HDR in Mount and Blade!

[bryce777]

It doesn't mean high precision color.

 

[Archonsod]

Yah, it means High Dynamic Range lighting. It's got nothing to do with colour, infact it's first implementation was in black and white film.

All it means is that the range for calculating light is increased. Light calculations run at a certain range of potential light or darkness for an area. Under standard lighting, this range is restricted meaning quite a lot of areas end up either darker or lighter than they really would be, simply because there's little gradation between black and white. High Dynamic Range increases this range allowing for a more 'realistic' lighting effect, so if you had an empty hall with a candle under HDR the light would have some effect all the way out to the walls. Under standard lighting the light would quickly drop off, giving a halo of light around the torch and pitch blackness around the walls.

 

[KON_Air]

Holy **** actually dark nights?!?!

Thought most of it is the mipmap pack but still...

 

[KON_Air]

Okay, double post whatever, you will have your fake HDR shaders tomorrow, but keep these problems in you mind;

1-M&B wasn't designed to work with these, so textures and actual rendering may have some wierd results.
2-Lighting in M&B is far too weak, given these shaders require a proper lighting you will need a sidekick mod. What I mean is "ooh, look fire, so it should be brighter around here" lighting just don't do it.
3-Except performance hits, flashing screens, overheating hardware, seizures and a broken heart.

 

[Xlacier]

To call this effect high dynamic range is misleading.  If anything this effect reduces the dynamic range by deepening shadows and over blowing highlights.  I've also seen this effect referred to as bloom.  I have less of a qualm with that terminology.  From a photographic standpoint, what is known as HDR is when all intensities of light are marginalized(for lack of a better word) by underexposing for highlight details and overexposing for shadow details usually by taking multiple captures of the same scene at different exposure settings and then combining them later in post processing.  Mount&Blade in it's 'native' state is what I would consider HDR.

Back on topic; I tried the Resident Evil 4 version, but it jacked up at the startup screen to where all the text was jumbled together in the bottom left corner so that I couldn't select the menus to restore my saved game(I didn't think to take a screenshot).  Then I tried the GTA San Andreas beta v0.075 variant and it seems to work ok.  The problem I'm having now is that textures phase in and out of extreme blurriness at random.  Trees and text usually stay blurry whereas my character is blurry half the time.  This is only a problem when I try and zoom in to shoot an arrow at someone.  whenever they decide to be in blurry mode, I can't see whether I'm aiming under the target's shield and my targeting reticle will blur and blends in as well.  The blur effect reminds me of a forced perspective sort of feel which I like, but detracts from my immersion when I'm trying to 'focus' on the target.

Reference:


with ENBSeries:




I hope nobody minds the size of my screenshots.  All of this is a bit over my head though.  I think I'll just wait to see what KON_Air has to offer.  If it still wigs out I'll try try my luck with the ini file to try and figure out if any of the settings can lessen the blur problems I'm having.

 

[Darian]

This must be what things look like for people needing glasses.

Because of the way Mount&Blade renders interface elements, all of these HDR hacks are going to produce some unwanted results in menus and so forth; also, as KON_Air pointed out, an accompanying mod is a must. Right now the range isn't, well, "dynamic" enough to provide good results (except for night scenes, which don't rely on light nearly as much).

 

[Saber Cherry]

It doesn't mean high precision color.

Yah, it means High Dynamic Range lighting. It's got nothing to do with colour, infact it's first implementation was in black and white film.

All it means is that the range for calculating light is increased. Light calculations run at a certain range of potential light or darkness for an area. Under standard lighting, this range is restricted meaning quite a lot of areas end up either darker or lighter than they really would be, simply because there's little gradation between black and white. High Dynamic Range increases this range allowing for a more 'realistic' lighting effect, so if you had an empty hall with a candle under HDR the light would have some effect all the way out to the walls. Under standard lighting the light would quickly drop off, giving a halo of light around the torch and pitch blackness around the walls.

That's simply not true.

Currently HDRR has been prevalent in games. Though these games are mostly for the PC, it is also possible to render scenes with high dynamic range in Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3. It has also been simulated on the PlayStation 2, GameCube, and Xbox. In desktop publishing and gaming, color values are often processed several times over. As this includes multiplication and division it is useful to have the extended accuracy and range of 16 bit integer or 16 bit floating point format. This is useful irrespective of the abovementioned limitations in some hardware.


[edit] Development of HDRR through DirectX

Complex shader effects began their days with the release of Shader Model 1.0 with DirectX 8. Shader Model 1.0 illuminated 3D worlds with what is now called standard lighting. However, standard lighting had two problems:

  1. Lighting precision was confined to 8 bit integers, which limited the contrast ratio to 256:1. Using the HVS color model, the value (V), or brightness of a color has a range of 0 - 255. This means the brightest white (a value of 255) is only 256 levels brighter than the darkest shade above pure black (i.e.: value of 0).
  2. Lighting calculations were integer based, which didn't offer much accuracy because the real world is not confined to whole numbers. “Nature isn't clamped to [0..1], neither should CG” [4].

Before HDRR was fully developed and implemented, games would create an illusion of HDR by using light blooming and sometimes using an option called "Enhanced Contrast Settings".

On December 24, 2002, Microsoft released a new version of DirectX. DirectX 9.0 introduced Shader Model 2.0, which offered one of the necessary components to enable rendering of high dynamic range rendering: lighting precision was not limited to just 8-bits. Although 8-bits was the minimum in applications, programmers could choose up to a maximum of 24 bits for lighting precision. However, all calculations were still integer-based. One of the first graphics cards to support DirectX 9.0 natively was ATI's Radeon 9700, though the effect wasn't programmed into games for years afterwards. On August 23, 2003, Microsoft updated DirectX to DirectX 9.0b, which enabled the Pixel Shader 2.x (Extended) profile for ATI's Radeon X series and NVIDIA's GeForce FX series of graphics processing units.

