Cinematic Mod (FakeFactory)

FakeFactory's Cinematic Mod is a modification which completely overhauls Half-Life 2 (and it's episodes) graphics to look more gritty, dark and detailed, aswell as cinematic. The mod partially replaces the original music with (or adds) orchestral scores (by Hans Zimmer) and also modifies weapon strength to resemble realistic stopping power.

History

Originally, Cinematic Mod was a mod that replaces various model textures with a higher quality one, but as it's evolved, the modification later improves the entire game graphics by adding new props, models and other map modifications, aswell as new post-processing effects.

As from version 5, this mod requires 64-bit version of Windows. The reason of that is because the Source Engine limit is up to 2GB RAM use due to the executable does not have LAA enabled (which isn't affected by 64-bit executable). After the engine passing this amount of RAM used, it may crash the game. A workaround is to use this 4GB RAM patch, which would increase the RAM limit to 3GB for 32-bit systems and 4GB for 64-bit systems, but may or may not work with some Source Engine games.

Development

Development of FakeFactory's Cinematic Mod has been stopped due to controversy surrounding the optional NPCs models for being soft-core NSFW aswell as doesn't fit the game's lore. However, the mod continued to receiving minor unofficial patches in 2017 to 2019 respectively.

The latest version available of CM was CM2013, which was released in order to make it compatible with Source 2013 and then-new SteamPipe content delivery system.