Release: v2109

• Introduced the Standard renderer, a new alternative to ray tracing designed to preserve the original game's lighting, colors, and atmosphere without requiring hardware ray tracing.
  • Improvements over the base game's renderer:
    • Added omnidirectional shadows for shadow-enabled point lights, extending the original renderer's spotlight-only shadow support.
    • Added contact-hardening soft shadows, with sharper edges near the casting object and softer shadows farther away.
    • Replaced the original screen-space ambient occlusion with horizon-based ambient occlusion (HBAO) for contact shading.
    • Added temporal antialiasing and upscaling, including FSR 3.1 and XeSS where supported.
• Standard rendering includes the original point, spot, and box lighting, along with shadow maps, ambient occlusion, water reflections, fog, decals, particles, and translucent materials.
• Added a choice between Standard and Ray Traced rendering in the graphics settings, with both modes available for editor previews. GPUs without hardware ray-tracing support automatically use Standard.
• Added DirectX support on Windows, alongside Vulkan.
• Improved lighting, colors, and brightness in the ray-traced renderer.
• Improved darkness detection to account for light bouncing off nearby surfaces, making sanity loss more forgiving in indirectly lit areas.
• Fixed flickering and disappearing shadows in scenes with many lights.
• Fixed texture artifacts around cutout edges.
• Improved particle blending and visual effects.
• Updated upscaling support across graphics backends.
• Improved editor previews, thumbnails, and camera captures.
• Updated campaign lighting settings.
• Improved graphics compatibility and rendering reliability.