[REQUEST] Mercenaries 2: World in Flames Fusion Mod 🖖

[FrostMoonEcho]

I would like to request the Fusion mod for Mercenaries 2: World in Flames, hoping it will catch the attention of someone who might be interested in contributing to this repository or our dear maintainers might develop an interest in the game in the future, so having something to start from could be useful.

Known Issues with the Game:

• Memory Issues: The game crashes after 30 minutes to 1 hour of play. The graphical pipeline doesn't have full access to memory, leading to random FPS drops, freezes, and stutters. The issues are similar to those in Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Conviction, which were fixed by the Fusion mod. Due to these limitations, the game can't be fully remastered using ReShade.

• Gamepad Support: The game does not support modern gamepads. Additionally, when using a gamepad to look around, it feels jerky, and camera movement looks very pixelated like —|— only. The deadzone also needs to be checked it may not function correctly, though this can be fixed using the SpecialK.

• Shadow Map Resolution: The shadow map resolution is low, appearing to be only 1024 units, which doesn't look great on modern PCs. Also, some shadows are flickering when you are moving it might be due to its resolution, because they can't scale properly.

• Draw Distance: When driving a car, the draw distance becomes too low, causing a broken "speeding effect." While it works fairly well overall, it would be great to have an option to increase the draw distance for modern PCs. I'm also unsure whether adjusting the draw distance works in the latest release of the game, though it definitely works in the demo version.

• Flying Papers: In previous releases of the game, there was an effect with flying papers around the town. However, developers disabled it because... because... they thought the cost of paper in Venezuela was too high??? The effect can be re-enabled by using a DirectX to OpenGL wrapper, but this wrapper has poor performance and compatibility with other wrappers, such as SpecialK.

• FPS and Window Mode Issues: When the FPS exceeds 40, objects worn by the character, like bags and rifles, begin to shake. If the FPS exceeds 60, the character's movement becomes unnaturally fast, as if a speed hack is enabled. This can be manually fixed by limiting the FPS to 40 and using Lossless Scaling Frame Generator to increase the FPS. However, to do this, you need to switch the game to windowed mode(bordered), which is not possible. Many wrappers, such as DgVoodoo and SpecialK, don't handle this properly in this game. You also can't force windowed mode via compatibility settings in Windows, as this feature was removed in newer releases.
  Additionally, pcgaming wiki states that mouse camera speed slows down at higher framerates.

• Scaling Issues: When running the game at the highest possible resolution, it looks amazing! However, at lower resolutions, some textures appear overly sharpened, while others look too blurry. Resizing the display, changing scaling options, and other compatibility workarounds don't seem to help. This is a common issue in many games, and I'm not sure it can be fixed, but perhaps luck is on our side.

• Character Lighting Option: Adding an option to disable character lighting would make the game look more natural and improve compatibility with ReShade shaders.

• Icons: When anti-aliasing is turned on, the icons to show weapon/ammo/health on the ground and vehicle icons vanish when the player gets close to them.

• Is there any way to improve lighting and LOD?