Create a mod with RTX Remix

YOU’LL NEED THIS

NVIDIA RTX 3060TI GRAPHICS CARD

or better RTX Remix software Retro game library

A lot of patience

WE’VE SEEN PLENTY of remastered or modded games recently that have updated the textures and even patched ray tracing into older titles. The RTX versions of QuakeII and Portal are some of the best examples, as they were created by professional studios that know what they’re doing.

If you don’t know what you’re doing, or just want to have a go because taking games apart to see how they work is interesting, Nvidia has released a beta version of RTX Remix that can do just that. It’s time-consuming, fiddly, and there’s no guarantee that you’ll actually get results. However, in so many ways, it’s the perfect pastime for PC gaming enthusiasts.

This being an Nvidia application, you’ll need a graphics card from the green team. It’ll need to be a fairly recent one, with RTX capabilities—the more powerful, the better. Apologies to AMD GPU users and those who bought Intel Arc cards—this will sadly not work for you.

It’s also worth pointing out that this is largely going to be a story of failure. The first two games we tried didn’t run, and the third had significant issues. Getting into modding with RTX Remix looks like being a long-term project with a steep learning curve. –IAN EVENDEN

1

INSTALL THE SOFTWARE

You can get the RTX Remix beta from nvidia.com with a simple internet search. Download the Omniverse app, log into it with your Nvidia account, then navigate to the Exchange section of the app, find the RTX Remix beta, and click install [ Image A]. There are some minimum specs to consider—a four-core CPU and RTX 3060Ti, though it prefers eight CPU cores and an RTX 4070, and you’ll need 16GB of RAM. While this is downloading (it’s 6.75GB, so may take a while), there’s a Tutorials button at the bottom of the interface that takes you to YouTube to get some pointers from the experts. There’s also an FAQ with an installation guide and basic how-to, which does its best to put you off using the software by pointing out that it’s for ‘experienced modders’.

2

LAUNCH

There’s a handy ‘Launch’ button in Omniverse’s Library section—pressing it gets you into the RTX Remix app itself. This is beta software, and we found that this step could be a tiny bit crashy, especially on one of our PCs with a 16-core AMD Zen+ processor and an RTX 3080 GPU, but it ran first time on an i9-13900K and RTX 4090. There may be something about the older AMD chip, which only just scrapes the Windows 11 requirements, which Remix doesn’t like. Whatever it was, the app wouldn’t even run on that PC, despite it hitting all the other hardware requirements. Once it’s open [ Image B],

you’ll find a section called Exchange. In this, search for RTX Remix, click install, and wait while several gigabytes download.

3

HOW IT WORKS

RTX Remix comprises two parts: there’s the runtime component, which exists as some .dll files, and the toolkit, which runs in the app you open from Omniverse. There’s also a sample project, an .exe file that does nothing but make an R logo rotate within a rectangle with coloured walls. It’s useful for learning how the system works before embarking on a game mod. It’s not especially easy to find, as the file structure is obscure, but if you open the install location of RTX Remix from its Omniverse Settings page, it’s in deps/ remix_runtime/sample.

4

INTEGRATE THE RUNTIME

Sounds scary, huh? It’s actually just a case of copying some files into the folder that contains the executable of the game you’re trying to mod—in this case, sample.exe. The most recent versions of the runtime files are on GitHub, but RTX Remix comes with some too, and you can find them in /deps/remix_ runtime/runtime. Copy everything in the /runtime folder to the /sample folder (or the location of the .exe for the game that you want to mod).

5 RUN THE SAMPLE If you now run the sample.exe file, you’ll notice that it’s a bit different to the way it was when you last saw it. Its lighting has been upgraded, and there are path-traced shadows present under the spinning letter. This is absolutely not what will happen when you try to mod a game—the sample file has been built with remixing in mind, while games from the early 2000s weren’t, and you’ll have to put quite a lot of work in before you see these kinds of upgrades. We tried it with some older titles, and they simply wouldn’t start, or if they did launch, there was usually something badly wrong with them, such as NPCs’ eyeballs displaying as blank white, or important parts of the in-game HUD being invisible.

6 ENTER THE MATRIX With the sample app still open, press Alt+X, and you will get the RTX Remix User Graphics Settings window [ Image C], from which you can hit the Developer Settings menu for a more fully featured options panel that slides in from the right. At this point, the beta nature of the software asserted itself again for us and it stopped responding, so remember to use that Save Settings button frequently.

7 FIDDLE One of the easiest things to do is turn bloom lighting on and off, which uses a single toggle under the Post-Processing section of the Rendering tab. You’ll see the bloom disappear and reappear from the rotating image. To start upgrading a game properly, you’ll need to perform an asset capture. Go to the Enhancements tab, and click Capture Scene after giving the capture a name. When it’s at 100 percent, quit the sample game and open the /sample/rtx-remix/captures folder, where you’ll find a .usd file with the name you gave it, plus folders with names like Lights and Meshes.

8 A NEW PROJECT Go back to RTX Remix, and create a new project. You’ll be asked for two folder locations. The top one can be wherever you like, perhaps user/documents/ rtx-remix, but the second must be /rtx-remix. Choose the .usd file you made, and click ‘create’ to get the project started. This sets up a /mods folder in the / sample folder, and throws a couple of symlinks in—don’t change the file or folder names. From this starting point, you can begin to create the remix mod for your chosen game, although if you have no dev experience, it’s worth watching a lot of videos and reading forum threads first.

9 CHOOSE A GAME TO MOD Now for the tricky bit. There are lists of compatible games on ModDB and Reddit, so it’s worth perusing those before taking the plunge. A game that’s fully compatible and already in your Steam (or GOG, or even Epic) library is a good place to start, though remixable titles tend to be of the older and cheaper variety. You’ll need one that supports either DirectX 8 or 9, and there’s a file you’ll need to route DirectX 8 functions to DirectX 9, so check the small print before you attempt your Remix.