On August 9, 2004, Microsoft updated DirectX once more to DirectX 9.0c. This also exposed the Shader Model 3.0 profile for high level shader language (HLSL). Shader Model 3.0's lighting precision, according to Dr. Sim Dietrich Jr., has a minimum of 32 bits as opposed to 2.0's 8-bit minimum. Also all lighting-precision calculations are now floating-point based. NVIDIA states that contrast ratios using Shader Model 3.0 can be as high as 65535:1 using 32-bit lighting precision.

HDR is impossible without high-precision color.  Specifically, at least 16 bits per color channel are needed, and floating-point is ideal.  The reason old games cannot support HDR was because old video cards only allowed 8-bit (per channel) integer color in hardware, which is insufficient to provide more than a factor of 255 contrast ratio, and a terrible 100% brightness jump at the lowest level (from 1 to 2), as opposed to human vision which the article quotes at around 10000:1.  Since textures, effects, and lighting are processed through multiple stages, the imprecision accumulates and the end result is very inaccurate.  HDR is indeed solely about color precision and the increased accuracy and contrast ratios it allows.

Note that lighting does absolutely nothing except moderate the brightness and color of the emissive source (e.g. a textured surface), so increasing the precision or range of the light sources alone will not give you HDR.  But a 32-bit floating point (i.e. high precision) light source on a 32-bit floating point (i.e. high precision) emissive surface (e.g. a texture) processed through a 32-bit floating point (i.e. high precision) path will result in 32-bit floating point (i.e. high precision) color channels for output, and prevent any significant inaccuracy accumulation despite multiple rendering stages.

HDR is indeed simply the use of high-precision color channels in all processing.  It will ideally will include high-precision source textures and light levels, but must include high-precision numbers in all processing stages.

In summary:  If at every stage of processing (including texture, lighting, and all subsequent steps including antialiasing/filtering/shader code/etc, and finally output) you use 16+ bits per channel and ideally floating-point numbers, you will have HDR, unambiguously, period.  Of course, the more bits per channel, the higher the definition the HDR.

 

[KON_Air]

http://rapidshare.com/files/125830543/ENBSeriesM_B.zip.html

it is a hack job, don't expect it to change your world. Read the Readme(s)...

 

[Raz]

Thanks man, I'll try it out.

 

[Buxton]

I like it! Very pretty.

 

[Raz]

Hmm, I think you forgot to put a .dll file or two in the Rar, Kon Air.

 

[KON_Air]

I forgot to tell those were settings for people that already use the ENB.

Rename "d3dx9_31.dll" to whatever dll is missing. And then you should have original package... pfft...

whatever here is a download with this and the previous one you have everything you need;
http://rapidshare.com/files/125856324/DLLs.zip.html

 

[Coenraad]

Screenies anyone?

Oh, and does it cut your frames?

 

[Xlacier]

KON_Air, you make my Mount & Blade bloom dreams come true!  Admitantly I didn't have any such inclinations before this thread.

Screenies anyone?

Oh, and does it cut your frames?

Reference:  Mipmap Mod light ver. and Graphical Enhancement 2.0 skyboxes


with KON_Air's bloom hack:



with hack and the original Resident Evil 4 .ini files:


same as above but with directX7 rendering method


One thing I notice is that I lose about 1/3 my frame rate with bloom activated; still playable on my machine though.  I haven't tested it but I imagine the RE4 settings aren't too good for night combat, whereas KON_Air's settings are very playable during night combat.

EDIT:  Another note about why I'm taking such a hit in frame rate is that I'm working with 256mb video memory.  The documentation was saying something about being a memory hog and my resolution is probably pushing it, if anyone was wondering.

By the way, do I need DX9 shaders for this to work?

As is, DirectX7 render mode seems to work from my limited play through but some of the textures aren't affected so it looks a little strange(trees and grass are the most noticeable).  Check out the last screenshot to see what I mean.  This might just be my machine, I can't be too sure.

 

[KON_Air]

By the way, do I need DX9 shaders for this to work?

Meh? The whole point is using HLSL hooks to Direct X 9 and forcing them to be used.


In which goddamn century you people are living, are Direct X 8 or 7 distros even available to download?

On performance, my monster machine doesn't have any noticable drops in combat areas and a loss about 5-10 frames in cities thanks to awkward lighting... go figure...



*Check that one out, If your screen is bright bloom and colour correction is treated differently then if it was darker.


Edit; The bloom is about %3 at day (bright) and %5 at night (dark). In dark I tried to catch "Oh, everything is relflecting light a bit" and during bright tried to get the warmth of sun light which seem I did managed to catch in this shot;



Me happy.

 

[Boeing]

Hooray my games can now be blinding, all I need is a dull brown filter and it will look real!

 

[Darian]

Hooray my games can now be blinding, all I need is a dull brown filter and it will look real!

Graphical Enhancement 2.0 isn't brown, but it's certainly dark.

And you call that bloom? THIS is bloom!

 

[Boeing]

No, I actually use that myself, but I'm referring to Yahtzee's (zero punctuation guy) criticism of "realistic" graphics...lotsa bloom and brown.

Thanks for blinding me though

 

[Zathan]

You can never have enough bloom.

Zathan

 

[idomi]

In which goddamn century you people are living, are Direct X 8 or 7 distros even available to download?

You can disable shaders in M&B it doesn't need a specific distribution of the game. You can also have DX9 installed in a non-DX9 supporting system and a game that supports some sort of fallback (like m&b does) will resort to DX8 or 7 mode for the rendering.