Blade Of Darkness 0.242

[piltrafo]

Boris,
you can see the dark blue color on some of the geo. especially stuff that's far from camera, but you can also see it in the female character face.

Also I forgot to tell you that the game flares, like the sun and fires, show trough the geo. So you can see the light sources trough walls. Please look at the last image with the sun shining trough the canyon walls.

[ENBSeries]

Version updated, download again
Fixed bugs. Toggling mod off now work, day mode always used by the game, so no bugs from dependent properties, configuration files saving properly. Unfortunately this game is too much old and don't have data for fog distances or anything else, it's depth buffer inverted, all objects absolutely the same and drawed by each triangle separately, etc etc etc, i don't see any reason to continue modding it, from my side it can't be modified any more.

piltrafo
I will not do any more changes. Still don't understand what is "geo" and how anisotropic filtering may produce bugs, this simply impossible (and if filtering must be point only or texture have wrong data in mipmaps, it's not my business). Lens flares works partially, reason unknown for that, unable to understand why this happen and won't spent hours experimenting.

[piltrafo]

Boris, I'm sorry abut the images. They are too dark and it's hard to see anything. "Geo" is short for geometry, or polygons. What I meant was that some triangles showed a dark color instead of the texture when force anisotropy was turned on. I shouldn't have called it a bug as I don't know why it's happening. I think I read somewhere glide or nglide doesn't support texture mipmap filtering? Not sure, but as you say is probably a limitation from the old engine. Is easy to solve by just turning that option off. Just wanted to let you know about it.
And same with the flares going trough walls. Just sending feedback.

The truth is I never expected anything and you gave us a great update for that game. I completely understand that is not worth investing too much time in such old game. However I'm really grateful you decided to put your energy into it for a couple of days. I'm already getting some nice images. As soon as I have something final I'll send it your way so you can play the game again and have some fun after all the hard work That game is still very good compared with today standards. And now it will have modern looks too.

Thanks very much.

P.S.
If you ever play it again, you should try this mod.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDiO_jgfrXM
http://gorentitymod.host-ed.me/

[midhras]

Boris, if you like Severance: Blade of Darkness, be sure to check out the alpha for Overgrowth, which is currently in development by a couple of young game devs, and which features nice screenshot options. It's a good, hard brawler. If you can look past the fact that you'll be playing as anthropomorphized animals, I think you might like it.

http://www.wolfire.com/overgrowth

[FiftyTifty]

Don't forget Mount and Blade or Dark Messiah. Mount and blade has the best combat I've experienced in a game.

Quite a strong Russian community for Mount and Blade, too.

[sfb]

Greetings,

I just saw piltrafus's post on Arohkslair regarding this enb.

I want to thank you Boris for adding this to the enb list as it's by far one of the best games of all times.

Hopefully this might inspire more modders to get involved with this classic title.

cheers and thanks again
sfb

[piltrafo]

http://youtu.be/QveGjWHObZE

Long video but I wanted to show different lighting scenarios. Of course I don't know how to get any quality out of youtube so it looks all compressed.

Blade of Light MOD and ENB settings.
All weapons can emit light to help you see in the darkness. This way the ENB lighting can be truly contrasty. Maintain the stark lighting design of the original game and enhance its spectacular color palette. Now light itself is a factor in fights as you need to position yourself in a favorable spot to increase your chances. If there's a big bonfire behind your enemy you'll get blinded so you'll have to circle arround to see them better. Archers standing against the sun are harder to spot but they will pin you down. You'll need to stay in the light on the pitch black dungeon to stand a chance.
I tried to create a setting that works trough all the game. Unlike many modern games where there's a huge world but it all looks a bit the same, BOD has smaller maps with completely different looks. Desert, castle, foggy mountain pass, catacombs, volcano, fortress, etc. Ideally every map would have its own specific settings but for now I tried a version that looks good on most situations.

Thanks Boris over all, but also Mithras, Matso and many others. I've been stealing shader code from all
I hope I can wrap this up in a nice pack and post it soon. What hosting do you guys recommend? Can ww.enbdev.com site host files?

On a technical note for Boris, we talked about some flares showing trough walls. I realized those and any other transparent texture like blood cause severe slowdowns to ENB so I replaced the in game glow textures for "one black pixel" bitmaps and turned off blood on the game menu to improve performance. I'll keep digging to see if I can get at least the blood to work fast by making it opaque.

Also I found a post where the people behind nglide talk about texture filtering for BOD. The last post is from the nglide creator I think.
http://www.zeus-software.com/forum/view ... c265ba3d44
It seems BOD glide raster doesn't do mipmaping.

[ENBSeries]

I can host files (not bigger than 10 mb), but you need permission from all authors of the mods included (and shaders too). Better to share it on forums and sites made by game fans, my resource is useless for such old game.

[piltrafo]

Hi Boris,
I was googling about some performance issues with BOD and I found an chat where they talk about the performance drops when there's a flare on the screen. I'll post it here just in case the information is useful. It's for BOD on Wine, but they talk about the game render plugins.

http://wine.1045685.n5.nabble.com/Bug-1 ... 47957.html

" Comparing logs done with WINEDEBUG=+d3d I found some difference between fast and slow plugins there:
A couple of plugins (Vodoo 1-2 D3d v4 and D3d i740 windows 98) seems to do vertex declaration thru the graphic card, indeed are lighting fast and almost problem free.
While the rest D3D plugins drops the following:
trace:d3d_draw:drawStridedSlow Using slow vertex array code
trace:d3d_draw:drawStridedSlow glEnd and previous calls call ok drawprim.c /
572
And their fps rate drops to less than one frame/second when a torch, candle or fire becomes visible on the screen.
Should I assume that drawStridedSlow is some kind of software vertex rendering that is slow? "

"--- Comment #10 from Athrun <[hidden email]> 2008-07-28 13:42:45 ---
Reached to the following conclusion, some of Blade of Darkness plugins use software pixel shaders to bypass cards lacking hardware pixel shading support (or other support).
This seems to be handled by Wine thru drawStridedSlow, which is really slow, but not really a bug."

[ENBSeries]

I don't know what is that and don't know any reason for such low performance.