Shaderhacker Lore Chapter One: The Unity Lighting Breakthrough
This title represents something quite special to this community, because this fix is not just about this one game - you've seen my Unity templates credited over and over on so many fixes, and the work I have put into this one game really represents all of those fixes combined.
Those of you who have been here for the last few years might recognise that this isn't the first time I've fixed this game, nor is it even the second or third, and each time have I worked on this game we have made leaps and bounds forwards, and this update is no different.
The first time I fixed this game back in 2014 was when I cracked the "unfixable" Unity lighting pattern wide open, and developed the maths and techniques that would be right at the centre of just about every Unity fix that has been released since then. Prior to this Unity games could only be approximately fixed if the FOV never changed.
Shaderhacker Lore Chapter Two: Templates and Scripting
Since this game was episodic it meant I had to update the fix each time a new episode was released, and the first few updates were mostly uneventful, with just new scenes added to the game that I had to go in and fix. In the time that had passed before these updates I had turned my lighting fix into a template and scripted some of the more common patterns, allowing me to fix these early updates in a matter of days or hours, instead of the three and a half weeks that it had taken for the initial fix.
Shaderhacker Lore Chapter Three: The Reflection Breakthrough and Automatic HUD
When this game switched to Unity 5 and I had to restart the fix entirely from scratch I spent some time trying to make the reflections and specular highlights more pleasing in 3D, and I succeeded beyond my wildest expectations - I didn't just fix the obvious reflections like puddles and glass - I managed to fix everything, adding small details to almost every object, popping building interiors into 3D, adding moisture to Zoe's lips and sparkles in her eyes, and even making materials like leather, wood and stone reflect light in just the right way to look realistic. In other games like The Forest this has even managed to pop flat sand and rock textures into detailed three dimensional surfaces, and the same approach to fixing specular highlights has worked in other games that don't even use Unity, like Metal Gear Solid V, Far Cry Primal and WATCH_DOGS2.
To make these reflections work with the limitations of Helix Mod I also had to fundamentally rework my Unity lighting fix, making this the second time I had used this game to invent a new Unity lighting fix, and every physically accurate reflection and specular highlight you see in a Unity game since then is because of this.
For that update I had dug into some relatively obscure features of Helix Mod and was able to figure out how to use them in combination with my own automatic crosshair technique to adjust the HUD depth so that it would follow the location of the floating HUD icons automatically, but at the time I was still stuck with a 2D mouse cursor and some other limitations of Helix Mod.
Shaderhacker Lore Chapter Four: The End?
I had to re-fix the game entirely from scratch one more time for the Unity 5.3 update (which is a whole other article in itself), but finally Book 5 was out and the game was finally complete, end of story...
Shaderhacker Lore: Interlude
...or at least it was, until the developers decided to switch to DirectX 11 in preparation for The Final Cut, completely breaking my fix once again :-(
Unfortunately as some of you might already be aware I had been forced to check out from this community and leave my day job to deal with a major (and ongoing) mental health crisis brought on by a combination of factors including a series of very bizarre coincidences in my personal life, and I have only recently mustered up the strength to try to return to this community and start modding games once again.
But I couldn't just leave this game in a broken state when my fix had meant so much to me personally and this community more generally - that would be like an artist having their prize work stolen from them (is it surprising that so many modders in so many communities burn out?). This fix was a showcase for my talent - like the kind of thing you might display in a portfolio, and something I very much did when networking with other local game developers.
Shaderhacker Lore Chapter Five: DirectX 11, 3DMigoto and The Final Cut
I took the change to DirectX 11 as an opportunity - I had already adapted my Unity template to work with DX11 and 3DMigoto for previous games, but this game is far more complicated for all sorts of reasons and needed so much more work to be done. This fix is released alongside 3DMigoto 1.2.65 - with thousands of new lines of code, dozens of new features and a month and a half of pretty much full time (because unemployed because depression) development work this is the largest single update to 3DMigoto in the entire 1.2.x series. This release adds a whole new ini parser that allows this fix to load in under one second instead of the two minutes that it would have taken with the old parser. It adds a software mouse cursor implementation - so at long last the mouse cursor depth can follow the rest of my automatic HUD adjustment (plus, this will work with the SBS/TB output modes of 3DMigoto), and countless other new featuresthat were needed for this game as well. I have also made some major updates to my Unity scripts and template, to not only work with some quirks of this game, but also to increase performance by a whopping 10-20fps!
Those of you who have used a few of my fixes will know that I pride myself on being able to make almost any effect work in stereo 3D - I'm very good at figuring out complex problems and it is extremely rare for me to just outright disable an effect that doesn't work in 3D. This game however, uses volumetric ray-marched light shafts in a lot of the interior light shafts and after spending several weeks on these back in the day I had to admit defeat when I realised that they were going to be impossible to fix with the limitations of Helix Mod. These were the only light shafts that have ever eluded me, and with the switch to 3DMigoto I took the opportunity to have another crack at these, and while they were still extremely difficult I managed to pull it off, and the effect is really quite stunning:
The automatic HUD adjustment for this game is back as well, only this time the flexibility that 3DMigoto and DirectX 11 allow means that it is even more sophisticated than before - it now analyses every active HUD element to decide what depth to render the HUD and mouse cursor in each frame, and can take into account transparent objects such as glass monitors to render the HUD on top of them.
