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- General - Tutorial: Forcing ambient occlusion ingame.
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Hi! I would like to know, to have AO in TS3, do you have to use driver version 314? It might be dangerous because my card is pretty new and my cable is going loco (I have to weirdly unplug and plug it every time on startup) and I don't wanna have to bring my PC to the shop again. Are there any other ways to get AO on Nvidia Cards? |
Sorry for the bump but what's your current graphics card? You can use a later revision of the Nvidia drivers, but I am not sure as to which AO flag to use for best results.
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Looking at other games, I have a limited frame of reference but distinctly remember having to settle for Medium-High settings in GTA V (where Medium is actually the lowest possible setting) whereas the 1070 will quite comfortably stick to 60 at Very High. Ultra and Maximum are possible but will quite often drop the framerate well below 60, which is not something I'm prepared to live with anymore. I can run Just Cause 3 and Fallout 4 at 90 or even 120 so anything under 60 is no bueno as far as I'm concerned.
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https://imgur.com/a/AfQcYRe
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Interesting- Reshade with Screen-Space Reflections for TS4- wonder if it'll work for TS3? https://imgur.com/a/AfQcYRe |
Seems like that technique is more suited for photostories and/or screenshots than anything else. SSR can be rather crude at times as it only uses the screen's contents as a base but it should be reasonable enough at least in some scenarios.
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It also has no concept of material properties so it'll give every surface the same shine at the same angle. That means shiny grass, shiny skin, shiny trees. In practice, you'll have to take a screenshot with the shine on and one with the shine off, and then manually composit them together. |
A more ideal solution would be a dedicated .asi to inject additional shader effects per-material than a generic post-process injector like Reshade. Have it detect the shaders used on materials, then let the .asi do its thing. Heck, you could probably implement some rudimentary PBR provided the .package files are supplied with requisite textures to account for the pipeline. I'm no programmer but I'm sure someone with the skills could pull this off.
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....then again, how would you make a script (which probably can't be injected into the game itself) identify objects within the screen space and map the appropriate textures onto it? Tools like Reshade can access the final composited image generated by the graphics engine at each frame, and it can access depth buffer data, but it can't hook itself into the game engine to recognize assets. Maybe I'm just talking out my ass though; I'm not a programmer. My rudimentary understanding of how it'd work is that the script would have to hook into the game executable to access it's .packages, then load in all of them and somehow identify not only which ones are currently active within the engine, but also where and how.
Then again, you suggest there might be some form of PBR possible using the existing texture maps but if I recall correctly PBR mapping is based on stuff like roughness and metallicness. TS4's specular maps for example are RGB where each channel defines a different property of the object's specularity. TS3 only has a very simplistic greyscale map where black is no shine and white is maximum shine. So assuming it would be possible to use the specular mapping and, if present, the normal mapping, a rudimentary PBR should certainly be possible.
But I think we both know it's not going to happen because ideas like this get floated all the time, and they always sound a lot easier than they are.
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My thoughts exactly. It's certainly worth investigating; the game clearly defines material properties for each visible object, and where there is no appropriate shader data or a specular texture map, it can be assumed the object is wholly unreflective. It would have to be able to read certain file formats used within the game engine, but assuming it already can in a manner similar to what tools like S3PE and TSRW do, making it read RGB pixel values off a texture map seems like child's play. ....then again, how would you make a script (which probably can't be injected into the game itself) identify objects within the screen space and map the appropriate textures onto it? Tools like Reshade can access the final composited image generated by the graphics engine at each frame, and it can access depth buffer data, but it can't hook itself into the game engine to recognize assets. Maybe I'm just talking out my ass though; I'm not a programmer. My rudimentary understanding of how it'd work is that the script would have to hook into the game executable to access it's .packages, then load in all of them and somehow identify not only which ones are currently active within the engine, but also where and how. Then again, you suggest there might be some form of PBR possible using the existing texture maps but if I recall correctly PBR mapping is based on stuff like roughness and metallicness. TS4's specular maps for example are RGB where each channel defines a different property of the object's specularity. TS3 only has a very simplistic greyscale map where black is no shine and white is maximum shine. So assuming it would be possible to use the specular mapping and, if present, the normal mapping, a rudimentary PBR should certainly be possible. But I think we both know it's not going to happen because ideas like this get floated all the time, and they always sound a lot easier than they are. |
I recall what DexX did with SA GFX when he experimented with the RenderWare engine in GTA San Andreas where he managed to isolate vehicles from other scene objects and used it as a basis for how to selectively shade objects in said game. A variation of it could be used in TS3, and I don't think you have to read all objects in the game, but rather tap into the shaders and inject stuff from there.
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There was some talk here (http://modthesims.info/showthread.p...094#post5495094) from my post onwards about the potential of cracking open the Shaders_Win32.precomp file and seeing if there could be some surgery in possibly transplanting code from its series siblings.
Anyways, on the thread topic- what Nvidia AO setting are people using these days ? I'm still on 0x00060019 as it's the one that shows up best in pictures.
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BINGO! Someone on the Officials sent me a bunch of links to MATY, which I hadn't even considered consulting, and referred me to an After Effects plugin that can apparently read and edit precomp files. Haven't had the time to look into it much further but MATY seems to be doing a bit of problem diagnosis here, at least as far as the shadow situation goes. Would be nice to unfuckulate that, which would be possible with the shader file. Then again, there's probably a good reason it broke in the first place and EA might've broken it to make something else work. Might be worth raising the issue at MATY and seeing if they know more about it. There might yet be someone alive over there with a bit of engine knowledge to dispense. |
Interesting- do you have the MATY links?
Also, I wonder what would happen if we tried transplanting the original Basegame no-patch Shaders_Win32.precomp file into the current files? There are a bunch of things that were also messed up over the years, the most significant being cross-floor lighting which was broken after WA.
I was also looking at some early-build images for TS3, and I wondering how the lighting on sims might have changed- the shading is much less harsh and there are some things like hair sheen that are not noticeable in the final build.
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The big issue is we ideally want parts of both the original shaders and the final version. Preferably, the improvements of the newer one with the functionality of the older one. I'd also, personally, like to restore the more noticeable cubemap reflections on the glass shader, which is something I noticed when playing a day-one version some years ago. It was just a Sunset Valley starter home, nothing fancy, but I could easily see the world reflected in each of its windows. In later versions, the effect is either gone entirely or so subtle that I can't see it.
These are all the links I have off MTS. They discuss the precomp file but not specifically how to modify it.
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s....msg551704.html
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s...,15034.150.html
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These are all the links I have off MTS. They discuss the precomp file but not specifically how to modify it. http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s....msg551704.html http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s...,15034.150.html |
Interesting, the second link talks about finding the original precomp file lol- looks like if you have the CD, you can grab it from there.
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