Don't worry about discouraging me, I don't run off courage and praise. I'd far more value a realistic appraisal of the situation, and so I thank you for that. I guess I won't know how deep the hole is until I hit the bottom.

That's the answer I was hoping for


Is there any reason it was told 'not to'? Does that somehow make it easier for the engine to run other tasks or something? I don't see why Beth would just lock out some of the engine's functionality like that without good reason...

And perhaps more importantly, would it be possible to unlock that functionality?

You might want to consult with RPG-BlackDragon as he seems to have the most experience with implementing shadows in OB 'and' 3.0 shader effects in OB. Just google RGP-BlackDragon if you aren't familiar with his work. Best of luck with your endeavours and if you are successful I'll sing at your wedding. And if you fail I'll sing at your wedding.

Is it just me, or does the SSAO make Oblivion look like Borderlands?
And sorry if I'm interrupting this project at all; I feel like I'm intruding. But I noticed when I was using the modified version of the god rays, whenever I was looking sideways at one my screen would fill with the color of the sky:
http://filesmelt.com/downloader/Oblivion_2009-12-03_14-24-05-54.jpg
So I glanced in the fx file and reduced the "static const float saturate = 0.540f;" from 540 to 040.
This was the result.
http://filesmelt.com/downloader/Oblivion_2009-12-03_14-23-11-94.jpg
Just a small fix, if it was bothering anyone else.

Just a small request, tried doing it myself, but wouldnt work for some reason... an esp that enables showtestshader on startup?

So you want to do a high precision, high res cascade shadow map? That's hard to do when you have the source code for the entire engine, not to mention you'd have to hack speedtree to work with it because all the leaf cards are billboarded. I mean ok it's possible, but likely? I wouldn't think so.

I don't get it, I can understand it being a rediculous performance killer, but why is it practically impossible to the point where you basically need to write the engine yourself? Could someone explain it? I'm seeing it from a purely mathematical (well, not really. pure maths svcks, imho) POV, so I'm missing the programming side of things, but this is how I see it:

You have a texture showing what is rendered on screen. You have a matrix that turns each point of that 2D texture into a 3D point in the game world. (My reasoning is that there is one for the 3D point -> 2D point, so it's just a matter of reversing it). You use that matrix to get the 3D position of the point in the world from the camera's perspective. You have the position of the sun in the world from the camera's point of view. You then (somehow, I don't know if this is possible) have a matrix that turns coordinates in the camera coordinate system into coordinates in the sun coordinate system (the same point from the sun's perspective). You then do whole 3D -> 2D switch in the sun's persective to get a texture of what you'd see if you were where the sun was. Compare the depth of the same (2D) point with the depth of your point in the 3D world, and if they are not the same, then something must be in front of it, and so a shadow should be cast at that point. You switch back to the original (camera perspective) 2D point on the texture and make it a bit darker. Rinse and repeat.

Now, it's fairly obvious that is a lengthy process, but how is it practically impossible? (I'm not trying to argue a point or anything, I'm just wanting an explanation as to where my thinking fails)

EDIT: Yep, rereading, it definitely would be a perf. killer. But that's not the point.

@ Jjiinx: When we get the ability to pass variables to the shaders from Oblivion scripting, that (and more) shall certainly happen.

@ Snow_EP: You're definitely not intruding. And thanks for the fix. :thumbsup:

oh thank you i wiil try that out Question though are you useing HDR ?

Yes.

cool so iam I

I was messing around, with color correction shaders and other small time stuff, when I noticed I came with a nice desaturation shader. Its not really for gameplay (some big bugs with the sun and when HDR is on) but it looks good for screenshots. I took and converted some code from the MGE Sincity shader but will make my own code and probably release a beta thats not so dark.

http://img706.imageshack.us/img706/5789/sincity01.jpg
http://img706.imageshack.us/img706/496/sincity03.jpg

Im working on a bleach pass shader to give the scene a very minor desaturated and Gloomy look for those who missed Morrowinds Darkness

And AA, by any chance?

Is HDR + AA + Godrays just no go? Or am I simply having trouble tweaking the numbers properly... I can't remember what I'm supposed to do with those, in order to get rid of the "WSoD" (White Screen of Death ) effect and "spotlight" effect.

WSoD happens all too easily, even after changing the saturate from 540 to 40, as suggested. Same goes for spotlight, or varying numbers and width and intensity of vertical bars of white light, more to the point. I think blue featured more, prior to that saturate fix, but other than that, things haven't changed all that much. Maybe these things don't happen quite as often

I think I had it working just fine before, but I had to do a fresh install, due to a rather daft mistake (that led to furher problems) that was irrevocable, or so it seemed. Now I'm not sure what I did differently. Must be something to do with the Godrays.fx settings, I guess.

