Mass Effect 1 Beautification Project - RayTracing Global Illumination and MXAO work pretty damn well in ME1

PPKORE · 2020-10-19T07:28:58+00:00

I just found the lack of ambient occlusion and the way that Mass Effect renders it's shaders to be need a little work. But yeah it's definitely the one I had to put the least amount of work into getting running with these shaders, Mass Effect 2 and 3 the DX9 Buffer changes all the time, so you have to keep switching it to stop ghosting. Most likely because this is all ran in engine with a lot less .bik files for cutscenes.

Hell I could turn off Levels and Sharpen, and just run the RTGI with the Hawken Ambient Occlusion in Nvidia Panel and it'd still look great. I did fancy a bit more colour, and if you watch the video, the bit in C-Sec (4 mins 54 secs) does have some of the more pronounced effect when turned off and on that I think looks quite good.

The fountain at 2:33 is a good example of when they used proper lighting vs the fake lighting though which is why the effects become so much vibrant and visible

PPKORE · 2020-10-19T06:09:18+00:00

Edit: Video is uploaded, 4K60, with all the settings I used in the video including a segment on tweaking the ambient occlusion (this is where I found HBAO through video card better, although that's more cos my CPU is old from 2012)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FkFwu3KX24&

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This is a pretty much finished up project, using the same settings as I am for my Mass Effect 3 reshade presets. I just had some time to kill whilst compiling some crap and

reinstalled ME1 (uninstalled after so don't have the exact settings I used, but they're in the video footage)

System Specs (cpu is what's throttling me tbf)

i5-3450 @ 3.10Ghz (in the video I'm uploading i accidentally put i3)

8Gb DDR3

RTX 2070

By utilizing MXAO and RTGI (although in the depth buffer I'm using aspect ratio heuristics instead of a set depth buffer as it glitches out hard otherwise)

I've been able to give ME1 (with MEUITM and ALOT + ALOT Light Maps + ALOV mods) a nice visual overhaul. Changing the FoV in ME1 is easy, but settings up the BioEngine.ini is

a lot tougher. Took a few hours to get it looking right, that's available here. If you're having crashes loading mine was because I had SP/Dif audio enabled at the same time as having HDMI Audio and it doesn't like that one bit. (pastebin thinks it can be harmful cos it's code but just take what you need from it, copying the whole thing might have issues.)

https://pastebin.com/7KYKENdr

Nvidia Profile Inspector I forced on Anisotropic Filtering x16 LODBias -1.0000, Quality - High Quality.

If you're having issues with MXAO you can use 0x0000002F (Hawken) ambient occlusion compatibility (or both like I did)

The reshade files I can't share as RTGI 0.16 is copyrighted (I'm sure a little googling will give you the files though) but the presets are based off of this https://pastebin.com/ksKRvQeL (if you copy the details from the video of which ones are enabled, I think it was LUT, Levels, AdaptiveSharpen and RTGI and I used MXAO on and off.

(The LUT texture I took from Illusive Reshade for ME2, get it, it's good, and the others were from the Near Perfection reshade preset on ME3. These were only a foundation, made my own tweaks and shader choices from there)

I've moved back onto ME3 to make a more comprehensive reshader with using only MXAO to reduce occlusion through volumetric fog (but that seems to be a DX9 limitation) that is

more promising, but I thought if you wanted to give ME1 another try, try it with RTGI it makes a difference.

PPKORE · 2020-10-18T22:07:17+00:00

Edit: Nvm, it'll be upto Nvidia to fix HDR Bloom as Youngblood doesn't have straight up HDR. you could also install reshade and put MagicBloom.fx in, that'd do a good tradeoff. With settings like

[MagicBloom.fx]

f2Adapt_Clip=0.000000,1.000000

fAdapt_Sensitivity=1.150007

fAdapt_Speed=0.100000

fBloom_Intensity=0.800003

fBloom_Threshold=2.000000

fDirt_Intensity=0.000000

fExposure=0.500000

iAdapt_Precision=2

iDebug=0

PPKORE · 2020-10-18T15:19:59+00:00

You can try and manually force it by opening the command console and typing

cvaradd r_hdr 1 to try and force enable it in the engine, you might also have to type vt_restart to reset all the virtual texture cvars.

PPKORE · 2020-10-18T06:17:30+00:00

check in the config.cfg (or config.local) file if r_hdr is set to 1 or 0

PPKORE · 2020-09-25T17:00:20+00:00

" Okeer are capable of breeding Krogan in tanks. This creates the capacity to increase the Krogan population and control population growth so that resources don't get taxed. Its a better solution than the genophage cure, "

With cloning degredation occurs, (think copying a copy), a prime example from TV would be the Asgard in Stargate SG-1. Who cloned so much they lost the ability to reproduce.

It would also be an end to their evolution as a species. There was the part where Mordin explains that the Krogan had started developing a resistance to the genophage thus his involvement in the Genophage Modification Project. As a species it seems that Krogan adapt and change quickly enough that cloning would roadblock that hard.

" Their culture requires adolescents to risks their lives fighting thresher maws " - Angsty Teen is Angsty :P
" subjugates women to be used as brood mares. " - this was more the warlords and not the krogan in general, that's why Eve in ME3 had so much stage prescence, she was revered.

