntiAliasing=0/False is off.
Regarding what you stated around folding the configs in to a .pak- I read what you replied to Baxder and it made sense to me (I think). Is there currently a way to do exactly as you stated? (though I'd imagine if there was, you would have mentioned it) I noticed the Stray Splitscreen mod includes a "config" .pak as well as usage of UnrealModLoader to inject a separate mod .pak. I haven't actually used that mod, but it made me think about what you said.
If I'm completely misunderstanding- I apologize!
Are you able to share how you were able to extract the default variables? Or at least dump that information somewhere?
Here are some pastebin links for the default files I pulled from the Hk_project-WindowsNoEditor.pak :
Folder structure right out of the .pak: Hk_project\Config\
DefaultEngine.ini
DefaultGame.ini
DefaultUserSettings.ini
DefaultInput.ini
DefaultScalability.ini
And an additional folder: Hk_project\Config\Windows
WindowsEngine.ini
WindowsGameUserSettings.ini
WindowScalability.ini
And here's a GDrive link to the files themselves (folder structure maintained)
As for how I did it, I used UnrealPakTool and followed along with this YouTube video: #UnrealEngine - UE4 GEMS - Unpack, modify & Pack the *.Pak files However, keep in mind that you cant actually pull the majority of the actual data out of the .pak aside from the configs, presumably because there is a level of encryption on the actual assets- so when you go to extract the .pak using the tool, you'll notice a lot of errors. This is also why you cant use UnrealPakTool to extract the .pak, edit the files, and recompile it. Maybe there's a way to modify specific files in the .pak using the tool, but I haven't figured that out (and I have a feeling you cant).
Thanks for posting the configs! I'm wondering if modifying those along with some of the materials will allow raytracing to become optimized-ish and work beyond console commands.
EDIT:
Yes! Simply pak'ing up the files with the folder structure you posted and making it a _P mod does work! Have to see what this allows for now that we can go beyond "simple" console commands.