Here you go Cogstar:

- http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=14339

I concur :thumbsup:

Hello guys,
how i can make a Black-White Effect with OBGE? Which script commands?

If you mean a greyscale effect, or just black and white, both need to be done by writing your own shader, and loading that in-game with OBGE's shader loading function. If you're adept enough to figure out the first part, then the second should be no problem.

You can't get new effects directly through Oblivion's scripting, unless you use ScreenEffects as a backend, and even then I don't think you can get a black and white effect, just greyscale.

i think it is the saturation effect. How i make the Shader?

What you want to do is learn how to write HLSL shader effects files.

Argh, than i ask the Author of ScreenEffects if i can use his Mod. Thanks.

i could strongly recommend joining these ideas with "weather: all natural" - incompatibility may force some people to make hard choices...
(stormy weather + godrays etc. - it sounds strange, i.e...).
http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=1040183

Strange how? http://farm1.static.flickr.com/158/362330778_03f86abdd1.jpg Also, if the sun is obscured by clouds or anything else that it won't have the chance to generate rays... At least if it's coded correctly.

I do agree though that crepuscular rays should be programmed to the weather (and subsequently time of day):

- Fog aware, "thicker" rays when foggy. Lack of volumetric fog makes this harder, although a shader could be applied to the rays to make the fog actually look more realistic. Meaning a "patchy" noise could be applied to the rays' visibility that moves slowly with the wind. Since fog is not uniform.

- "Burning off" the morning fog, with lower visibility. http://www.codermind.com/files/crysis-view-mountains-sun-fog.jpg Note that visibility is actually pretty high, but not infinite. You can't see the horizon or any details in the sky. Of course for variety sake this shouldn't happen every morning. Only during foggy mornings! I hope the weather system is robust enough to mimic that type of fog in the image.

- Reduced crepuscular rays around midday. The sun has much less atmosphere to go through when it's high in the sky (so the light shifts color less), and when overhead has less directional brightness compared to the sky dome which provides a lot of ambient fill (since it's close to the center of the sky), not to mention you don't ever have much directly above you to take note of (though there are certainly exceptions). I'll address the above-head rays at the bottom of the post...

- Warmer rays during evening and even warmer at sunset.

- Of course, ideally it'd be GREAT to implement volumetric clouds and fog to better interact with the crepuscular rays. It'd be great to see clouds passing in front of the sun and creating rays! Though of course that may have to be a much-later-on-down-the-road thing.

... And regarding that first image, I'm not even sure if Oblivion allows for alpha channels in weather textures? I would assume so, but who knows with the Gamebryo engine... (*Wishes TES V will use CryEngine 3* HAH) ... I'm also not sure if the sun remains visible during dark or stormy weather anyway. Of if the sun is even positioned behind the clouds in those cases. I have a feeling the sun may be turned off altogether in the stormy situations, but who knows. And even if it's not, they may change the lighting drastically such that it's too dark, or no longer a sunny yellow. So anyway, I'm not even sure if the sun could poke out through storm clouds to create crepuscular rays... But I certainly wouldn't consider it strange if I were to see it.

And about situations with the sun above head, like at midday in thick forests for example, it would be nice if the shader was positionally aware... That way the rays could be "turned up" when you are in very thick forests, and faded once you get out of them. This of course makes sense because the more you have overhead, like a tree canopy, the darker your surroundings will be relative to the sky. Or maybe it can do this solely based on a brightness average of the screen, or other brightness data like the amount of contrast. I imagine there are methods that HDR uses to monitor the overall brightness to turn up/down effects or to enable/disable bloom-type effects? I also think then that for atmosphere a forest's canopy should be much darker during the day, and that a lot of the light provided be from the crepuscular rays. But I do like contrasty lighting, so...

Anyway.. I'm glad to see that Ilmryn was back in here posting! I'm excited for what this project holds... Maybe we'll get CryEngine-3-esque graphics some day... (http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=377013 for some nice shots)

Good god, that is too epic for words. If we can emulate the effects of just a fraction of that engine, Oblivion would look almost twice as realistic.

First off, I think all this talk about how it should be tied into the weather and time of day is a little off topic. Yes, it should be done, but it's outwith the remit of OBGE, which is an OBSE plugin coded in C++ (or C, whatever), and shaders, which are coded in HLSL in this case. The weather integration is something that can only be done when OBGE and the shaders have been worked on, and is something that is done through the CS. You should see then as two completely separate but complementary things.

@ jw0ollard: I'm afraid that Oblivion's weather effects are fairly limited, and pretty much everything that can be done to the weather has been done. To answer some of your questions, yes, the textures have alpha channels, and yes, HDR does make the sky brighter in dark places, which I'd imagine can be carried over to rays.

Now CryEngine 2, that's got a great Time Of Day/Weather system. I played around with it a little a while back. :drool:

I was actually linking to CryEngine 3 images (just released), which is even better! Better ToD/Weather (more natural), Global Illumination, and what not.

