~~ Very Important Notice ~~

Alright my dear humans it's about time we have a conversation about what's going on with Wuthering Waves updates breaking on mods. I wanted to do this a few month ago but I couldn't find the time to gather my words. I would appreciate you guys read this note very seriously because it might impact the future of mods for wuthering waves (any! not just mine).

To sum things up, the future of wuthering waves mods is in a critical state. It actually never been so bad and alarming. Version 3.0 was preparing something brutal for us and I could only get the full grasp of it a couple hours ago while discovering the changes. At the point I just stopped my Chisa fix in order to write this message and warn my dear humans as soon as possible. Two mod creators I know and love just told me they gave up creating for this game yesterday. We had a discussion and they can't take it anymore. Each new version of the game will sometimes breaks our custom meshes, creating more instances of superfluous LOD textures, doing random texture hash shuffling... among a lot of other things.

The saddest aspect of this is that players have played a huge part in inflicting that wound. Especially when giving bad ratings for optimization in the last surveys or wanting even more optimization each time without realizing their device might just be outdated or not fitted for the game.

Wuthering waves game developers are coping with a lot of constraints and I do believe they won't ever be able to do magic because that's just not physically/scientifically possible so please stop asking them to make fluid and crazy good graphics if you only own a 2005 phone or an old gtx1080 pc. At some point there will be just pure logic and facts. Optimization can't change your potatoe pc into a high-end beast and never will. This world has always worked the same : your graphic chip or gpu will load 3D meshes and textures within its vram, treat it, then create frames to display it. The limitation are : your hardware.

And since this game must hold the huge burden of running on phones it will remain shackled to the ground. Because of that, game's core and native engine were built on a generic all-round version of unreal engine 4 (Unreal engine 5 wouldn't have changed a thing btw). To solve your possible framerate issues KuroGames would need : either to drop phones or develop its own custom game engine. The first is simply not wanted for business and profit reasons, the latter is also impossible for business and profit issues. Building a custom game engine is an immensely expensive investment and a tremendously slow and hard task. Since gachas are ALL predatory I don't believe we will see that anytime soon in that category (even if KuroGames seems be part of the kind ones) and even if they wanted to it's also waaaaaay too late for that : Games who owns a custom engine must create it at the very early steps of the development in 99% of the cases (like the divinity-engine for BG3, tempest-engine for Naughtydog games or fox/decima-engine for Kojima games, and many many more)

There is no joker or trump cards here and never will. Just your game and your device raw performances. And since they've been pushed by this a lot lately they start to make more and more mistakes, bigger and bigger. KuroGames is now panicking with the pressure of players on this matter and I believe myself that's mainly because of delusional feedback/surveys. They won't ever have enough shoulders to make a custom engine so all they can do is implementing more and more non-senses, more and more "illusions", multiplying LOD layers, fake mipmaps, lowpoly model sneaky swaps, and such... For users not using mod : they will barely have any improvments. But now guess who is taking all that right in the face? Mod creators.

With version 2.6 we had a new layer of LODs. Each mod using custom textures (and let's be real those are the most interesting ones) usually require 8 dumps to claim them all. 8 dumps is 130go+ of data travel and around 1H30 of just gathering hashes and sorting them and there is also a wounded state to cover. Each breaking update forces us having to do this once again. The more you have mods and character covered, the more it requires days just to patch or create another mod. Yes! You're telling me there are "fixers" (.exe patch). Well, those are not magically made or growing on trees. Guys creating them are tired as well, if you noticed they have different names because some of them quit, they have to do the exact same thing : dump, sort and manually update their code and you know what? It's even not 100% effective. Each one can make mistakes for each update. I've seen a lot, to err is human afterall. On the top of that some mods like mine use very specific channels no one use and patchers won't bother doing the extra work just for my mods.

Now with 3.0 they added a fifth layer of LOD, but also a new low-poly mesh requiring us to double our 3D edits for any object or character (you can notice it by flying with wings and accelerate behind your character). It honestly become insane to create stable mods for this game and btw that's why even KuroGames devs gave up on "wet" state. Because even them can't handle too much anymore. To me they even shouldn't have ever bothered with wounded effects which straight double our scanning process (and them, all the texture/game size). Of course I could do like a lot of beginners : mods for just my own graphic settings and ignore the rest, ignore all the comments saying "it doesn't work for me" but that's not my philosophy! I want all of you to have the radiant experience!

So let's conclude for now : keep in mind that stating the game needs optimization will only make the number of issues grow. Kuro won't find a magic solution to give you a 5080RTX on your phone and you know deep inside that's the hard truth. And on our side, at some point it will take hours just to fix one mod, it's already the case for a lot of my own items. By installing mods you are canceling the LOD's array, we creators are forced to do so. Meaning reverting back what Kuro desperately tried to do to improve your framerate : The snake eats his own tail! The new LODs will remain useless and just here to mess with mod creators, to give us tons of work and made some of us quit for other gacha games. Please my dear ones, please! If you love your WuWa mods don't push heavy on KuroGames about optimization especially if you have an old device (Although it would be valid to complain if you have a good config and still bad experience). If your game runs okay, tick the best box any time they ask, let's stop this hemorrage so they can focus on content and next characters. To me they already did what's best for a game sharing a ground with phone gaming. And if you already know everything I said, please unleash this knowledge onto any mod enjoyer discussion or forum. If you have friends using wuwa mods tell them! Otherwise I fear we will miss out a lot of potential future mods and ultimately see creators disappear.

Edit 2 hours after : before going to bed I posted a first batch of fixed versions for my Chisa mods, only her for now. It's not perfect yet (could flicker while at long distance or during wings/para flights). I'll work seriously tomorrow to find better ways hoping there is. Then I'll do a couple of characters and move on Lynae to avoid a motivation burn-out.