Blade Of Darkness 0.242

[ENBSeries]

Such feature not hard to implement, but i will not do it. It's pervertion, as entire letterbars are.

[piltrafo]

I understand what you are saying. So let me explain why I was looking for it.
Blade of Darkness is so old that is doesn't have widescreen support. My screen is 1920x1080. That resolution renders a 4:3 image of the game with black bars at the side.



I was trying to create a widescreen mode by running the game at 2560x1440.
If we could crop a 1920x1080 area from that input image we could have a widescreen frame.

widescreen result




I can edit the camera FOV from the game scripts so I can restore the original character screensize in the new aspect ratio



I have been doing the same thing by zooming the 2560x1440 image so only the portion of frame I want is on the screen. The problem is that ENB still has to process lots of pixels that end up out of view, so is very slow. If I could crop the input before ENB starts with the effects it would be much more efficient.
Could you help out with this?

[piltrafo]

If the area to crop could be defined manually it could be adapted to different display ratios like 16:9 or 16:10

[ENBSeries]

HUD will be distorted after stretching screen. Fov and aspect manipulation do not affect it (in any game). Old games also draw objects by transforming them on cpu, many of them are transformed to screen already, they will be distorted too (skewed). Just make stretching in shader yourself to hide black borders, the difference will be almost invisible, because even with 21" full hd displays pixel size is very small for human eye.

[piltrafo]

I'm not sure if we are talking about the same thing. What I'm trying to do is change the Aspect ratio of the game without stretching the image. I can render a 4:3 image bigger than the screen so I can zoom into a 16:9 portion of it that fits the screen. What I was asking is if there's any way to crop the pixels that are out of view so they don't get processed by ENB so the trick is faster.
Is it possible to do this with current ENB? To crop the image input before enbprepass.fx starts?

I won't bother you more with this. Just wanted to make sure we were both talking about the same thing.

[ENBSeries]

You mean cropping image with loosing hud elements? Sounds like that for me, but it's bad idea.

Is it possible to do this with current ENB? To crop the image input before enbprepass.fx starts?

No, this require a lot of changes actually, all computations everywhere are based on full size of render targets. Changing viewport size is not enough, because shaders will have full texture size unclipped as inputs, but making copies of lower size will affect performance negatively (without copying to lower resolution render targets external shaders will work wrong, unless not modified accordingly).

[piltrafo]

You mean cropping image with loosing hud elements?

Yes, that's it. Only I can reposition the HUD to fit the new Aspect Ratio modifying the game scripts, So Hud would not be lost.

No, this require a lot of changes actually, all computations everywhere are based on full size of render targets.

Custom sized or cropped render targets is exactly what I was thinking. It could be used to create a widescreen mode like I propose. Also if used to add "Cinematic" black bars it would actually make sense as an optimization as ENB would be processing less pixels.
SOmehow I thought it would be an easy thing to do. But if it's not forget about it. Thanks for the feedback anyway. I'm Always glad to learn a bit more about all this.

[ENBSeries]

This kind of "feature" really not worth it, by performance and by the amount of work to implement it. Use stretching when reading bloom and scene textures in enbeffect.fx shader.

[piltrafo]

Hi Boris.
Long time no see. I hope all is good with you.

This week the game BLADE of Darkness was re-released. It has been updated mostly to work on windows10, it has widescreen support and its based on dx11.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1710 ... _Darkness/

I immediately thought about our conversations and the work you did for this game, 7 years ago now.
I wanted to replay the game using the mod I did called "Blade of Light ENB" but of course it doesn't work anymore with this version of the game.
I tried Reshade, but as good as it is, is not at the same level as ENB. Reshade captures on the final 8bit buffer for processing and it shows.
Nothing beats ENB as I guess is capturing a 32bit frame-buffer to apply the shaders. The resulting colors are just beautiful with ENB. Reshade always feels flat in comparison.

I was wondering if you see any value in trying to apply your ENB to this modernized version of the game.
ENB, HD texture MODs, the game on Steam... all together it could bring quite a new life to this old wonder of a game.

Best Regards

[ENBSeries]

Hi. I tried demo of the game and very quick deleted it, because the more time pass the worse graphics looks compared to modern games and don't inspire for modding. So basically modding it do not differ from any other game, which people finish after few days but i have to spend weeks to do mod, especially bad when mod was made earlier for original version. So i think not worth it.