I don't really agree that godray/weather integration is off-topic. Simply because my suggestions rely on extra shader code to be thought out and written. Namely the fog effects, such as the morning atmospheric fog (not ground fog), and the patchy/noisy effect to fog rays or fog shadow. Search Google Images for "fog shadow" (http://images-1.redbubble.net/img/art/size:large/view:main/32904-11-the-shadow.jpg) ... You can see that the shadows are not perfect, but "patchy", and the fog would be animated with the air moving (however slowly). Actually I can't think of any of the shader-weather integration that would be done solely through the CS as you speak of? I obviously agree that this relies on a more complete ray shader (depth buffer is important!), as well as a more complete OBGE rewrite.... But everything relies on the OBGE rewrite! So we may as well talk about nothing then, right?

Anyway, I feel that my point was that the ray shader should be inevitably structured such that it can receive several different switches for how it will display, all which will rely on the ToD/Weather, in fact the entire shader relies on ToD/Weather for the proper color, effects, and intensity and thus can't be discussed without assuring ToD/Weather is discussed as well. So clearly someone needs to think of how to write the shader such that it always has access to the ToD, and any weather which may affect the display of the rays.

So if Scanti up and finishes rewriting OBGE and Vtastek or Ilmryn or anyone else up and finish the ray shader, and the two products can't communicate all the necessary code to one another, then we'll just have to wait on more rewrites. Something I think should be avoided! Of course, I'm blissfully unaware of what information OBGE can communicate to shaders. If there is never the possibility for Time-of-day access or weather access, then there will have to be some trickery involved then. But if I'm not mistaken, past versions of All Natural had the Enhanced Seasons stuff, so you would know much better than me what OBGE (and Screen Effects) allowed for in its current state.

Of course, I think the things with the lowest point of entry to discuss and plan on would be all the items that were already checked off as "Complete" or "Waiting on Depth Buffer" in the OVEP threads... There was an awfully long checklist of things... Now, with access to a depth buffer maybe those things could finally come to fruition. (It is REALLY good to see Ilmryn back and wanting to work on things!! I can't even stress that enough..)

sry for spam, i assume.

have fun, guys.
plz, remove my post and account.

@ jw0ollard: Well argued. You can set external shader variables through OBGE, so it would be possible to pass weather type and time of day to the shader, and have it do different stuff depending on what those variables were. And I didn't realise you were requesting a new shader for fog, sorry. I suppose that would be possible.

And I would like to see that OVEP list worked on too.

Regarding Enhanced Seasons, I'm currently rewriting that to use it's own shader, independant of ScreenEffects. I've got all the initial-release stuff done apart from one seemingly impossible effect - independant r/g/b saturation changes. Once I have that cracked, I'll be releasing it as a separate mod.

I wasn't necessarily requesting a brand new fog shader... More simply, I thought the new ray shader could be utilized to enhance the realism of the existing "fog" or the foggy weathers, rather. A way to add a more volumetric feel as I explained would be to make the fog look "spotty" or "patchy" when sunlight is present to cast fog shadows, or "fog godrays". It'd be simple enough to add this effect to the light cast by the ray shader, just a bit of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File%3a%50erlin.png or something more suiting. It could then of course be animated for some added realism.

Although of course ideally, I'd LOVE to have real volumetric fog and volumetric clouds... I think I mentioned in passing that it would be nice to have volumetric clouds for some nice god rays up in the sky.. Not just god rays cast by objects close to the player. (http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/2007/features/hardware/wic_hardware/wic06.jpg) And if the "fog" encountered in dungeons could be added as a weather effect, plus the god rays through trees and what not, I think that'd make for some awfully moody forests. Although I have the feeling that that the vanilla volumetric-ish fog shader wouldn't support the god rays at all and would have to be rewritten anyway...

But I'm patient.. I understand that the initial 0.1 version of a god ray shader needs to be released first before things can be added.. Doesn't hurt to throw suggestions out there, though.

Honestly, I think some things are much more important than god rays... Object/static/architectural shadows are by FAR the #1 thing I miss in Oblivion right now. It pains me to play the game and ask myself why, e.g. a building is lit up even though another building should be putting it entirely in shadow. Or why no objects cast shadows other than PC/NPCs and their equipment.

And of course all the OVEP things that never got to be 100% complete. I was always excited about that stuff.. Also, I request a rewritten motion blur!!!! And maybe break off the underwater shader into its own mod, with caustics support. Of course, if Ilmryn was working on rewriting the entire Oblivion water system, those could be bundled with that too. =p

Anyway, with access to the depth buffer, the motion blur can depend on the distance from the camera! I hardly like using it now because when I turn really quickly with, say, my hand holding a torch in 1st person, everything gets blurry, including the torch! (Or just exclude any part of the PC during the blur) I understand that's the best they could do back then... But once the depth buffer is 100% sorted (and written into OBGE I assume) what we could do with the graphical mods really takes off!

