I recently installed and set up ol' TS2 again. Looking for mods to spice the visuals up, I noticed how much more advanced these seem than anything we've had in other games, particularly TS3. I mean, there's a mod that completely changes the way lighting and shading works (this one), there's a mod that overhauls several shaders (this one) and then there's a mod which works like ReShade, except it's completely integrated into the game and everything. (this one).

What makes the difference? Is TS2 so much more moddable? Does the community have better tools for TS2? Is everything hardcoded in 3 and 4? If you were to go the full mile, you'd end up with a TS2 that can easily compete with TS4 in terms of aesthetics, postprocessing quality and general visual fidelity. TS3 is five years newer, and yet the same can't be said for it. There's still plenty ways to improve it, but nothing truly in-depth and hands-on like shader replacements and a total lighting engine overhaul.

~ Pi

Following.

The technical answer is: all the shaders in ts3 are compiled this means it's extremely difficult to recover the source code to perform changes. In ts2, most of the shader's source code are exposed so you only need to change some instructions to change the effects.

Yeah, TS3 has it's shaders in the shaders.precomp file, doesn't it? It is possible to decompile them, but you'll need to do it with some pretty professional software...I think Autodesk Maya or something. It would of course be amazing if that could be done.

good luck with that