VAMOpen – A community engine mod for Virt-a-Mate

[badass234xxx]

Hi everyone, first time posting here. Wanted to share a project I've been working on!
Virt-a-Mate never opened its source code and has been stuck on Unity 2018.1.9f2 forever.

VAMOpen is a community engine mod that brings Virt-a-Mate back to life.

It's an open-source rebuild: the game's code is reassembled back into a Unity project, with shaders recovered from the bytecode that ships in the release build. I don't redistribute the game itself. The repository only contains the recovered code and the pipeline, and you point it at your own installation.

What already works

• Compiles and runs.

• Scenes, character, skin, hair load.

• Clothing renders correctly, layers are fine.

• Physics

• UI

• Some shaders

• Post-processing

What's still in progress

• Minor character material defects.

• Many shaders not ported yet.

• Some shaders

• Code is partially readable but needs refactoring.

Plan

First, get the project to a state where 95% of basic functions work stably.

Then gradually move everything to the latest Unity version.

And after that, add modern stuff: proper Anti-Aliasing, new shaders (subsurface scattering, HDAO, etc.), then DX12 and Vulkan, add at least basic multithreading so physics doesn't lag when you add just a couple of characters to the scene, then FSR 4, DLSS, Ray Tracing, and so on.

The hardest part here is the engine migration. Everything else after that is much easier.

How to try it

You need Windows, Unity 2018.1.9f2, and your own Virt-a-Mate installation. Keep Unity Hub closed, otherwise it will reissue the license file and the 2018.1 editor will reject the reissued one.
 

scripts\Setup-RebuildProject.ps1
scripts\Invoke-CompileGate.ps1
python scripts\Extract-VaMShaders.py --out artifacts\shader-blobs
python scripts\New-VaMShaders.py
python tools\check_shaders.py
scripts\Invoke-ManualPlay.ps1

Stage details are in docs\, the source of truth for status is in CHANGELOG.md.

Source code

https://github.com/badass234/vam-open