I should stop spamming the thread for now... I'm just too excited about graphics modifications right now! haha. With this thread and the release of CryEngine 3 I've been doing a lot of geeking out over this stuff. I wish I could be of help, too, but unfortunately I program in entirely different languages... It was actually always my goal to be a game programmer but now I'm stuck with other kinds of programming.. Best of luck to those working on things right now, especially Scanti with the OBGE work!

I like your input jw0ollard, many good ideas :goodjob:

The above post is making me salivate more.

EDIT: The one before the one above.

When first I wrote godrays, sun position wasn't available. Then knu did a shader drawing a fake sun. The shader was too complex for me, the calculations were embedded inside the drawing functions and really complex. Then phal made a shader with functions I can understand(or at least copy-paste), both shaders were drawing the sun according to sunpos, funny thing is it was not actual sun position but sunlight position. Sunlight goes backwards after sunset in Morrowind.(might be the same case for Oblivion too!).

I thought I would face lots of problems and can't release it, because there were lots of issues like jw0ollard pointed. "How am I gonna fix weather conditions?"... You know what, that day, I released a playable beta.

I was using a brightpass technique which gives bright parts of the image, that worked better than I expected. During overcast weather(godrays + stormy weathers won't happen! But http://www.edwud.com/photos/rays_of_light_through_clouds.jpg. But http://photos.jibble.org/albums/GwehelogInWales/Sun_Rays_Breaking_Through_Clouds_In_Wales_A8V9537.jpg. It is about facing and off screen sun, lack of 3D data from clouds.) it was disabling the rays automatically by itself, and also boosts according to contrast which turns great at sunsets, even takes account being inside a thick forest.

Phal then programmed more variables and released a great sunshaft shader. It draws its own sun, rays are calculated according to suncol and fogcol variables, visibility of the sun is also coming from a sunvis(ibility) variable. Advanced shader it is, and programming necessary variables when needed is also an amazing skill. It also draws the sun off-screen which makes rays visible even when sun is not visible in frame.

My shader calculate rays accounting the image, so I don't have to calculate colors, intensity, but that causes blue streaks coming from blue sky sometimes. And must hand tweaked according to your sky settings. If a night sky is bright enough they may appear, but it never happened to me.(unless during a lightning strike!!!)

I will add all those and more(but I was that guy, only three months ago, asking http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?s=&showtopic=981438&view=findpost&p=14818634 I am learning and I suggest you to learn shaders if you are really interested and knew basic level of coding.) my goal is to figure out how to render off-screen now. Then I will add stuff like dust shadows and more.(I feel that part will be easier.)

I'd like to take up your advice and take on a share of the shader-writing workload, if I can. Of course, I'm currently sitting on everything shader-related to see what Scanti comes up with in his OBGE rewrite, which should be interesting.

What we need is a list of those ridiculous requests, so we can keep track of them all, give priority to some over others, see which are feasible and which aren't really. I think that would help give this more structure. If people saw what there was to do, perhaps we might even be able to dredge up some hidden shader talent. :shrug:

Just wanted to add that I love what I read here. Not only the possible results I can dream of, but also the way you help each other in order to achieve it.

I would love to contribute, but don't have the time to start learning something completely new now, so I will stick to modding other parts of Oblivion. I keep reading every new post in this thread though

There used to be a long list of requests and ideas in the older threads. I'm still hoping that my request from back then will become reality one day and that is heathaze over fires. Shouldn't be too difficult. An added bonus would be if the glowing sparks would rise from campfires ones in a while.

Ooh, a new fog shader, just something that's unified and sets the skybox as "infinite" so a foggy day is actually... foggy, and reverses the fog gradient so lowlands receive more fog that upper reaches. As long as you could get the normal fog color you wouldn't even have to re-write any of the weather! You'd have to have fog lessen the "higher" you got in the skybox though so fog isn't just a featureless gray down. The question of being able to get a good horizon when it isn't foggy would also be tricky... Ok maybe you'd set the skybox to a certain distance so the horizon doesn't look entirely fogged in all the time.

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/519253/TestShaderv1.zip the test plug-in I promised a few days ago. You should now be able to play around with the depth buffer. Yay!

I haven't had time to test it on my nVidia laptop but it should work OK. If not then let me know. It's also not very stable. There's lots a ways you can crash it, like if you alt-tab out of the game.

The next thing I'm working on is where the existing shaders get their constants from. Before we were taking the data direct from Oblivion's data structures but IlmyrnAkios said some of the data seemed wrong. So by tracing how Oblivion gets the data hopefully we should get the correct info.

Talking of IlmrynAkios, good to see you back.

Nice, not sure how much I can do with it, but downloading anyway.

Thanks scanti, great work :foodndrink:
Now we have to wait to the right people comes around and plays with it :shifty: