Warzone Reforged FX

A drop-in graphics mod for Warzone 2100 4.7.0 that rewrites the game's Vulkan shaders for a modern, cinematic look — filmic tonemapping, bloom, physically-based specular, god rays, a lens flare, enhanced water and sky, and more.

It ships as a standard --mod archive and does not modify any core game file (base.wz stays untouched): the engine simply overlays the mod's shaders on top.

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Features

Present pass (world_to_screen)

• AgX filmic tonemapping (exposure 1.1) — natural, filmic highlight roll-off
• Multi-scale bloom — soft-knee bright pass + 3-octave jittered spiral (tight core, wide soft halo)
• CAS sharpening (AMD FidelityFX, sharpen-only)
• Color grade — saturation/contrast + split-toning (cool shadows, warm highlights)
• God rays — radial light scattering from the sun
• Lens flare — sun glow, anamorphic streak and tinted ghosts, masked by the real scene brightness at the sun position so it never draws over terrain or at night
• Vignette + dithering (anti-banding)

Scene lighting

• GGX / Cook-Torrance specular on units, terrain and water (replaces the legacy Gaussian/Blinn-Phong lobes) with Fresnel grazing highlights
• Subtle rim light on units for silhouette readability
• Enhanced water — GGX sun glitter + fine high-frequency ripple detail on top of the existing scrolling normal maps
• Point-light boost (weapons/explosions) and atmospheric haze (aerial perspective)

Sky

• Enhanced skybox — contrast, saturation, cool atmospheric tint, brighter stars
• Procedural clouds — dome-locked fbm clouds whose brightness follows the sky

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Requirements

• Warzone 2100 4.7.0
• Vulkan graphics backend (Options → Graphics → Backend → Vulkan). This mod overrides the Vulkan (shaders/vk) shaders only — the OpenGL backend is not covered.
• Any modern GPU (the SPIR-V is vendor-neutral).

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Installation

1. Download WarzoneReforgedFX.wz from the Releases page.

2. Copy it into your version-specific global mods folder:

   %APPDATA%\Warzone 2100 Project\Warzone 2100\mods\4.7.0\global\
   

   (macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Warzone 2100/mods/4.7.0/global/, Linux: ~/.local/share/warzone2100/mods/4.7.0/global/)

3. Launch with the mod enabled:

   warzone2100.exe --mod=WarzoneReforgedFX.wz
   

   On Windows a simple launcher .cmd next to the game exe works well:

   @echo off
   start "" "%~dp0bin\warzone2100.exe" --mod=WarzoneReforgedFX.wz

Combining with an HD-model mod (e.g. Art Revolution) — pass both, and you get the sharper GGX highlights on the HD models' specular maps:

warzone2100.exe --mod=ARmod_4.0.1.wz --mod=WarzoneReforgedFX.wz

To turn the mod off, just launch the game normally (without --mod).

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Multiplayer note

This mod changes only rendering — no units, stats, research or game rules are touched, so it cannot cause desyncs or give any advantage. However, Warzone still marks any loaded mod as "modded" (version/hash), so for ranked/clean multiplayer, launch without the mod. It is intended for campaign and skirmish.

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Building from source

The compiled SPIR-V is reproducible from the GLSL in shaders/src/.

# needs glslangValidator (Vulkan SDK, or the standalone glslang release)
.\build\build.ps1                 # compile GLSL -> dist\spv\*.spv
.\build\pack.ps1                  # assemble dist\WarzoneReforgedFX.wz

All effect parameters are compile-time #defines / consts — see the top of each shader and the flag list in build\build.ps1. Tweak, rebuild, repack.

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How it works

Warzone's Vulkan renderer loads precompiled shaders/vk/*.frag.spv from base.wz. Because mods are overlaid on the engine's virtual filesystem, an archive that provides the same paths replaces those shaders at load time — no engine rebuild, no patched base.wz. The mod modifies five fragment shaders: the final present pass, the unit (tcmask_instanced), terrain (terrain_combined_high), water (terrain_water_high) and skybox shaders. Uniform/descriptor layouts are kept identical to the stock 4.7.0 shaders, so it's a straight drop-in.

Effects that need engine-side support (SSAO, depth of field, motion blur, real screen-space reflections, TAA, auto-exposure) are intentionally not here — they require additional render targets / buffers that a shader-only mod cannot add.

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Compatibility & limitations

• Pinned to 4.7.0 — a future WZ release may change the shader interface and require a rebuild.
• Vulkan only (see Requirements).
• Procedural clouds are static (the skybox pass has no time uniform) and tuned conservatively; they can be disabled by rebuilding the skybox without -DSKY_CLOUDS.

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License & credits

Licensed under the GNU General Public License v2.0 or later (GPL-2.0-or-later), matching Warzone 2100 itself — the shaders are derivative works of the WZ2100 GPL shaders. See LICENSE.

• Original shaders: The Warzone 2100 Project (https://github.com/Warzone2100/warzone2100)
• Shader modifications / this mod: Krynex Lab (bassprofressor-lab)