Tribes 2 Graphical enhancements

T2-JesusChrist said:

I will be sincere with you and not pretend to be fake nice, I don't how the changes look at all. It hurts my eyes just looking at it. Too much bloom, too shiny, not enough color. It is just a degradation of the default style. What tribes 2 does need though is higher res textures with more detail, for everything, including ground. And maybe even more grass and plants in the maps to make it prettier.

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ZurkinWood497 said:

I added more pictures in the new link. Take a look at both 8a and 8b, JC. Tell me: Which of those do you think looks better? Leave 8c out of the question.

For some things I got going on right now in tribes:
Ambient Occulusion (AO)
DoF Haze (Works better than real DoF)
Ambient Lighting
MXOA (The shading around the corners as seen in the new link I provided.)
Some stuff to sharpen the textures (In a good way) and give it a more 'detailed' look.
The brightness in the sky is the ActiveFog, which I'll probably remove if I can't get things set right with it. This will all be toggleable anyways, so if you don't want, turn it off. Done.

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T2-JesusChrist said:

In 8b, the shadows look better and the object edges look a little less blurry than 8a, the objects look more sharp. But if I were to choose one, I'd still go with 8a because the color is more lively there. 9after also has good shadows and object sharpness, better than 9before. I'd say that keeping the colors is important.

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T2-JesusChrist said:

Sure, man. I looked at the video and I think I liked how the game looks most starting at 2:52, it's colorful/sharp enough, has better shadows, and has none of that bloom stuff. Though the shadows could be a bit less evident/softer so it doesn't look too striking, if that could be possible. And the motion blur is unnecessary since it's distracting in such a fast paced game. Also, is it possible to turn off that effect that darkens the edges of the screen?

I just hope this'll work on my system though, seems like you have a better PC than mine and it still lags.

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To do things like shader effects (like SSAO, bloom, dynamic range compression emulation, etc.) is more complicated with GL Intercept, because T2 uses "legacy" OpenGL (1.x). The various matrix transformations are done in fixed pipeline, which would be challenging to reconcile with a new vertex shader (designed to do those transformations in the programmable pipeline).

In any case: doing a full graphical overhaul of T2 without source code is out of the scope of the TribesNext project. While it is possible to replace the rendering pipeline by swapping out bits of Tribes2.exe compiled code with pieces of the Torque Game Engine, doing so would be more work than it would be worth. You could apply global shaders (especially ones that work primarily on the fragment level) in the way Ranzear did, but, to get good results, you'll need to tag different objects with different shaders (and hope the game's scenegraph is arranged in a way that shader program context switches don't kill your performance). Easier to just write a new Tribes game from scratch, though, in my opinion.

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ChocoTaco said:

http://www.tribesnext.com/forum/index.php?topic=3202.0
https://www.reddit.com/r/Tribes/comments/118sdq/wip_ssaofakedr_bloom_mod_for_tribes_2/

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ZurkinWood497 said:

I understand what they're talking about there, but ReShade bypasses the entire 'legacy OpenGL' issue. It completely ignores the OpenGL version T2 uses and goes straight to the GPU to render the graphics; thus, we get SMAA, MXAO, AdaptiveLighting, etc.. It's wonderful.

I'm fine-tuning the graphic settings in ReShade right now, I'll have it uploaded by the end of the day.

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