30 replies to this topic

[xeromynd]

Hello All,

I've been playing this game for 3+ years now. I want to spice it up a bit. I've already got a few sound mods for the game, just to change it up a bit, but now I'm looking into graphics.

I know there used to be a 'high end' user.cfg file that was maintained, but due to the inability to search-by-date on these forums, I can't find anything recent about what we can modify in the user.cfg. If there's anyone out there using a relatively high-end user.cfg file, could someone post it, or put it in a pastebin? Obviously, old tweaks like Film Grain, FOV, and Cockpit Glass are no longer necessary in the .cfg, but I'd like to know what else works. I have a 980 and I'd like to make this game look as good as possible without tanking my framerate too much.

There used to be a 'Ultimate 4k Screenshots' thread or something, and I'd like to know how to make my game look like some of those (provided those weren't edited in post, not sure).

Also along those lines, I'd like to know PGI's current stance on using SweetFX for making the game look good. I'm not talking about tactical advantages, cheating, or visibility tweaks that give players an advantage, I just want to make the game look great, and run well.

[Wintersdark]

SweetFX is explicitly allowed.

I'd recommend using ReShade, though. It includes SweetFX, and several other shaders, as well as providing an excellent GUI to play with settings and enable/disable individual features from each.

[KrazedOmega]

xeromynd, on 22 April 2016 - 08:02 PM, said:

Also along those lines, I'd like to know PGI's current stance on using SweetFX for making the game look good. I'm not talking about tactical advantages, cheating, or visibility tweaks that give players an advantage, I just want to make the game look great, and run well.

Last I heard it was still ok to use SweetFX, and I hope it stays that way. I've been using it for years now and the game just looks bad without it.

[GreenHell]

I'm interested in this as well. I have a few edits in my .cfg but it's a bit old too. Wasn't there one that let you turn down the cockpit lights automatically? I forgot to add that one and now I can't find it.

Edited by GreenHell, 22 April 2016 - 11:02 PM.

[Yosharian]

I just installed SweetFX and it seems to do absolutely nothing. Turning it off-and-on ingame (SCROLL-LOCK) yields literally no results.

Anyway the difference judging by the screenshots is nothing special.

Edited by Yosharian, 23 April 2016 - 01:51 AM.

[His Holiness Pope Buster]

SweetFX is like using flour to find moisture. It isn't necessary if you know what you're doing. The whole point of playing a difficult game is to have a challenge. Why try to make it easier? You're robbing yourself of fun.

Edited by His Holiness Pope Buster, 23 April 2016 - 02:19 AM.

[Oderint dum Metuant]

His Holiness Pope Buster, on 23 April 2016 - 02:14 AM, said:

SweetFX is like using flour to find moisture. It isn't necessary if you know what you're doing. The whole point of playing a difficult game is to have a challenge. Why try to make it easier? You're robbing yourself of fun.

What? Sweetfx doesn't make the game eaiser....it just makes it prettier.

Yosharian, on 23 April 2016 - 01:49 AM, said:

I just installed SweetFX and it seems to do absolutely nothing. Turning it off-and-on ingame (SCROLL-LOCK) yields literally no results.

Anyway the difference judging by the screenshots is nothing special.

You have the redshade library?

[thehiddenedge]

Yosharian, on 23 April 2016 - 01:49 AM, said:

I just installed SweetFX and it seems to do absolutely nothing. Turning it off-and-on ingame (SCROLL-LOCK) yields literally no results.

Anyway the difference judging by the screenshots is nothing special.

Did you install a preset or tweak it yourself? Simply installing the reshade framework doesn't do much.

His Holiness Pope Buster, on 23 April 2016 - 02:14 AM, said:

SweetFX is like using flour to find moisture. It isn't necessary if you know what you're doing. The whole point of playing a difficult game is to have a challenge. Why try to make it easier? You're robbing yourself of fun.

I don't think you know what you're talking about. Sweetfx is simply a graphics enhancer.

[Iqfish]

I can recommend ReShade too. We're using it for fliming.

[His Holiness Pope Buster]

thehiddenedge, on 23 April 2016 - 03:03 AM, said:

I don't think you know what you're talking about. Sweetfx is simply a graphics enhancer.

I don't think you know what you're talking about. People use it to enhance visibility on "foggy" maps. Ggclothes.

[Iqfish]

His Holiness Pope Buster, on 23 April 2016 - 06:46 AM, said:

I don't think you know what you're talking about. People use it to enhance visibility on "foggy" maps. Ggclothes.

ReShade applies post processing effects AFTER the image has been rendered.
It isn't even abled to mess with the games own shaders, let alone meshes or textures, since it sits behind the games engine in the rendering pipeline.

The Only thing you could do is increase contrast on foggy maps, but that comes with a lot of downsides too.

Edited by Iqfish, 23 April 2016 - 06:57 AM.