IIRC, the motion blur mod implements that.

Read the OP to fix the searchlight effect. You must edit the shader FOV to match your ingame FOV.

@ Shademe
Yes I am aware of that but this will be better and much different. Plus its stand-alone and doesn't need motion blur for it.

Sorry, my bad.

So it disables AA. Oh well.

As for FoV, the only instance of it I've come across is in oblivion.ini, and that's the default of 75. Apparently, it resets every time a game starts. So, unless something else is setting it to another number, I assume it's 75. Which is what Godrays has as default too.

Not sure what to try next.

You can set your FOV in your documents/mygames/oblivion/oblivion.ini there. Or use this console command-> SetINI "fDefaultFOV:Display" 90.00- -(this number canbe your desired FOV aspect)

You mean http://screenshot.xfire.com/screenshot/natural/dd107cd26a5bb9d8dc1a7d0c69d3c20fc6ea073d.png its from War Cry part of FCOM Red Mountain"s Fury Set

and here is a nice Godrays http://screenshot.xfire.com/screenshot/natural/44d08d3c08d586de75eec17b62cc7e05a48746fe.png B)

Are you talking about http://filesmelt.com/downloader/Oblivion_2009-12-04_06-23-24-89.jpg? Because I don't believe there's anything we can do to fix it.

No not that. He means the effect you get on usually clear weather when you look at the sun, you see one beam extruding from it, turning it into a searchlight. There is a pic on the last thread. The Godrays Shader is best displayed on cloudy weather types, in the dawn and dusk hours.

@Wrinkely

Ok, let's assume you can do it, first off your pointing the view from the sun, right? Imagine a high rez shadow map even, lets say x2048. From that perspective it would obviously be fine, but then your mapping it to screenspace, I.E. the pc's perspective. So from that far away, you'd be getting the distant mountains to cast shadows onto things, but from that perspective the character might be no larger than a few pixels. Suddenly your characters shadow is a few oddly shaped blocks. That's going to look horrid. Now you could do a lot of complicated math and create what are called cascade shadow maps, this means the shadows are rendered in slices going out from the player and you'd have to combine them all into one coherent one. This of course is even more complicated and kills performance even more.

Now another problem is trees. As I said, the leaves, called leaf cards, are billboarded. Meaning they turn to follow the players perspective. Now this looks bizzare enough on its own, but imagine it from the shadow maps perspective. If you're viewing the tree at a right angle to the light the leaves shadows are going to disappear almost entirely. Not to mention it'll look just plain bizarre to begin with when moving at all. Now there are ways to correct this, I.E. getting the leaf cards to turn towards the shadow maps perspective. But that's yet more work, and brings up more problems and etc.

So as you can see, at this point it's just going to be plain hard to do. Not to mention having to deal with all the other "transparent" objects since that use alpha blending (you'd need a DX11 renderer to get actual z-sorting) and plenty of other problems. The point is one of the biggest problems still trying to be solved in advanced rasterization research is shadows. There are still papers every year explaining how to make shadow maps work better and it's still not really "solved". So trying to hack them into a game you don't even have the source code for is probably just going to be an exercise in futility.

Actually, both of those, Snow_EP and AmpolX, but only when it's clear and sunny, and only on certain angles. I have no (or very few) problems with Godrays when switching HDR off, however. Which is what was suggested in the OP, I know. There was cake, and I was hungry. So it goes.

Nothing to do with the FoV, I'm pretty sure now.

Which, IMO, it would be better to let the engine sort the objects by class and determine what will be passed to the render engine as shadow caster/receiver. Beth did that. They just restricted the list to rigged objects. Originally they were using cubemaps for shadows (ref: E3 demo) and even clutter was casting shadows. But performance was an issue so they axed the whole system before release.

@ tombofsoldier: OK, I get it now. I hadn't thought of either of those points. Oh well, thanks for explaining it. Though you spelt my name wrong.

What about a sort of reverse take on the Godrays shader though, as a sort of shadow? I mean that Godrays takes the parts of the screen which are exposed to the sun (or something like that, obviously it's not exactly that or else we wouldn't be seeing weird tinting bugs, etc.) and brightens them, would it be feasible to get a reverse effect that darkens the non-exposed bit?

So would it ever be possible to get past the restriction Bethesda enabled with shadows using future versions of OBGE?

I have OBSE 0018b4 and OBGE (v1 I think?) but when I run Oblivion with Godrays FX in my shaders folder and type ShowTestShader, Oblivion tells me it doesn't recognize the function. Any idea what's going on there?