New ICR and GoKart patches now avaliable
It has been a few years since either of the mods had an update as there were no known major outstanding things to patch or fix. Recently however as of this past week a new direct X 9 DLL file released that finally allowed players to have shadows working from structures and other cars. In the past the cars would always render black and you had to disable the options in the NR2003 game menus. It was a small sacrifice of using the DLL all these years for the massive FPS boost it gave the game.
You can read more about how to get the new DLL in this reddit thread here. I also have threads on Stunod and ADRD keeping up to date info on the DLL developments as well. I soon found out that some mods (including my ICR and GoKart mods) were not receiving shadows from structures and/or crashing the game as a result. I went into my code and thankfully found the root cause quickly. These new patches for ICR and GoKart have the newly recompiled fixes so you can now enjoy my mods with shadows as well.
Fixing the Shadows in the code
When making a mod these days there are not many of the OG creators around. So you end up having to figure out several things on your own when it comes to the more subtle differences in making code for a NR2003 Mod from scratch. So if you were wondering “why wasn’t this issue found earlier?” when I tested my mods in game as they were being developed I was always using the DLLin my game and comparing it to other successful mods of the past how they looked. Since the DLL black car lighting bug affected every mod regardless it was impossible for me to realize the difference unless I tried the game with a DLL added.
So what causes some mods to receive shadows correctly and others do not? It all comes down to a Bounding Box that has a MIN and MAX coordinates in the code:
Interestingly this code if omitted from your mod doesn’t cause any ‘major’ issues outside of shadow rendering on it. It doesn’t play a role in any other form of lighting such as the sun direction, reflections, or night race lights, its just for shadows and if the car can receive them. I had written in my code the bounding box MIN and MAX but not actually included it to be used in the output for the 3do when it compiled.
To include it in the output it has to be added in the final group of the exterior output but not in the actual parenthesis like you generally group elements for a papyrus script GROUP. Once this is done then the car mod in game will render shadows on it correctly. The only major issue when not including this code is the game could crash if you enable shadows from other cars.
The final result in fixing the code is the mods can now have proper shadows from structures and other cars covering them as the image below:
To get the patches they have been integrated into the latest mod files. Simply head on over to the downloads > mods section and re-download the mod files for ICR and GoKart patches.