FakeFactory's Cinematic Mod (often abbreviated as CM), also simply known as Cinematic Mod, is a mod that aims to improve Half-Life 2 and its episodes, and push the Source Engine's capabilities as far as possible. It was created and developed by 52-year-old (as of 2019) German IT service employee Jürgen Vierheilig (aka FakeFactory). The current version is Cinematic Mod 2013 Final 1.24.

Half Life 2 Fakefactory mod v7. Page 4 - Seeking answers? Join the AnandTech community: where nearly half-a-million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech. Then look for 'Half-Life 2 (EP0)' and (EP1) and (EP2). Those are the CM executables. Make sure you have all of the games installed before you installed the cinematic mod. Half-Life 2 - FakeFactory Cinematic Mod V10 Beta. This is beta version 10 of the legendary Cinematic Mod that improves the graphics and appearance of the Half-Life 2 series by bringing the Orange Box Engine to older series.

It has received criticism from many fans, mainly because of the character models and music not fitting with the universe of the Half-Life franchise.

Why It Sucks

NOTE: Some features of the mod are optional, but they are still bad features that were heavily criticised.

1. The new character models are awful and they don't fit the Half-Life universe at all (for starters, the female NPC models are heavily oversexualized). Half-Life 2 was a revolutionary game for its time due to its artstyle and great character animation, but that's completely absent with these new models.
2. Speaking of the artstyle, it completely misses the point of what the original artstyle was trying to convey.
3. The new music is ripped directly from the Dark Knight trilogy soundtrack by Hans Zimmer.
4. FakeFactory messed with a few weapons, and the new weapon changes are awful and broken. Some weapons have even been outright removed.
5. There's suggestive photos on several walls in the game and even a dildo inside Alyx's room in Black Mesa East. We're not making this up.
6. FakeFactory cannot take even the slightest bit of criticism, as he decided to stop working on the mod after Version 5 due to the mass criticism he received from angry fans.

Redeeming Qualities

1. Despite its awfulness, the mod is a good demonstration on how powerful the Source engine is.
2. In response to fan criticism, later versions of the mod by default do not use any of the optional content. A main menu launcher is included for toggling the more controversial elements of the mod, allowing for a more canon-friendly experience.

Videos

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'There's suggestive photos on several walls in the game and even a dildo inside Alyx's room in Black Mesa East.'

Half-Life 2 - FakeFactory Cinematic Mod V10 Beta

This is beta version 10 of the legendary Cinematic Mod that improves the graphics and appearance of the Half-Life 2 series by bringing the Orange Box Engine to older series. Expect truly amazing graphics that rivals any game.

Note:

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- This base installer is a large 10 GB file that takes several hours to download.

- Also available is a single download of the full and final version

CM version 10

and

FakeFactory Beta to Full patch

- Recommended on 64bit Windows OS on a PC with 4 GB ram, dualcore CPU, and high end video card with 512 MB to fully experience this game. Run

CM 10 Beta 1 (First puplic beta)

* MAJOR rework of all human models and maincharacters

* Added Hybrid-HD-Alyx (very very beta) This model comes with HD-body but keeps the original VALVE-style face

* Reworked Adriana Lima style HD-Alyx (new bonesetup, more realistic proportions, tweaked jigglebones)

* Alyx got a pistol laser sight system

* Optimized LOD system on HD models

* New HD-textures / HD-props

* Reworked old Hires-Textures with more efficient HD-overlays Cara flash huawei y336.

* Moderate rework of some keyplaces like Kleiner's lab, Black Mesa East, EP2-silo ecetera

* Optimized texture pool for more economic usage of shared materials (CM9 uncompressed VRAM memory peaks: 2.3 GB VRAM -> CM10 uncompressed VRAM memory peaks:: 1.7 GB VRAM)

* First implementation of a fully dynamic soundtrack framework (experimental)

* Killed some background music (Less is more)

* Tweaked the new running effect (reloading and shooting possible while running)

* Several bugfixes

* Launchers are using the heapsize command by default, because the current amount of texture/sound/mech data would break the heapspace limit

CM 9.7 (non-public)

* Engineupdate to Build 3740

* Added new ConVar 'ff_new_running' for toggling the new run-effect

CM 9.6 (non-public)

* Added dynamic muzzle flash effects (New ConVar 'ff_dynamic_muzzle' for toggling)

* Added MAJOR reworked HD-Alyx (Lima-Style) with much much much better vertex weighting (smooth bending).

* Added some new HD Civilian models

* Fix: Small bugs in several maps

CM 9.52 (non-public)

* Recompiled the HD civilians for better Eyes movement

* Increased Bump and Specular maps on female characters

Sound drops or crackling:

If sound crackles occures, you can fix this by setting the snd_mixahead value in the autoexec's of CM's subdirectories. You will find the autoexec.cfg in the FAKEFACTORY_CM9hl2cfg FAKEFACTORY_CM9episodiccfg FAKEFACTORY_CM9ep2cfg directories. Try different value like snd_mixahead '0.2' or snd_mixahead '0.4' for increasing the buffered time of soundsamples. This will fix crackling or dropouts, but can lead to slightly asynchronous or delayed sounds.

Microstutter and Heapsize:

If you encounter microstuttering ingame (animations), try the heapsize command. Add -heapsize {bytes} to the shortcuts, i.e.: Shortcut: Cinematic Mod EP2 Target: ..launcher.exe' -heapsize 512000. But NEVER set the heapsize above [YOUR INSTALLE RAM / 3] or 512MB

Setup.exe and virus warning:

Setup uses a tool called SetACL for setting write permissions to the mods screenshots / cfg / SAVE directories. Some antivirus software could warn about possible malware. This is a false positive.

Technical info:

This mod's binaries are modified for memory allocation beyond 2 GB. To prevent STEAM from overwriting this binaries with its own copies on each start, the mod ist using a little launcher, that reroutes STEAM's original binaries to >NIL. Start this mod only with the shortcuts in your start menu (that were created during installation)!

Hardware requirements:

* DX9 capable graphics hardware with minimum 512 MB VRAM. (1024 MB recommended)

* 3 GB RAM (4Gb recommended)

Software requirements:

* Fully installed STEAM Client; You can't start the mod without STEAM running.

* Fully installed and unlocked HL2 / EP1 / EP2; Make shure, you have started those games in the past.

Used software or this mod:

* Adobe Photoshop CS2

* 3DS MAX 8

* E-Frontier Poser 7

* Microsoft C++ Visual Studio 2005

* Powerbasic 8

* VALVE Source SDK

* Sony Soundforge 7

* Sony Vegas 7

* Crazy Bump 5

* Cannonfodders SDK tools

* entspy

* vmex

* Autoplay Mediastudio Pro

* Setup Factory

Used texture resources:

* Majang.com

* 3d.sk

* Dosch

* environmenttextures.com

* Own photos

Used model resources:

* contentparadise.com

* efrontier.com

* daz3d.com

* Anton Kisiels Apollo Max

Donations:

Development of the Cinematic Mod has taken 4 years of my life, a vast amount of coffee and 16000+ dollars for software and resources.

It will stay free for all, but you are welcome to donate a free amount for further development via paypal. If you want to donate, please follow link at the Donate page. You can choose the amount of your donation yourself