So I've been playing with Mass Effect 2 and ENB series. I know ENB has a rep for applying tons of bloom to everything, but all stereotypes aside, it's an incredibly useful tool for applying per-pixel post effects to the game. You can even write your own shaders in HLSL (!!!!). Performance hit is also fairly small (about 10 FPS in most areas. Not a problem for most computers at 1280x720). I'm getting 30+ FPS on an nvidia gt330m (similar to desktop 9600gt).
Basically, I've tweaked the in-game settings to slightly oversaturate blue and orange tones, and have light sources give off slightly more ambient bloom, which gives things more atmosphere. Things in bright light are also oversaturated, and things in shadow are slightly desaturated. Contrast and image sharpness are slightly increased, and a (tiny) bit of grain is added, giving the image a "cinematic" look.
I've also used the Antialiasing shader from the GTA IV ICEnhancer mod to add cheap MLAA (used on ATI cards, and for example the edge smoothing in Deus Ex: HR, BF3, and Crysis 2) as a post effect. The performance hit is very negligible and small aliasing artifacts (such as in hair and weapons) are greatly reduced (things in the distance still have aliasing artifacts, however).
Here are some screens so far (still a WIP). Top is before, bottom is after:
EDIT: Changes aren't very noticeable in small images. Click image for link to full version!!
1) Notice how aliasing in hair and clothes are reduced, but there are still jaggies in the background pillar + pipes. Contrast increased.
2) Notice that jaggies in the square blocks are slightly reduced, but not by much. Lights are also more pure white and give off slight blue tint.
3) Notice how jaggies in the window pillar to the left, and the control box directly above EDI are reduced. Jaggies in the pad directly below EDI are still apparent. EDI colors (high brightness) are saturated, while shadow colors are desaturated.
4) Again, AA is good in near-plane (hair and jacket), but very poor in far-plane (lights).
5) Blue color is more pronounced.
6) I don't like over-darkening on Garrus. Want to implement shader in HLSL that can determine screen brightness and dynamically adjust contrast to avoid this.
7) I think over-brightening is OK. This can be adjusted to lower value, however.
8) Quick test on Thane's recruit mission on Illium:
So here's what I still want to do. I would like to write some custom shaders that we can use with ENB. The only problem is that I have absolutely NO experience in HLSL, and I have no idea how to proceed. The syntax looks familiar because it's similar to C (I have some experience in C), but I'm not sure how everything fits together and what the pipeline is like.
1) Implement a better form of AA. The edge smoothing algorithm that I have right now is quick and dirty, but it would be nice to implement SMAA for increased quality (source and examples available here: http://www.iryoku.com/smaa/)
2) Implement vector-based motion blur (something like the algorithm described here: http://http.develope...gems3_ch27.html).
3) Implement dynamic color correction that is some function of overall screen brightness to determine how much to darken/lighten.
If anyone here knows some HLSL or has some good resources for learning, I would really appreciate the help!
Finally, I know this won't appeal to all people because let's face it, vanilla ME2 looks pretty good already. So another goal is to have the mod be as customizable as possible (ENB is already very easy to mod, but having an in-game editor would be even better).
Again, any feedback or help would be very much appreciated.
EDIT: Link to the (current state) of the mod. Try it out, but please don't release!!!
Clam ME2Mod Alpha v0
Modifié par MrChowderClam, 12 novembre 2011 - 09:35 .
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