Clear Sight 0.0.7

A visibility mod for HELLDIVERS 2. It thins out excessive fog, smoke, explosion dust, flashes, light shafts, heat haze, shield bubbles, rain, bloom, sun flare, the Experimental Infusion overlay, spores and darkness.
Every effect is a separate Arsenal option with its own strength level. Player gas stays vanilla.

• Version 0.0.7, game build 26251122
• Requires the Arsenal mod manager
• Resource patch only: no Lua, no loader, no DLL, no data (dl_bin) changes
• Fewer particles can reduce GPU bottlenecks and improve 1% low frame rates

Design goal
Clear Sight does not draw anything new on screen. It only lowers values the game already has: particle opacity and lifetime, fog density, bloom, lens flare, screen overlays and night color grading. The aim is that you stop noticing the haze, not that you notice the mod.
Game modding tutorials
Game modding tutorials

Kept vanilla on purpose

• Player gas (gas grenades, gas mines, gas mortar, eagle and orbital gas, Sterilizer, gas sprayers) and the effect on gassed targets
• Explosion fire (only the black cloud around it is reduced)
• Bug effects: bug holes and nests, reinforcement smoke, hit and death clouds, Spore Burst Titan breath, Spore Burst bug mist, dragon roach breath
• Hit sparks and light, tracers, laser beams, shotgun flash, jetpack flame, rocket sentry trails, distant yellow spore columns
• Map information hidden by mission modifiers (enemy units, nests and bug holes stay hidden)

Options
Numbers are how much of the vanilla effect remains (25% = keep 25%, 0% = remove all). The first sub-option is the default. Option labels in Arsenal are in English in the main zip (HD2 Clear Sight 0.0.7.zip) and in Korean in the KR zip.

Material - Base file, required by Fog, Equipment Smoke, Ambient Smoke, Gimmick Smoke, Explosion Dust, Explosion Cloud and Flame Soot. On its own it looks exactly like vanilla. Smoke Lifetime, Flame Flash, Flash and Light Shafts carry what they need and work without it.

Smoke Lifetime (50% / 75% / 25% / 10%)
Smoke columns, explosion dust, landing dust, fire smoke and the like disappear sooner. Their thickness is unchanged. Smoke in effects handled by other options, such as Eagle and Orbital strike explosions, is shortened by that option instead when it is on (Explosion Dust, Explosion Cloud, Ambient Smoke and Fog use their chosen level).


Flame Flash (100% / 0% / 5% / 10% / 25% / 50%)
Opacity of the flames of flamethrower-type weapons (FLAM-40 Flamethrower, FLAM-66 Torcher, SMG/FLAM-34 Stoker, P-72 Crisper, SG-451 Cookout, B/FLAM-80 Cremator, A/FLAM-40 Flame Sentry, AX/FLAM-75 Hot Dog, EXO-51 Lumberer Exosuit, M-104 Incinerator FRV). The default is 100% (vanilla).


Flash (10% / 25% / 0% / 5% / 50%)
Opacity of muzzle flashes and explosion flashes, including the Meltagun. Also turns off the light the flashes cast on their surroundings and their light shafts. Shape, size and duration are unchanged. Turn the option off for 100%.


Light Shafts (on / off)
Turns off the beams of light (volumetric light shafts) around fires, explosions and lights. The light itself and its brightness are unchanged.


Fog (25% / 0% / 50%)
Volumetric fog and clouds, fog floating around the terrain or lying low on the ground, the hazy layer that covers the screen with distance and height, the mist on swamp and moor floors, and fog generated by terrain. Gas clouds stay vanilla.


Equipment Smoke (25% / 0% / 50%)
Firing and casing smoke, laser overheat smoke and heat-sink vapor, laser sentry vapor, thrust smoke from jump pack, hover pack, guard dogs and missiles. Some explosion smoke that shares the muzzle smoke texture (e.g. HE grenades) is reduced too.


Ambient Smoke (25% / 0% / 50%)
Spore Spewer smoke, burning wreck smoke columns, enemy facility chimneys, lava pits, volcanic plants and magma vents, volcanic activity smoke, ship steam, warp pack cooling vapor, ship floor smoke.