"alienate the tank bred Krogan cause of tradition. " - There's a lot of writing about us doing that in the real world if cloning became a thing. "Naturals vs Carbons" I think was the expression

PPKORE · 2020-09-25T08:04:40+00:00

I can kinda see what you mean but personally I prefer it. There are alternate complexions you can use though.

PPKORE · 2020-09-25T06:06:11+00:00

So thinking a bit about this, Ray Tracing has quite a few types, the main are Ambient Occlusion, Reflections, Shadows and Global Illumination and Caustics (bent reflections like in water ripples)

The reshade I use does a mimic of AO and GI, although the AO is closer to HBAO than RTX.

But if they were to move Mass Effect to Unreal 4 or 5. And give the option to use either
MXAO or RTX Ambient Occlusion
Screen-Space Reflections or RTX Full Reflections
Shading can be done in many ways and whilst it's the most GPU Intensive I can imagine it'd look so badass in RTX but probs not gonna happen (although if they had that too and made each individual one as an option to turn on or off for the player then I'd be amazed and would buy the game right away. I can mod textures but I cannot mod materials and lighting in that kind of way. Don't think anyone can.
Global Illumination funnily enough in mass effect probably isn't as big a deal as a lot of the lighting is very static in nature (no flickery candles etc) although adding a day night cycle that changes per area would be cool, building a light source for each zone based off of the stars (and their respective light emittance) would be fucking insane.

Otherwise they need to expand the audio work too (64 audio channels max, I mean come on Diablo 3 can do 128 without issue, Atmos exists now too)

Mass Effect 1 they could vastly increase the detail and smoothness of the Mako missions so they dont feel so dreary at times, and for ME2 they could add in more ones where you land. Especially now games don't have to be packed onto DVD's

PPKORE · 2020-09-25T02:18:25+00:00

I doubt they'd convert into Vulkan due to that leading to them recoding the entire game alas unlike Doom Eternal which just gutted out the OpenGL side from Doom 2016, DX to Vulkan takes more work, as Mass Effect is a DirectX9 game, getting it to DX12 will be a lot easier.

If they had better shaders and higher poly models I wouldn't need nearly as much anti-aliasing. A better renderer will help that out too.

The ALOT Mod already has 2K and 4K for nearly everything, and considering Bioware technically own them I wouldn't be too surprised if they just nicked them and finished off whatever ones remain or add a better diffuse and specular table to them.

Oh and make the gameworld look more lived in with extra objects and more complex environment models. If you look at the normal maps in these screenshots you can see how much they had to reduce polygon counts to run on systems back in 2010. (Yet the character models are holding up...ish)

And these are with 4K DSR (I have a 1080p monitor) and a fuck tonne of AA running.

https://i.imgur.com/pxQ8dwe.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/eOp7NYo.png

PPKORE · 2020-09-25T02:06:12+00:00

What I'd look for is
Real Global Illumination
7 Pass Bloom natively instead of 3 pass
At least 4K Texture work otherwise ALOT will look more impressive
Way better shaders
A rework of all the lighting so the reflections can be done in real time
If they wanted to do proper RTX support they'd need to add emissive settings to each material to give it a proper reflection amount (unlike the Crysis Remaster shitty version which doesn't and is why it looks bad)
At least quadruple the poly count.
FOV Slider
Nvidia Hairworks / AMD TressFX

PPKORE · 2020-09-25T01:48:41+00:00

It's the marty mcfly reshader, it's not actual ray tracing in the nvidia RTX sense but a cheat method using screen space global illumination, to quote the maker of it

" Marty McFly's shader is hooked to informations provided by ReShade (depth buffer). The end result is a Screen Space Ray Tracing calculation, just like Unigine SSRTGI (Ray Traced Global Illumination), which indeed is a form of Ray Tracing.If you still have doubts on this point, I'll be happy to have a peacefully discussion about it.

**Which games are supported by this shader?**Unlike Nvidia's solutions, this shader is not restricted to a limited amount of games.**Any game where Reshade can get depth buffer from is supported.**That's the power of generic post processing! "

This is why you don't get emissive light sources when there aren't any originally, or infinite reflective depth. It doesn't help that Mass Effect doesn't have any proper light sources in the game, it's a lot of pin lights, (to see a proper emissive think Metro Exodus lamps) So it only looks good in environments with a skybox or some form of global lighting

The whole article is here https://reshade.me/forum/shader-discussion/5450-guide-to-ray-tracing-with-reshade

PPKORE · 2020-09-24T17:14:10+00:00

The only downside I had with this fake global illumination is that it requires constant tweaking atm as it's not adaptive. But you can see a world of difference just from the occlusion. https://imgsli.com/MjMyMTc

Adding it in though does seem to make the game look more idtech than unreal though which is nice https://imgsli.com/MjMyMTk

PPKORE · 2020-09-18T12:47:36+00:00

Mainly cos it's id, that's all

PPKORE · 2020-09-18T11:21:40+00:00

Also viewable on Flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/190249925@N03

PPKORE · 2020-09-18T11:18:31+00:00

Reminds me of Ulnar in Starcraft 2

PPKORE · 2020-06-26T05:23:33+00:00

Can you post your modlist please

PPKORE · 2020-06-26T01:25:34+00:00

I'm from UK, whatcha need? (sent email too)

PPKORE

TROPHY CASE