SKIP! SKIP! SKIP! Too much lore! What did you fix already?!?
If you couldn't get through all the lore above beware that this might not be the game for you as it is pretty lore heavy in itself. Although personally, the thing that appeals to me the most about The Longest Journey and the two Dreamfall games is that the main characters from Stark are just ordinary people that talk about ordinary things like life and relationships and have been thrown into events beyond their control... and of course Crow, the best comic relief sidekick in any game ever.
- Major updates in 3DMigoto 1.2.65 for this game
- Major updates to Unity template for higher fps and to handle certain cutscenes
- Lighting / Shadows
- Halos
- Volumetric Light Shafts (the bane of my existence has finally been defeated)
- Physically Accurate Reflections / Specular Highlights
- Screen Space Reflections
- Ambient Occlusion
- Parallax Building Interiors
- Sun moved to infinity
- Replaced the hardware mouse cursor with a software mouse cursor
- Automatic HUD and mouse depth adjustment that follows the icons on screen
- Separate automatic subtitle depth adjustment
- The HUD depth is fixed whenever the inventory is open to line up with it
- Automatic low convergence + mouse depth preset when picking up an item or examining it in the inventory
- The Purple Mountains background being at closer depth than the foreground is fixed compared to the old version, but I can't take credit for that - the developers finally stopped rendering two separate scenes in the same 3D space ;-)
Installation
Extract the contents of the zip file to the game directory.
If you are running the 32bit version of the game, replace the DLLS with the ones in the 32bit directory.
- Right click on the game in Steam and go to "Properties" -> "Set Launch Options" and enter "-window-mode exclusive" (without the quotes) and click "Ok"
- If you are not using the steam version, launch the game with the provided "Dreamfall Chapters - 3DMigoto.bat"
If 3D Vision didn't kick in, make sure that full screen is enabled in the game settings.
If 3D Vision still didn't kick in, you may have to alt+tab out and back, or try pressing alt+enter twice.
Notes
The Volumetric Light Shafts can be pretty expensive in 3D. In most places they are used in this game they aren't too bad, but they can really tank performance in The Hand That Feeds which has five large light shafts filling most of the room (the developers even turned off the dynamic real time light shaft shadows in that room to save on performance, but it still tanks), so you may need to lower their quality slightly in the settings menu if you find the framerate too low in that room (I just put up with it - the highest quality light shafts are worth it elsewhere in the game, especially the ones that have real time shadows enabled). If you are playing on an underspec machine and finding that these hurt performance too much even on the lowest quality setting you can disable these by searching for [CommandList_Volumetric_Light_Shafts_Common] in the d3dx.ini and uncommenting the handling=skip line below it.
The subtitle depth adjustment is capped so that they can't pop too far out of the screen. This limit can be adjusted by editing the d3dx.ini and adjusting the x value under [Constants]
Side-by-Side / Top-and-Bottom Output Modes
This fix is bundled with the new SBS / TAB output mode support in 3DMigoto. To enable it, edit the d3dx.ini, find the [Present] section and uncomment (remove the semicolon) the line that reads:
run = CustomShader3DVision2SBS
Then, in game press F11 to cycle output modes. If using 3D TV Play, set the nvidia control panel to output checkerboard to remove the 720p limitation.
Like my Work?
As you would have gathered from reading the lore, fixing this one game has taken an enormous amount of my time - Steam shows I've spent close to three hundred hours with it running (probably a hundred of those would have been spent staring at those light shafts alone) and all up I can say that I would have probably spent about three months or so working on this one game - not counting time focussing on other games that went towards working on the Unity template, scripts and many of the features I've added to 3DMigoto over the years that this builds on.
I'm also currently out of a job largely thanks to my ongoing battle with mental health issues, and until I have recovered enough to work on changing that I am entirely dependent on my wife for support, and any donations I receive from this community. I hope you can see that even if you are not interested in this specific game, that the work I have put into it goes far beyond this one title.
I usually prefer not to say much when I post this donation link - because no one likes begging, but given the significance of this fix I felt it prudent to go into more detail and share a little of my personal situation.
If (and only if) you feel that you are in a position where you are able to do so, please consider supporting me with a monthly donation on Patreon, and thanks again to those that already do! While I prefer the more stable monthly support that Patreon offers, I can of course understand that some of you prefer to make one-off donations when you can, and for that you can use my Paypal. As a reminder, these donations are to support me personally, and do not go to other modders on this site.
This mod is created with 3DMigoto (primarily written by myself, Bo3b and Chiri), and uses Flugan's Assembler. See here for a full list of contributors to 3DMigoto
I also have to thank mike_ar69, 4everAwake and Bo3b who helped me in the early days while I was learning ShaderHacking, and while I was starting out looking at Unity in particular.
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