something i decided to do in my spare time

[eezstreet]

I don't really hang around these parts anymore, mostly because I dislike JA anymore.

However, this applies to JK2 mostly, so I'll share it.

I've decided to mess around in QEffects in my spare time. I altered the color grading shader in it a bit. I can't stress enough though that this was meant more for JK2 than JKA, as the color grading isn't designed around that game as much.

What you'll be seeing is a combination of the following:

• Color grading (improved over QEffects)
• Motion Blur
• Screen-space Ambient Occlusion
• Depth of Field
• Bloom

My eventual list of features that I'd like to see get ingame (more of a wishlist):

 

• Improved bloom
• HDR
• Lens flare
• Improved SSAO
• HBAO

If anyone has any contributions in the form of GLSL shaders that would be kinda handy.

Anyway, onto the screenshots. Do note that these are done in singleplayer, but the effects are virtually identical in MP.

 

Baseline:

 

modified:

 

 

[therfiles]

Woah! That's looking great! It really adds a darker twist to the classic game!

[minilogoguy18]

A bit too gray, the once navy/gray floor is now dark gray almost black.

[eezstreet]

A bit too gray, the once navy/gray floor is now dark gray almost black.

That was sorta the whole direction I wanted to take with this particular area. The idea was that Kejim in general was to be grey and black, since it's mostly Imperial installations. I am working on probably making each level have its own set of postprocessing effects so that every area isn't the same grey/black drab. Hue/Saturation/Lightness (HSL) color grading isn't going to be enough for what I'm wanting to do though, so I'll have to add some more shaders to the mix. Some other little miniature effects will be added too, like some motion blur, and I would like to tweak some of the existing shaders to look better (cough cough SSAO..)

 

All of the effects are purely customizable, so you can tweak the blue of the floor to be however you want it to be. My HSL shader doesn't make the contrast go up whenever you alter the saturation, which was the main thing I wanted to show off here.

 

Here's a comparison of the old shader and the new (note that there's a very slight difference in lightness and saturation in the values, because I went from a 0->255 scale to a 0->100 scale. I'll probably switch back though)

 

Old:

[eezstreet]

Did you mean to post a New: image in the above post? Or comparative to the picture in the OP?

 

 

I like the OP though. Looks very nice. No plans on making this work in JKA?

Compare the picture to the one in the OP, yes.

 

This works for JKA (the QEffects mod). It's compatible with JK2 SP, JK2 MP, JKA SP and JKA MP. However, I'm optimizing it for JK2 SP.

[eezstreet]

updated OP

[eezstreet]

Submitted to JKHub. Have fun, etc.

[Jango40]

This is how it looks for me:

 

My graphics card is ATI Mobility Radeon HD 2400 XT. Oh, and I can't change brightness with this.

[Mog]

Looks awesome! Will download!

[eezstreet]

This is how it looks for me:

 

My graphics card is ATI Mobility Radeon HD 2400 XT. Oh, and I can't change brightness with this.

Turn off SSAO in the INI file. I haven't had issues with not being able to change brightness, but I know that F.Lux has issues with it (F.Lux has issues with a lot of things though), so if you have it, turn it off.

You might want to turn down the bloom intensity too.

Make sure when you edit, you are in the correct section. There's a section for each executable -- jamp.exe, jasp.exe, jk2sp.exe and jk2mp.exe.

Lemme know how it looks after that, and maybe post a pic of Singleplayer too, since that's what I've been doing the majority of my testing on.

[Jango40]

Yep, it works, turning SSAO off got rid of the visual glitches and turning flux off allowed me to change my brightness. (However without qeffects I can change the brightness with flux on, weird.)

Also, those pics WERE taken in SP, I just used /devmap ffa_bespin. Oh, and what exactly does SSAO do? Am I missing a lot of visual awesomeness when I have it turned off?

[minilogoguy18]

Everything is just so gray and dark though, even in all the pics I looked at in the download section. I think the regular games look better with dynamic glow, dynamic lighting and volumetric shadows all enabled.

[eezstreet]

Everything is just so gray and dark though, even in all the pics I looked at in the download section. I think the regular games look better with dynamic glow, dynamic lighting and volumetric shadows all enabled.

 

So disable all other effects besides Bloom, which:

a) is way better than dynamic glow (visually and performance wise)

b) is the only way you can get anything similar to dynamic glow in JK2, since it doesn't exist in JK2.

 

All of the things are able to be modified in the various settings. Don't like Depth of Field? Turn it off. Don't like SSAO? Turn it off, or make it less intense. All of the things can be controlled. Hell, you could make the game more colorful if you really wanted to. That's just the settings that I prefer to use.

 

@@Jango40:

In the OP screenshot, you'd be missing the shadows that the stairs are casting. That's about it. There's a few other small shadows in the OP screenshot which aren't worth mentioning.

As far as F.Lux is concerned, yeah, that's really weird. F.Lux causes issues on other games too (at least for me), like on Fallout 2. I'm not sure what the issue is or who's to blame for that.

[CaptainChar]

interesting, shiny things get my interest

[eezstreet]

Improving the softness of Bloom, DOF and SSAO shadows. Will post screenshots once in finished.

[therfiles]

Just had a chance to try this...it looks really good! I love the motion blur, it looks so great! However, cutscenes look a bit odd with motion blur, but I assume there is nothing to do for that.

[DT.]

This works great for JK2SP, though it didn't on JAMP or JASP.

 

Would be sweet to have emboss to work on select specular textures though, it would emulate bump mapping. But I'm guessing that's not a possibility lol.

[eezstreet]

it would emulate bump mapping

Not even. Emboss is just the equivalent of doing an Emboss filter in Photoshop.

I hear the lead coder over at JKG has some sort of Parallax Mapping one though, which is sorta similar I guess.

[DT.]

Yeah I know, but it does have a similar look to bump mapping on some objects ingame. I really should wake up first before posting crap.....

[eezstreet]

Bumpmapping would only be relevant if JK2 actually had dynamic lights outside of sabers/entities. Otherwise, it's irrelevant and Mace's tut does exactly the same thing as what bumpmapping can help you achieve.