Gimmick Smoke (25% / 0% / 50%)
Eagle and orbital smoke, smoke grenades (including stun smoke and the orbital smoke walking barrage), spore bursts from highland mushrooms, and the thick spore clouds of Spore Spewers, Nursing Spewers and Caustic Chargers. Gas always stays vanilla.


Explosion Dust (50% / 25% / 0%)
Explosion smoke and dirt, hellpod / supply / dropship landing dust, impact dust, dust from destroyed enemies, structures and objectives. Explosion fire is untouched.


Explosion Cloud (50% / 25% / 0%)
Black clouds around strikes, hellbombs, rockets, grenades, napalm and incendiary fire, and the black soot left as fire cools. Fire brightness is untouched.


Flame Soot (0% / 25% / 50%)
Black smoke around flamethrower-type weapons. The flames themselves are handled by Flame Flash.


Heat Haze (0% / 25% / 50%)
Shimmering air from laser and plasma weapons, explosions, engines and the Melta mine.


Shield (10% / 25% / 50%)
Makes the bubbles of shield generator packs and relays fainter, so you can see out from inside them.


Weather (100% / 0% / 25% / 50%)
Rain streaks and raindrops on rainy planets, and other particle effects called by planet weather. The default is 100% (vanilla).


Bloom (40% / 50% / 30% / 20% / 10%)
Lowers bloom and disables the anamorphic streak at every level. Night bloom is half of the day value, so nothing gets brighter than vanilla. Requires the in-game Bloom setting to be on.


Lens Flare (25% / 50% / 0%)
The sun flare and the row of lens ghosts that appear when you look toward the sun. The sun and sunlight stay as bright as vanilla.


Stims (25% / 50% / 0%)
Turns the yellow screen overlay of the Experimental Infusion booster into the same teal as a regular stim and makes it fainter, together with its saturation boost. The regular stim effect stays vanilla.


Atmospheric Spores (Spores only / Gloom Veil)
Removes the spore overlay of the "Atmospheric Spores" modifier from the operation map, briefing map, minimap and drop-zone hologram. Gloom Veil also hides the yellow Gloom cloud on the galaxy map.


Night Visibility (Medium / Weak / Strong)
Lifts dark areas at night (shadows, foliage, craters) while sky and lights stay almost unchanged. Night grading applies to 221 of 281 planets; Gloom planets are left vanilla.


A few effect files hold effects from several options; those follow the option that owns the file (e.g. a little smoke inside flash particles is removed whenever Flash is on). Some flash particles are shared by other weapons, so the same flash changes there too. Exact counts are in README_EN.txt (README_KO.txt in the KR zip).

Installation

1. Close the game.
2. In Arsenal, disable other smoke / fog / muzzle flash / particle removal mods.
3. Remove any older version of HD2 Clear Sight, then add this zip.
4. Enable Material, then the options you want, and pick one sub-option for each.
5. Deploy.

After changing options, close the game and Deploy again. The zip uses standard compression, so Windows Explorer can extract it too.

Compatibility
If two mods change the same game file, only one applies, depending on deploy order. Do not use Clear Sight together with other smoke, fog, muzzle flash or particle removal mods.

Game updates - important
Every option contains full copies of the game files it changes. Fog in particular contains the renderer settings and 49 fog and atmosphere shader libraries, and Gimmick Smoke contains a fog volume shader library.

• When an update is announced, disable the mod (at least Fog, Gimmick Smoke and Bloom) and Deploy before launching the game.
• Otherwise the game may fail to start or look wrong, and updated effects may be overwritten with old versions.
• Keep it off until a new version is released.

Limitations
No real-time option switching, automatic graphics tuning or real-time exposure control. These would need Lua or data changes, which this mod does not use.

Credits
Based on HD2 Smoke Control by etxp (MIT). Clear Sight is not an official version of Smoke Control; do not enable the two together.
Thanks to the authors of Clear View, Hydrogen, Yet Another Eye-Straining Muzzle Flash and Explosion Particle Remover, WARDUST and Dynamic Shadows, and Bubble Shields for their permission, and to everyone listed in the Permissions and credits section and in CREDITS.txt.

License
Code and documentation: MIT (see LICENSE.txt). Game assets are not covered and remain the property of their owners.
HELLDIVERS 2 is developed by Arrowhead Game Studios and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment.