Hi, I meant a simple fade to black, as in the image in the screen gradually turns all black. For example, if you wish for some things to happen on screen, but not have the player see any of it, a smooth fade to black would help very much.

The only way I have found to do that in Oblivion is to force the player character to cast a custom spell which has a huge black particle cloud animation that fills the whole screen, but that is suboptimal to say the least.

P.S. I have searched youtube for 5 minutes and I can't find a single example of a screen fading to black!!

Oh, ok. Yes, that is perfectly possible to do, if I weren't on my ubuntu partition doing some composing, I'd rustle an example up for you right now. I can get it done later tonight once I've finished though.

That is very kind of you! No need to put in any hours of work for this though, it's only something I'll need "eventualy", it is nice to know that it is possible. Thank you.

OK, I did a quick mock up of a fade to black shader. ATM I can't have a properly configureable one, but come the next version of Scanti's plugin, that should be possible. Anyway, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btLWALklBjE's the video. It only stays black for a short amount of time, but again, that sort of thing will be changeable.

That's simply awesome, wrinklyninja, thank you very much! :dance: :touched:

DOF bug report :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbGEtF91Dxc

If you're talking about the 3rd person player model losing focus: it's a known issue that doesn't have a solution yet.

I thought it was fixed already.
What about a static DOF ? without focus.

The video is quite low frame rate, but I assume that you're talking about the focus switching between your character and the surroundings. That can't really be helped at the moment, though if you're staying in 3rd person, you might want to try opening up the shader file and changing the FocusPoint variable near the top to the 3rd person recommended value. That should make sure that you stay focussed on whatever is (sort of) in front of you.

Also, read the shader file for info on how to set it to distance blur.

Having static Depth of Field would be pointless since wrinklyninja worked so hard to get a Dynamic Effect. You can try Qarls if your looking for static Depth of Field.

Borderlands anyone ? Depth-based edge detection - http://i659.photobucket.com/albums/uu320/shademe/Oblivion2009-12-1505-54-46-96.jpg | http://i659.photobucket.com/albums/uu320/shademe/Oblivion2009-12-1505-54-41-43.jpg | http://i659.photobucket.com/albums/uu320/shademe/Oblivion2009-12-1505-54-17-38.jpg

I like it

Neat, one of my friends has Borderlands, describes it was 'Oblivion, but with guns'. I'll have to check it out, if only for graphical goodness.

[off-topic]
If anyone knows of any good piano synth plugins (LADSPA preferably), please do tell. It's painful enough trying to come up with music without an instrument on hand, and having to use the laptop's keyboard/clicking buttons, but having to listen to it in what is barely above single frequency beeps is torturous, and I'm not really into fine-tuning plugins myself. Why is it that my composing software (MuseScore, if anyone's interested) can give passable imitations of a wide variety of instruments, but the vast majority of audio synth-involving applications only cater towards electronica. Bah humbug. (A christmas themed tie in there, even if it was unintentional.)
[/off-topic]

Borderlands is awesome.

I thought it was terrible; but that's offtopic anywho.

Off topic, yes. I loved it though. The map could have used some work, but...

How incredibly co-incidental. I had just bought Borderlands, and now its referenced in the only Oblivion thread I'm monitoring, atm. I have noticed the DoF in that game works as previously described. You only get true depth of field when you're looking along the gun sight (which can be cumbersome sometimes when you're lining up for a head shot, but it is focusing on something closer), but in all other cases, you are treated to a simple distance blur, which looks quite nice.

Right now, the distance blur in Oblivion's DoF shader is totally static, right? Like, if I happen to be at a mountain vista looking out, it won't adjust to let me see all the pretty landscape without it looking like I forgot my glasses, will it?

Perhaps there should be some allowances made for situations like that, seeing as the vistas are part of what makes Oblivion unique. For the most part, the player will be looking at objects near to him, or on the ground, or running at him yelling, "You move like a pregnant cow!" But, now and then, most of what is on screen might be distant landscape. I'd think it would be smart to test for that, and then adjust the distance blur accordingly.

The blur is a gradual one that increases as the scene gets further away, and doesn't take into account where you are looking, but I guess I could have it so that if you're focusing on something that is pretty darn far away then everything will be in focus. In that case though it's more like normal DoF again, which would only have close objects blurred.

Yes, it would be, but you might not blur the near objects when you're looking at stuff far off, in which case, it would be a sort of half of a depth of a field... Or something... You just extend the blur beyond the range of the distant stuff when it appears to be appropriate. You don't want to obscure the artificial natural beauty that the folks at Bethesda worked hard on, is all I'm suggesting.

Random little idea: take the depth based edge detection, but instead of a black line just increase the contrast a little, the bigger the z difference the sharper the contrast, with a falloff so the effect fades away smoothly. Keep it subtle and it would make closer things appear a little sharper, especially compared to things in the distance.

This is what I was saying earlier, yes. It's a shame, because the DoF shader is AMAZING, and can make for some incredible screenshots, but keeping it on all the time is just jarring and breaks the immersion for me.

I think the best thing to do, would be to create a way for shaders to be activated individually. So that Godrays could be permanent, and DoF activated for those special scenic moments where its magic can really add to the vista.

A few more screens. The effect is easier to notice in these -> http://i659.photobucket.com/albums/uu320/shademe/Oblivion2009-12-1520-22-21-08.jpg | http://i659.photobucket.com/albums/uu320/shademe/Oblivion2009-12-1520-22-15-74.jpg ; http://i659.photobucket.com/albums/uu320/shademe/Oblivion2009-12-1519-56-14-04.jpg | http://i659.photobucket.com/albums/uu320/shademe/Oblivion2009-12-1519-56-09-19.jpg ; http://i659.photobucket.com/albums/uu320/shademe/Oblivion2009-12-1519-53-15-97.jpg | http://i659.photobucket.com/albums/uu320/shademe/Oblivion2009-12-1519-53-23-22.jpg ; http://i659.photobucket.com/albums/uu320/shademe/Oblivion2009-12-1519-51-31-76.jpg | http://i659.photobucket.com/albums/uu320/shademe/Oblivion2009-12-1519-51-26-09.jpg

Hmm .. will try.

This+3d vision discover = unplayable for me.
I'm gonna buy a gtx 275 though, (Eventually) so hopefully that will help.

I use 3D Vision as well. Could you describe what issues you are having. I've been able to overcome a few over the last few weeks.

Question... What is this "SSAO"? I did a string search in the OP and found nothing. Its name isn't quite as descriptive as the names of the other two effects, and there's no readme in the download.