Oblivion enb update

[Darkstorne]

There is a bad part about OBGE - it is dead for quite some time already. Their google repo indicates no activity for a year already, and i believe it's not going to change... Too bad, they had some awesome features planned - hair/fur shaders, tesselation(all the limitations were lifted by V3, wiki even contains some dev resources for this), realistic skin for characters(it works already, but requires some debugging), water caustics.

Doesn't a game need to be DX11 for tessellation? I thought devs were restricted to parallax occlusion mapping without DX11 (which was unlocked by OBGE).

But fur shaders sound amazing! Could that be done for Skyrim? Wolves, Khajiit, and farm animals could look incredible with that.

[Uriel24]

Doesn't a game need to be DX11 for tessellation? I thought devs were restricted to parallax occlusion mapping without DX11 (which was unlocked by OBGE).

That's a question only ENB might be able to answer. I thought so too, based on the articles i rad all aronud the interwebs. But i also know that freelancers and indie devs are able to do impossible things.

[far327]

@All - You're preachin' to the choir here guys... I am well aware of OBGE's capabilities. Although I wasn't aware of that beautiful new grass mod!!

















































To others points, the project is dead. SSAO and other effects have much left to be desired. Character enhancements aren't as good as what ENB produces. I guess what I'm getting at is that IF Boris felt so inclined as to revisit the Oblivion ENB code and update it with some of his new techniques he may of picked up while developing Skyrim ENB and others, then that would be really awesome! OBGE looks great now, ENB has greater potential IMO.
The current Oblivion ENB performance is lacking, and current OBGE performance is also not so great. Boris never ceases to amaze me as I'm sure you all would agree.

We should start a poll to see if it builds any interest. If not, I'm fine trying to tweak OBGE further.

EDIT: Poll created please vote all

[ENBSeries]

Oblivion has data for displacement (parallax), but tesselation work only for ATI cards as hack. Native dx9 coding tesselation is very complex and slow by converting geometry to textures, indexing them via vertex texture fetch, etc, etc, etc, such methods may work relatively good only when you do own game with full access to engine code, for example to make landscape. There are other similar to tesselation techniques, which work with pixels instead of geometry, that much more promising, but i believe that Oblivion require something else to make terrain really better and detailed, for example texture tiling randomized or shadows in texture space (on facebook i posted some time ago screenshots of this from five day war game).

[Darkstorne]

I believe that Oblivion require something else to make terrain really better and detailed, for example texture tiling randomized or shadows in texture space (on facebook i posted some time ago screenshots of this from five day war game).

Did you ever see this Oblivion LOD Generator enhancement? http://oblivion.nexusmods.com/mods/40549

It increases the detail of distant land meshes (as much or as little as you like) for far more detailed and accurate terrain, and can also be used to generate new textures with fake shadows - creating a greater illusion of depth and detail:

Mesh example:


Texture example:

[ENBSeries]

For me before/after are almost same, geometry detail is not enough, still looks like dunes instead of rocks/mountains.

[Darkstorne]

Yeah that's true. Geometry does wonders for the mid-range LOD (look at the island in the first pic) but you're right about the mountains. Shadows help, but only so much.

It would take a monolithic effort to overhaul the mountain ranges to look more realistic, but earlier this year there was an overhaul to Red Mountain in Morrowind, so I suppose it could happen one day

[far327]

@ Darkstorne - Again, another mod I wasn't aware of. I mean, I used the old version, but I didn't know that a new improved generator was released.
Any other cool gems you can think of that were released since Skyrim came out? I sorta stopped playing it since then but am looking to re-build my Oblivion environment soon.

[Darkstorne]

No other big graphic improvement mods I can think of that were released recently, but if you haven't heard of Autumn Trees you might like that too: http://oblivion.nexusmods.com/mods/36561

It adds falling leaves to all of the northern trees with yellow/orange leaves, so it's a lovely atmospheric effect - like the Rift in Skyrim.

[far327]

Yeah, the falling leaf mod was one of the last ones I loaded before switching over to Skyrim. Outstanding mod!!! The poll is starting to take good shape.