Looking for programming advice

[nomaddc]

Hello, I've decided to try to make my own graphics mod that would offer similar features as enb does for tesv, but for different game. I'm not looking for enb source code or anything like that, rather for some pointers like where to start and what literature would you suggest to read. I have background in C# and C++ programming, some shader knowledge, but I never did anything like this and not sure where to even start or what to read up.

All I know is that I want to make a dx11 wrapper/injector for that particular game (ffxiv), and I would prefer to build it from ground up myself.

[ENBSeries]

FF14 is online game, when i played it last time, it was dx9 based and when i tried to modify it, it renderer is very simple and nothing special to make it look good can be done. So, maybe you mean FF15? Its even worse, unreal engine games very hard to modify because of its stupid material system, which produce too many "uber" shaders and you need to do huge amount of tests to make sure some shader you linked work in any condition, with any game setting and lighting in scene. On practice its only good thing to modify shaders which do not have many variations, like bloom, temporal antialiasing, motion blur (but in unreal they still have a lot of methods based on video options). Game is not something cool and long living, so you will spent too much time to make a mod, but nobody will play it at that time (thats why i do not develop mods so often any more).
Anyway, if you still interested, i dont give anybody sources, but there are wrappers source in the net, just search "d3d11 wrapper source". Dont expect its easy, because require much more code than just replace something. Its only for people who have knowledge of graphics programming, otherwise to do it right will takes a lot of time, but time play against you with the game already released. if you never tried to write your own game engine and not familiar with graphics programming, dont do it, you will stuck at least for half year or more fixing bugs and trying to understand how things work (unless you genious).

[nomaddc]

That is correct It is an online game, it used to be dx9 only, but now it fully supports dx11 on 64bit systems. As for its current state - pretty alive and active MMORPG, I would say And it's looking like it will see at least 1 more big expansion in a year or so. I know there is already an injector for it - Reshade, but it's nowhere near as good as ENB and it's not dx11 (it's still dx9 mode only).

As for purpose - I'm more interested in just doing it as a self-appointed study project, to learn things and see how it works. As for graphics programming - I did study HLSL for quite a while and made a bunch of shaders, so I know *something*. Probably not enough

And ofc thanks for the pointer!

[ENBSeries]

Allright, but it really dont have anything useful in renderer to make an exclusive version instead or ReShade. Basically, only ssao/ssil can make game look better, but in mmo nobody need performance degradation caused by them, most people use very low game video options and place camera at the top far away (it was my first mmo, so i played in first person or very close third person till people said its incorrect and hard). Game itself look good enough in many locations, but very complicated to modify it by the lighting (like i do via direct lighting, ambient lighting, specular) and my experience says that dx9 to dx11 migration change nothing in render pipeline, so same problems about complexity of modding will remain. When i asked people in the game in several areas, only one replied that know my mod, others just dont care about graphics and when i asked in the guild, most mmo players dont play anything else but mmo and just migrate between them, so again they dont bother about graphics. At last, there are huge part of PS3/PS4 players, so the mod popularity will be even 2-3 worse than you expect. Just remember yourself, only when beginner its pleasure to have your character nice looking in cool clothing, but all are damn the same after all and only bit helped patch which involved replacement of real clothing to skins from any other. Btw, i tried subsurface scattering, didnt find how to apply it, because there is no separation between bodies and something else visible.

[nomaddc]

Haha, that's kinda true I've played both a lot of mmo and single player games, and I gotta agree - the majority of mmo players don't care. I do run into some rather ugly things when playing though, in particular tessellation on some textures (most textures tbh) looks ugly as sin. Another gripe I personally have is lighting in some areas and kinda meh AA.

Talking about MMOs, there was one for WoW some time ago. But it was made mostly obsolete when Blizzard updated engine a bit and added support for 64bit, CMAA, different MSAA settings, HBAO+ I believe, etc. Only thing I could probably want there would be drawing distance since I have a pretty strong PC and that "what is LOD" fog is pretty annoying and unimmersive Although bigger problem is no matter how much you improve all these features visuals still bottleneck at texture and mesh quality - low poly meshes and low res textures will look bad regardless of what you do. Either way it was really nice being able to play around with natively supported AA methods, wish more games provided more options to play around with graphics settings.

I do wonder when next TES game will be out Sadly TESO doesn't qualify for neither "new TES game" nor MMO Been messing around with skyrim, and it seem like it will be alive for quite a while longer.

On a side note: I figured that going to enbeffect.fx and enabling APPLYGAMECOLORCORRECTION fixes all and any issues with vampire vision (and anything other visual effects from mods/in vanilla that use it), and as far as it goes I didn't notice any negative side effects on preset I'm using (RealVision). Any thoughts on what it could affect negatively? Afaik Skyrim doesn't do a whole lot of color correction itself except a few specific quests where something happens and game applies it temporarily, but that is where you would want it to take over either way (I guess)? Or am I missing something?

[ENBSeries]

Vampire and khajiit vision affected as i know, nothing else. I dont think these two features are something so much important and useful compared to difference in image when game color correction make image desaturated, contrasted and often brown, better use some enbeffect.fx from good preset and if it is so much important to have vampire vision, then just disable mod by hotkey.

[nomaddc]

I see. Ran some testing meanwhile too, it was noticeable in Riften (a lot). Guess this will keep bugging me to no end