A non-exhaustive list of (configurable) effects that this mod adds to your game includes:
- palette based colour correction
- SSAO (screen space ambient occlusion)
- indirect lighting
- advanced immersive bloom
- dynamic depth of field
- ENB lens flare and anamorphic lens flare
- changed lighting intensity and curves, altered cloud and sky gradients
- eye adaptation
- film grain
- SMAA: Enhanced Subpixel Morphological Antialiasing (gets rid of jaggies at a much lower performance cost than normal AA solutions)
Fallout Street Lights
Some nights can get pretty dark. A bit of light doesn't hurt. My nights aren't as dark that you really need this, but if you also install the following mod, these lights become increasingly convenient. Added benefit: they add a bit of visual pizazz to the Wasteland.
Light of Night
This mod changes the ambient light settings at night. I use the starlight variant. Why not use ENB to make nights darker? Well, my interiors would become too dark, as both lighting schemes are linked (this may change in a later version of the ENB wrapper).
Megaton Lighting Overhaul
My ENB enhances light. This mod makes sure that the lights in Megaton actually throw light for my ENB to play with. Good combo.
If your game runs well using ENB, you can gradually add more and more texture mods, at increasingly higher resolutions. But beware: never stack up more than your GPU can account for. The higher the texture resolutions you're going to use, the more VRAM you're going to need. Fallout 3 is very prone to crash when it has to work too hard. Use a mod manager to quickly reduce the amount of texture mods you're using.
If anyone wonders what further mods I use, this is my list from 2012.08.27.
FAQ + TIPS
- ANISOTROPIC FILTERING - AF is enabled in enbseries.ini by default (you can put it to FALSE there if you want). I advise you to turn off hardware or game anisotropic filtering.
- FPS LIMITER - You can toggle on and off ENB's FPS limiter (for possibly smoother gameplay) by hitting HOME in-game. It's off by default, and when activated will limit at 30 FPS.
- BUILT-IN FPS COUNTER - Hitting the ‘*’ ket on your numberpad toggles a framerate counter at the top left of the screen.
- SCREENSHOTS - If you want to take lossless screenshots (bmp’s that get dumped in your game folder) that include the anti-aliasing that SMAA provides in-game, you have to use the END key on your keyboard. If you use any other means, results can vary. Steamshots will not include the anti-aliasing for instance. In SMAA's injector.ini you can change the keycode for which key you need to press to take a lossless screenshot. A link with a list to the various keycode values is present in the injector.ini.
- REFRESH THE ENB WRAPPER IN-GAME - The key to reload the ENB after you’ve alt-tabbed out of the game to make any changes to the configuration files is BACKSPACE (pretty handy for tweaking, that).
- SWITCHING ON/OFF ENB POSTPROCESSING IN-GAME - press SHIFT+F12. Try this to see the difference this mod makes! (Steam users: set your screenshot key to something different than F12.)
- CONFLICTING MODS - If you want to experience this ENB as intended, first disable and remove any mods that change the lighting and postprocessing such as Fellout (greener grass option is okay), The Imaginator, DYNAVISION, Director's Chair, Enhanced Shaders, CINEMATECH. Some aspects of these mods can be compatible with ENB, whereas others may not be. You are free to experiment, but the advice is to turn these off before your first try with ENB. Other lighting mods that do work well together with this config include Realistic Interior Lighting, Megaton Lighting Overhaul, Light of Night and probably very many others. There will also be a lot of mods that won't conflict or work well, but just won't work at all. Mods such as Advanced Recon Thermal Nightvision won't work. You can install them, but if you want to see their effects, you'll have to switch off ENB postprocessing (SHIFT+F12). This has to do with how ENB bypasses the game's original colour correction. That's just the way it is.
- HDR - make sure you have the line 'bDoHighDynamicRange=1' in the [BlurShaderHDR] section of your FalloutPrefs.ini. You can now have both HDR and ENB bloom at the same time! If you don't want HDR, put it to 0.
- GORGEOUS GRASS - with the lack of shadows on the ground, it's a good idea to have as much grass around as your computer can handle. Try tweaking your Fallout.ini to contain the following lines under the [Grass] section: iMinGrassSize=10 (or higher if too performance heavy, or when using 'Their World'); GrassPointLighting=1; bDrawShaderGrass=1; iGrassDensityEvalSize=2; iMaxGrassTypesPerTexure=4.
- FOG - fog settings can make or break how the game looks, especially because ENB influences how fog is lighted quite a bit. try varying your fog settings in-game using the console command 'setfog'. A good value (though FOV dependent) is 'setfog 4500,80000' but you can try varying both values (first is near fog, second is far fog). You can also go quite crazy with fog using this command.
PERFORMANCE TWEAKS
I’ll collect some suggestions here which can help you with performance, without going for an exhaustive guide. Of course, some of these tips will gain performance with reduced splendour as a trade-off:
- SMAA PERFORMANCE - The included version of SMAA is configured at the ULTRA setting, which is most performance heavy. You can change this by opening the injector.ini file and changing the line: 'preset = SMAA_PRESET_ULTRA' to any of the other values listed above it. If you want to disable SMAA anti-aliasing altogether, open up enbseries.ini and change ‘EnableProxyLibrary=TRUE’ to ‘EnableProxyLibrary=FALSE’.
- LOAD TIMES – If you experience excruciatingly long load times: just hit SHIFT+F12 to toggle off the ENB during a loading screen, as this will significantly reduce the wait. Remember to toggle the ENB back on afterwards (SHIFT+F12 again).
- ANTI-ALIASING – It’s very important that you use this ENB config without any other form of anti-aliasing, either in-game or driver-based. Don’t use MSAA together with ENB. The included and enabled SMAA alone will take care of most your jaggies.
- ENBSERIES.INI TWEAKS - There's a couple additional options in enbseries.ini that really have an effect on performance. So if you've either got power to spare, or complaining hardware, these tweaks are for you. I'll discuss these from the perspective of someone trying to get better performance mostly. EnableAmbientOcclusion, EnableDepthOfField, and UseIndirectLighting can all be turned off to gain FPS at a reduced image quality (IQ). If you leave AO and IL on, you can reduce their impact by setting SamplingQuality and FilterQuality to 2. The reverse also works: put these to 0 for added IQ. A highter Size- and SourceTexturesScale can also give better quality images.
C R E D I T S
Boris Vorontsov - ENBseries binary and shaders
HeliosDoubleSix - postprocessing assets in enbeffect.fx
Matso - DOF, Immersive Bloom, Anamorphic Flare
Dirty Peasant - additions to enbeffect/enbbloom code
trillville - passing the ball on some enbseries.ini values, tips on grass and fog settings, palette file (which I modified slightly), and that incredible, incredible gallery that kicked me so hard I had to do something.
Andrej Dudenhefner et. al - SMAA injector
YOUTUBE video link #1
YOUTUBE video link #2
