Hey Buddy, sorry for the late reply, however, this is the updated shaders as I have promised. I have also included all of the previous variations of the AA+Bump Map+Natural. In the zip, I also included my "Univeral Shader Folder" in the event that you do not have it. Not sure what shader is in that folder as of now, It think it is the one that I use on my games. Obviously, make sure you select option 5 in the graphics config menu, and select the universal folder that you have placed in your directory, then copy and paste shaders as needed as long as they are slv slf. If you want my settings for my graphics config, I have posted it before and can be found on this thread. Thanks and I hope you enjoy, take care.
The sharpness and textures in Chrono Cross look amazing using your (and Guest's) AA+Bump Map+ Natural V8 shader. I'm not such a fan of the color changes, though.
Is it possible to remove the color filtering and keep the rest of this shader (Maybe AA+Bump Map only?).
Maybe there's already something like this out there.
Regardless, thanks for all your incredible work on tweaking these shaders.
Hey Monater. You really got me there. I've been neglecting the cartoon shader development for a while, that's true. Sort off thought MMj's cell shader is doing a nice job and became lazy about it. But i have a WiP cartoon shader. It works well with 3D games, can get tweaked (need some feedback on that) and might work wonderful with new xBRZ texture enhancements, but i still think it's better looking on games with some 3D. Have a try...
EDIT: upgraded the shader (edge detection with shader level)
Noticed no one thanked you for this. Not trying to be high and mighty about it, I'm sure people were grateful nonetheless. Regardless, wanted to say thanks for this shader.
I took some screenshots with Chrono Cross, and despite one issue, the results were fantastic. For this test I set your plugin to maximum and turned off XBR in OGL2Tweak.
First the one issue, if you look at image 7 there is a weird "box" texture around every square couple inches or so. Hard to see in the screenshot, but very noticeable in motion. That being said, this particular area uses some purposely corrupted textures for effect, so I tried some of my other saves (images 8, 9 and 10).
When I loaded up any other area in the game the texture corruption was gone, and the game looked amazing.
Finally, for comparison sake I tried my current shader, AA+Bump+NV HQ, set at Medium, XBRZ set to 2 in OGL2Tweak. (Image 11).
When I compared 8(your shader) and 11 (my current shader) I was surprised how much better the new setting looked. This is my new goto shader for this game. Thank you!
EDIT: Forgot to upload image 11, fixed.
EDIT 2: Clarified some things.
Wasn't incompatible at all. Re-reading my last post, I'm realizing I wasn't very clear. The "boxing" issue I mentioned only occurred in that one section of the game that purposely uses corrupt textures (image 7). It just happened to be where I had saved last. When I loaded up any other area of the game, the issue was gone, and your plugin looked fantastic. I'll edit my original post for clarity.
That being said, next time I run Chrono Cross I'll try setting filtering to 0.
My codes skills are amateurish at best, so I may be way off base here. I'm guessing your code works as some sort of two step process where it:
1. First uses an algorithm to detect which areas of the screen are 3D renders.
2. Then applies a filter to anything that returns a value of "false." I.E. 2D.
I'm curious if the first step could be applied to something like opengl2tweak, something along the lines of a "No 3D shade" option. Something that could then send that data to the user selected shader in Pete's Opengl2. That way the user could choose any shader he/she wants for step 2 instead of you porting a whole bunch of different shaders to use this process.
It's almost what you described. It doesn't detect 3D renders. Actually, it detects pixels in high res. So, when you increase internal res, all 3D models are rendered in high res and the 2d sprites stay at low res. So you have small and big pixels in the same framebuffer. My detection is done by sampling a region (the size of a single low res pixel) to 'see' if all high res pixels inside it have the same color (which tells me I'm looking at a low res region). So, if it is low res, it gets filtered, otherwise, nothing is done.
It would be possible in a multipass shader framework (like in Retroarch). So the first pass shader would just mark pixels with some flag saying it is low or high res region.
In ePSXe I don't know how this info could be passed to shaders in a uniform var.
Genius, you've solved a conundrum many in the community have faced trying to play mixed 2D/3D games. Seriously, bravo!
I'm curious how "portable" your code is, in the sense that do you have to make modifications to your secondary engine (such as XBR) or do you literally just run your script and then drop the secondary code in?
I'm two weeks into coding school, a total noob at this kind of thing, but between that and your explanation, and your excellent comments in the shader file, I can sort tell what's going on here.
If it's indeed portable, I thought I might try to implement a bash script, where someone could put a shader in a folder, run the script, and your code would be inserted (with credit to you, of course).
I don't think you can automatize it. Each shader has a different treatment, I have noticed. Now I'm working into making super-xbr compatible with it and the approach will be different from all others I already made. I don't use any scripts, the idea is hacked inside each shader manually.
The idea to compare pixels size to detect high res one is good, but it relies in fragile premises. And you'll see many games that'll break them easily. One of the premises is that the pixels should be squared and positioned in the low res grid (almost all N64 cores break this in RA). The other is that the rule of sampling a small region to compare small pixels inside it isn't perfect and can not be 100% effective. So many games will present small glitches here and there.
Well for now then I'll leave this at: Thanks for the explanation! And thanks even more for taking all this time to create these fantastic shaders! I've been working on a pretty comprehensive guide to the best settings for Chrono Cross, as this game can be finicky and gets a lot of questions in the forum. I'm happy to say your work has forced me to update pieces of my guide.
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