Flatout 2 Reshade

[Tyler Bannowsky]

Ifeel your pain. I asked Ben a while back, when they first announced that the shaders were going to be changed, and difficult, if not impossible, for third party programs to work, if Laminar had any plans to create a native visual modification menu, similar to the graphics menu. He flat out said no, that was not on the road map. I even pointed out to him that the shader programs, and shader profiles at the time, were downloaded over 250,000 times. Still no go.

the thing that make me sad is the apparent lack of intention for fix sky colors,haziness,and others simple details,and ultimatly the peple that blame the use of improvements over a product in beta state.what reason for launch a beta then?the alpha phase of testing with perfect and controlled scenario its done alreadyno?

for me is important to test my installation with ortho,FWL scripts and other addons,because i need to know if they will work,im not sure about the convenience of sent crash reports caused for addons,but i think laminar must be aware of the real usage of XP,and pay some atention to the solutions and inprovements found by the comunity.

You can "test" anything you like, just don't blame Laminar if a plugin or script that relies on modifying parts of X-Plane that Laminar warned not to use for development of third party software while they were making changes to the base program gets broken or causes issues. Laminar said a couple of years ago not to touch the shaders (which are not the same thing as color/contrast controls btw). It is a very intrusive way of setting something as simple as color balance and saturation, and while it can be done that way, it will get you into trouble if Laminar changes the shaders during the Vulkan/Metal conversion. As it turns out, they said they would be making changes, they have made the changes, and some stuff no longer works. Laminar has no intentions of fixing compatibility issues with plugins that messed with stuff they were warned not to touch. It's as simple as that. The changes are probably not done either, so if the plugin developer "fixes" their product tomorrow, it could very well get "broken" again.

I have spent a fair bit of time messing with visual settings and the use of plugins. I found that reshade brought my rig to a halt. Xvision worked very well on 11.40. However, I have found that by using Nvidia Control Panel and played around with the settings in Adjust desktop color settings, I can pretty much get the visuals to my liking. Cant say anything about AMD cards but Im sure there are options somewhere. Maybe try a search for Gamma correction software as there should be freeware options.

If LR made better colors and sharpness of detail (not these gray and faded colors with the fog that always exists), I wouldn't have to use RESHADE or any other 3rd party software for a better viewing experience.

I fully agree with your observation. After installing version 11.50r3 I reverted to version 11.41. I have no FPS problems (more than 40-45 with all settings at maximum value) and the colors / contrast / brightness of this first Vulkan version are unsightly. You are right: it is not possible that a flight simulator does not give the possibility to adjust these settings. I prefer to fly with my plane on an gloomy autumn day...

What Is This?

This specifically is a modified ReShade .dll (built on September 29th) that can keep depth buffer access in multiplayer games, along with a couple presets I made. As for what ReShade is generally, it's a post processing injector similar to ENB, except it works generically in just about any game. It can't modify textures or models or otherwise enhance the in-game effects/lighting, but it can add in depth-dependent effects like ambient occlusion or depth of field and otherwise do anything you could do to an image in photoshop.

Why Would I Want It?

Alright, I'm Sold, Where's the Download?

Here you go! (For RTGI 0.10, MXAO preset included and set as default since it's free. Also a low end preset that should work on even integrated graphics).

But there's a catch! While I included presets that work for free, the Global Illumination shader used in the gallery photos is currently in beta and the developer does not want it publicly distributed. For now, if you want access to said shader, you'll need to support the developer on his Patreon, where it is in the $5 tier (I am in no way, shape, or form affiliated with the developer of this shader). Once the shader is finished in development, it will be available for free. As for why you might consider throwing him 5 bones, he's responsible for a ton of quality shaders for ReShade which are absolutely free, such as the great MXAO shader I've used as an alternative until the GI shader is available publicly.

How Do I Install This Thing?

Once you've downloaded the files, extract them to the root of your PSOBB install (where the PSOBB.exe is located). Boot up the game, and open the ReShade menu by pressing Shift + F1. At the top of that menu, there will be a selected preset. Ensure that the correct preset is selected for your needs.

As an added suggestion, go into the control panel for your video card and enable 16x Anisotropic Filtering for the game. Also, you cannot use MSAA or SSAA with this mod. It may simply make the depth effects not work, or it may crash at launch.

How's Performance?

These effects are extremely performance intensive as configured. At 3440x1440, this pushes my RTX 2080 to about 50-55% utilization. If you have a modern mid-range gaming PC and aren't running a 4k monitor this should run fine for you. I can't do a large range of performance testing, so if you have any performance problems please let me know what GPU you have, what resolution, and where you have problems. If anybody has issues on reasonable hardware, I can try to make a more performant preset. Optimization wasn't a concern for me given the age of this game and it having a 30 fps cap.

Thanks for taking the time to look at this! I spent a lot of time tweaking this to my tastes and making sure it didn't look bad in a large variety of scenes. If you give it a download, let me know what you think, and if you make your own preset, I'd love to see some screenshots! Hope you all have a great day!

I made a whole new preset using the latest version of ReShade (3.2.0) which I cloned off Github and compiled myself to remove the network restriction. What does this mean for you? Depth dependent effects such as Depth of Field and Ambient Occlusion will work in this game with the latest version of ReShade, which will perform far better compared to the original version I posted. I also made use of some new shaders, such as an eye adaptation shader (which you can see in action here), and scrapped my lazy choice for tonemapping in the previous version for a shader that I could customize, which should result in a warmer, more natural look. I swapped the basic SSAO implementation for MXAO, which is far more accurate and creates less noise in motion. I also configured god rays, with the goal being a subtle effect on warp gates and the box breaking effect. This also has a subtle effect on some of the lights in mines that looks really great. Reflections are also less aggressive, which should result in less reflections off surfaces that don't have any business being reflective (still some oddities, but nothing can be done about that given the limitations of ReShade).

NOTE: Ambient occlusion will still bleed in some scenes (can setup a toggle to turn it off with a key press), and MSAA is unusable unless you use the Performance preset I included. Additionally, pure white text boxes, like the ones that pop up for numerous quests, are unreadable due to the godrays. If that's important to you, setup a toggle to disable the preset for those situations, or you can flat out disable godrays from within the bloom shader. This is no longer an issue as of 2.0.1.

- The goal was to make something with more "edge", and to play around with cinematic effects like depth of field. I don't recommend the Cinematic preset for gameplay, the UI gets destroyed. There is a Cinematic (no blur) preset included for regular gameplay. The goal wasn't to make something "better" than the previous one, just something different.

4.) Go to the Settings tab, find the box named "Effect Search Paths" and at the end of that path add "\reshade-shaders\Shaders", then find "Texture Search Paths" and at the end of that path add "\reshade-shaders\Textures".

*SSAO with ReShade bleeds through alpha effects (techs and fog, the latter being the unsightly one). It's an issue inherent with ReShade. I set SSAO to toggle on and off with caps lock for areas that it flat out looks bad in.

*The full version does NOT work properly if you are forcing MSAA through the Nvidia/AMD control panel. If you want MSAA still, use the lite version, and you may want to disable SMAA as well, which is located in the ReShade folder, SweetFX.cfg file).

Well it's hard to do much more than slap post processing effects on the game. I can't even find an HD texture mod for the game (if you know of one, please share lol). The game isn't very popular anymore of course, so there probably aren't a lot of presets people have made. I remember finding some ENB mods a while back, but I thought they looked bad. If you had an interest, you could play around with the shaders and customize it to look pretty much any way you want.

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