[Wintersdark]

Yosharian, on 23 April 2016 - 01:49 AM, said:

I just installed SweetFX and it seems to do absolutely nothing. Turning it off-and-on ingame (SCROLL-LOCK) yields literally no results.

Anyway the difference judging by the screenshots is nothing special.

It's immensely powerful, but you need to know how to configure it. Simply installing it doesn't do anything, because no shaders are configured.

This is why I recommended using ReShade, as it adds SweetFX and ~5 more shader sets, with easy options to enable/disable/configure each without having to monkey with text config files.

[Wintersdark]

His Holiness Pope Buster, on 23 April 2016 - 06:46 AM, said:

I don't think you know what you're talking about. People use it to enhance visibility on "foggy" maps. Ggclothes.

No, that's not what it's used for. People running SweetFX (or the full ReShade toolkit) are doing it to make the game look better (or potentially stranger, as you can have it render the whole game in ASCII if you want, which looks awesome but really isn't useful). Because the shaders are applied after the game has fully rendered the image, you can't do things like remove fog. There are ways you could make mechs slightly more visible through fog, such as outlining, but that would outline ALL edges through the fog and generally be a huge mess, not to mention making the game itself really ugly otherwise.

That's not necessary, as eyeballs work - you can only have it outline visible edges, after all, as it doesn't have 3D data, it's just got the image to work with. If it's sensitive enough to pick out very hard to see mechs, then it's going to be highlighting the fog itself too.

His Holiness Pope Buster, on 23 April 2016 - 02:14 AM, said:

SweetFX is like using flour to find moisture. It isn't necessary if you know what you're doing. The whole point of playing a difficult game is to have a challenge. Why try to make it easier? You're robbing yourself of fun.

This is the problem when reading a thread backwards, you respond to posts before you realise how utterly moronic the start of a discussion is.

[Wintersdark]

This is ReShade:


Ambient Occlusion is a favourite of mine. The FPS cost is high (only usable for those with strong GPU's) but it adds way, way better surface shadows to the game.

My normal setup just uses ReShade for it's FXAA, Bloom, Vibrance and LumaSharpen settings. This, because the in game AA is terrible, and the game loves to make everything soft and blurry. LumaSharpen cleans that up, gives me nice pretty straight edges.

Vibrance to kick the colors up a little bit, and Bloom because it's purdy.

[Wintersdark]

ASCII mode!

[Wintersdark]

Cheating with ReShade?


Oh my god! That awesome, it's totally outlined! I can see it clearly through the fog! HAXORS!

(mind you, you could see it clearly without the cel shading too)



Oh. So it's only useful for highlighting a mech that's not blending into terrain, and is only going to show of readily visible skylined mechs? Yay.

[xeromynd]

Wintersdark, on 23 April 2016 - 07:29 AM, said:

This is ReShade:


Ambient Occlusion is a favourite of mine. The FPS cost is high (only usable for those with strong GPU's) but it adds way, way better surface shadows to the game.

My normal setup just uses ReShade for it's FXAA, Bloom, Vibrance and LumaSharpen settings. This, because the in game AA is terrible, and the game loves to make everything soft and blurry. LumaSharpen cleans that up, gives me nice pretty straight edges.

Vibrance to kick the colors up a little bit, and Bloom because it's purdy.

Damn that looks tasty, I'll have to try it out. Thanks!

Now the second part of my question: anyone keep a running list of what can be tweaked in the user.cfg??

Wintersdark, on 23 April 2016 - 08:04 AM, said:

Cheating with ReShade?



-snip-

Funny thing is. You can literally just use PGI's Night Vision to cut through smoke also.

Edited by xeromynd, 23 April 2016 - 08:19 AM.

[Iqfish]

Wintersdark, on 23 April 2016 - 08:04 AM, said:

REPORTED!!1

[Wintersdark]

xeromynd, on 23 April 2016 - 08:18 AM, said:

Damn that looks tasty, I'll have to try it out. Thanks!

Now the second part of my question: anyone keep a running list of what can be tweaked in the user.cfg??

Practically nothing now - or actually nothing, I'm not really sure. I stopped bothering after one of the earlier rounds of blocks in there.

Quote

Funny thing is. You can literally just use PGI's Night Vision to cut through smoke also.

Yeah; I was trying to illustrate how shaders can basically only add definition when there's already lots, or remove it; they can't make something hard to see easier to see; because the shader can't tell it apart from the background either.

[Moomtazz]

The outline on the skylined mech is pretty hackish. Mech outlines don't conform to hills, so even a part of an arm or head sticking out would show up much more clearly with the outline.

I actually use SweetFX for the general improvement to picture quality but that skyline shot makes me think it should be banned.

Wintersdark, on 23 April 2016 - 08:04 AM, said:

Cheating with ReShade?


Oh my god! That awesome, it's totally outlined! I can see it clearly through the fog! HAXORS!

(mind you, you could see it clearly without the cel shading too)



Oh. So it's only useful for highlighting a mech that's not blending into terrain, and is only going to show of readily visible skylined mechs? Yay.