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Modding is going to change forever thanks to the newest tool in the arsenal, the Nvidia RTX Remix. It was showcased back in September 2022 and is available fully starting January 22, 2024. The tech received a lot of enthusiasm from developers and modders alike. As many who are familiar with the process may know, modding is tedious, especially in the older games.
With the Nvidia RTX Remix, Nvidia has practically made the modding process almost effortless as the AI will be the one understanding, reworking, and ultimately improving the scene at hand. This doesn’t mean that the process will be completely automatic as it will still leave the final adjustment and decision-making in the hands of the modders and developers.
Let’s see how this game-changing technology for modding works.
Nvidia RTX Remix has cut short the path to analyze, import, and improve games with mods
The first hurdle in modding old legacy games is the lack of source code. This obstacle cannot be overstated enough. In Nvidia’s own words on their RTX Remix webpage, it took them several months for the Quake II RTX mod when the game’s source code was readily available.
Games that don’t have a source code for the modders to use are an extremely difficult task to undertake. It takes multiple teams of coders, designers, VFX experts, and lighting technicians to properly mod and implement a graphical overhaul.
Modding also creates one huge problem as the current setup involves steps that aren’t mutually exclusive to one another. For example, the rendering team must fully update and render the surfaces and objects before the lighting experts can begin working on how these surfaces and objects interact with ambient light.
This can take several days or weeks as the work must be one hundred percent complete before the next team can join in. RTX Remix solves this problem in a breeze. Below's a classic example of the tech works to improve the visuals of Mafia 1, a PS2-era classic released back in 2002.
The entire project is capable of being shared on the platform through Nvidia’s Omniverse. There, one artist can update material properties and provide denser geometry of meshed surfaces, while another can start placing them in the perfect spot as soon as the first artist is done with one object.
This creates a massively synced project where progress on the next part can start as soon as the previous step has begun its journey toward a conclusion. Of course, it is now possible for modders to work from anywhere across the globe while interacting and sharing ideas.
The RTX Remix thus solves work-progress latency issues impressively.
What exactly is this AI-powered RTX Remix software and how does it work wonders?
Old games were made in 32 bits and used x86 codes for the game files. Converting all of this, with or without their source code, to x64 code and inserting ray tracing manually is a momentous task, and the result is not worth the effort most of the time.
With the Nvidia RTX Remix, however, with the press of a key, the AI tool instantly captures the geometry, lighting, textures, and cameras of the entire scene. Next, the software intercepts the D3D9 runtime (rendering instructions for the GPU) of these older games using the RTX Remix Runtime.
It then translates them into different distinct assets and finally recreates the scene in updated textures, lighting, and geometry. It is so simple and intuitive that the process is almost magical.
Once the scene has been translated into modern assets, the modders can work their magic by individually placing objects and adjusting light interactions as they see fit.
Expected release date of the RTX Remix
So far from Nvidia, we have only seen product demonstrations and game demos where they have successfully managed to implement it in various scenes and images. Even at CES 2023, Nvidia didn’t provide any concrete details about the potential release date of Nvidia's Remix.
It is, however, expected that this tool for the modding community and developers should be available before the end of 2023.
Mods are perhaps single-handedly responsible for keeping a lot of games alive even a decade after their original release. Over the years, thanks to Nvidia’s new modding tool, a lot of titles should see modded blood infused in their veins to grant them a new life, all the while taking drastically reduced time in the process.
