Mortal Monkey on 31/10/2008 at 18:43
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
I know absolutely nothing about the low-level details of how these render hacks work, but it seems the problem with applying these effects to games that weren't designed with them in mind is that the hacks apply them "stupidly" (or "naively", to be more technical). They can't seem to tell if any given pixel is bright because it's a light source, or because it just happens to be that color.
You mean just like a pixel shader?
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
To really work properly, these hacks would need to hook into the render pipeline at a sufficiently deep level that they can tell when a surface's brightness is getting clamped.
Or rather, before the pixel colors get downsampled. I would say that the DirectX 9 API would be low-level enough, though.
ZylonBane on 31/10/2008 at 20:00
Quote Posted by Mortal Monkey
Or rather, before the pixel colors get downsampled.
Ummm... no. That's not even remotely the same thing.
Clamping is when you truncate an out-of-range value to just within the allowed range. For example, in real life, if you have 10 lights shining on something, it's going to be (almost) 10 times brighter than if just one light is shining on it. But in computer graphics, an object lit by 10 lights will be no brighter than with one light, because that one light is already exceeding the available RGB gamut. The object might have a cumulative illumination of 3000, but that still gets clamped to 255 for rendering.
That's where HDR rendering comes in. Even some pre-HDR engines, like the one used by Giants: Citizen Kabuto, will (
http://www.sg.hu/kep/2001_02/giants_citizen_kabuto_bemutato_05.jpg) overbrighten highly illuminated surfaces, creating an overexposure or whiteout effect. Bloom is also applied, to simulate the perception of the human eye when looking at something that's too bright.
bikerdude on 31/10/2008 at 23:48
well tried it out, and yes the light sources in-game do look better, but....
gamma stops working and the contrast is far too low, in that I cant see any details in the shadows at all. So this is a non starter for me.
On my NEC 20wgx2pro I have a dynamic contrast mode called "photo" that gives a similar effect but with out sacrificing the detail in the shadows or the overall brightness of the game.
biker
sNeaksieGarrett on 1/11/2008 at 16:54
Eh, I guess it's pretty cool, but it really doesn't do much. I also don't like how ddfix 1.1.1 has that blurry pixelated texture problem.
Fallen+Keeper on 2/11/2008 at 01:39
I think all this bloom business has corrupted my Thief installation. Although I have uninstalled the patch, I have some problems with playing the game, mainly with mouse sensitivity. It may sound strange, but it seems as if the mouse was loosing it, even if I set it at maximum, the movement is quite heavy as if the video card had problems with processing something...
:confused:
bikerdude on 2/11/2008 at 10:44
Quote Posted by Fallen+Keeper
I think all this bloom business has corrupted my Thief installation. even if I set it at maximum, the movement is quite heavy as if the video card had problems with processing something...
Running bloom as well as DDfix requires a lot of proccessing power, which your setup may not be able to cope with..
biker
Fallen+Keeper on 2/11/2008 at 18:03
No problems with my setup, it can handle much more than that (es.Crysis).
It happens now that I UNINSTALLED the DDfix.
bikerdude on 2/11/2008 at 23:53
a reinstall should fix that.
b.
Fallen+Keeper on 4/11/2008 at 01:25
Crap.
KoHaN69 on 5/11/2008 at 02:06
Quote Posted by Fallen+Keeper
Crap.
of the game, he means
