mod Lucky Strike's Mods: Hedgerow Hell - it's here!

[Vacillator]

19 hours ago, Lucky_Strike said:

Or it may be time to, huhum, borrow that RTX 2060.

Indeed .  However that could cause the second English civil war, in a single household.

[Lucky_Strike]

4 hours ago, Warts 'n' all said:

They way it should work if you follow Peter Panzer's tips is that when you click on Edit Profile, the first section is called Basic Info. One field will have you date of birth, the other field in your case should read Senior Member, which you can edit with something witty. Or, not as the case may be.

 

3 hours ago, Vacilllator said:

It's not a big issue but in my case if I do that it says birthday 'not telling' (so my comments on age and senior status may not be accurate ) and underneath there's a 'notify status updates' switch which is turned off.  There's nowt else.  I'll try turning the update status on...

Edit 1.  That made nae difference.  Do I need to put in my actual birthday instead of not telling? I'll try...

Edit 2. That made nae difference either.

+1 What Vacilllator said.

I think we remain as seniors until we depart the mortal coil and then we get some other rank, or at least the choice.

Oh well, gives us time to come up with something apt, not just MOD GOD!!!! Man I was looking forward to that.

 

[Lucky_Strike]

3 hours ago, Vacilllator said:

Indeed .  However that could cause the second English civil war, in a single household.

Or give you the excuse you’ve been looking for to buy that shiny new RTX 3080

[Warts 'n' all]

Ah, sorry it didn't work for you guys. I'm quite enjoying seeing "Dead Puritan" beneath my portrait.

[Vacillator]

9 hours ago, Lucky_Strike said:

MOD GOD!!!! Man I was looking forward to that.

We will of course think of you as the Mod God anyway .

[Warts 'n' all]

4 hours ago, Warts 'n' all said:

 beneath my portrait.

It's beneath your name you silly old fool.

[Lethaface]

On 11/10/2020 at 2:16 AM, Lucky_Strike said:

Great, thanks for these Lethaface. It’s amazing to see the textures afresh, even though I’m so familiar with them.

Hmm, it looks to me like the various shaders aren’t loading. I can see that you have the ini selected, but only three shaders look to be working. I doubt that the Mask will work too effectively as that tends to be very specific to screen res, aspect ratio etc. You also won’t notice too much of an effect with eye adaption. What version of ReShade is that? What I might need to do is update my ReShade and try to get a newer version of the ini for you. I can always revert back to my current version.

I did install the latest version and updated all shaders/textures to see if that fixed anything. If you make a newer version of the .ini that would be very much appreciated!

[Lucky_Strike]

6 hours ago, Warts 'n' all said:

Ah, sorry it didn't work for you guys. I'm quite enjoying seeing "Dead Puritan" beneath my portrait.

Never mind, we will just have to wait for one of the old codgers to grant us a status upgrade.

[Lucky_Strike]

3 hours ago, Vacilllator said:

We will of course think of you as the Mod God anyway .

That makes the sulking a bit easier.

[Lucky_Strike]

1 hour ago, Lethaface said:

I did install the latest version and updated all shaders/textures to see if that fixed anything. If you make a newer version of the .ini that would be very much appreciated!

Yeah, I’m gonna look at this, but it is a weakness of ReShade - it is prone to updates breaking the settings. It is possible to open the ini files in a text editor and read the settings from it manually, but it’s a bit of a faff.

Watch this space ...

[Vacillator]

It's dark, oh so dark...

I'm play testing a nice campaign in Nothern France (nudge, nudge, say no more) and its early in the morning...

Someone seems to have left a light on in the top house (I know, not really but it looks nice):

At the same moment, looking from a different angle, there's no light:

@Lucky_Strike is this an artefact of your lovely work or something more generic to the game?  I ask because I'm also getting lighting effects on one side of my bocage (like the buildings in the grainy screenshots), which do not always face where the sun might be about to shine...

Not a biggy but curious.

[Erwin]

Are you also using Reshade?  (FWIW I have Lucky's mod without Reshade and it seems to be working well.)

[Warts 'n' all]

9 hours ago, Lucky_Strike said:

Never mind, we will just have to wait for one of the old codgers to grant us a status upgrade.

I didn't know there was such a thing as an "upgrade". The "Enable status updates" takes you from Junior to Senior. After that you can call yourself what you like.

Edited November 11, 2020 by Warts 'n' all

[Vacillator]

42 minutes ago, Erwin said:

Are you also using Reshade?  (FWIW I have Lucky's mod without Reshade and it seems to be working well.)

No Reshade, just noticed the odd lighting effects but I don't normally play 'daaaark' scenarios so just interested.

[Vacillator]

47 minutes ago, Warts 'n' all said:

I didn't know there was such a thing as an "upgrade". The "Enable status updates" takes you from Junior to Senior. After that you can call yourself what you like.

I was very quickly upgraded to senior somehow, not of my own making.  Not a problem.

However, the bit about calling yourself what you like does not seem to be an option for me, again not a problem but perhaps we've identified a forum glitch?  I've seen two cats tonight, but they're both my own, and normally try to sit on my keyboard or behind the heat exhausts .

At this rate I can see myself being put back to Junior or even Juvenile member...

Edited November 11, 2020 by Vacilllator

[Lucky_Strike]

3 hours ago, Vacilllator said:

@Lucky_Strike is this an artefact of your lovely work or something more generic to the game?  I ask because I'm also getting lighting effects on one side of my bocage (like the buildings in the grainy screenshots), which do not always face where the sun might be about to shine...

Not a biggy but curious.

Ah, I think the light patch is an effect of LOD and those mini ground tiles. If you used my ground textures then the colouring of the mini ground tiles is not too well coordinated with the grass tiles, or something like that, so you get these strange bright squares. I will try to figure this out when I’ve made all my new ground tiles, but I think it’s also dependent, to an extent, on one’s GPU. I’m pretty sure it’s been mentioned multiple times in other threads, not so sure if it’s ever been fully addressed. Also this explains the draw distance line that you had noticed previously. I did some checks after you mentioned this and was getting draw distances of about 350-400m This was consistent across all the resolution of my mod, and the same as when using default textures. The line is where the mini ground tiles kick in. With default textures it’s much less noticeable.

The engine has some weird lighting/shading effects that can’t be resolved. The casting of shadows in the opposite direction to what they ought to be has been mentioned many times. It’s a limitation of the engine I can’t do anything about I’m afraid. It can be more or less noticeable depending on the time of day, intensity of light, colours etc. I personally have shadows and shaders always on as I prefer things like tanks to be anchored to the ground, but I think the shadows are automatically off if the light is diffuse, like when it’s raining, though don’t quote me on that. Sometimes things can look better without shadows or shaders, but then you get floaty tanks ... Basically it’s a weakness of the game engine that shadows are either on, harsh and unidirectional or off. In reality there are always shadows, even on sunless, heavily overcast days, they are just softer whilst contrast is much lower so they don’t appear as dark. This is what the game should emulate, but unfortunately it can’t. ReShade can be made to affect how dark the shadows appear, but this can come at a cost to other things like how black appears. There are some very clever light adaptive effects in ReShade which work to emulate how the human eye reacts to very bright/contrasty light situations, such as a very sunny day. These effects can lighten dark/shadow areas, such as under trees, when looking into them whilst at the same time burning out the bright surrounds/background. If the view is switched to the bright areas then shadows plunge into darkness whilst the bright areas become clear, no longer burnt out or over bright. This emulates the opening and closing of the iris to allow more or less light in. It does this in real-time with a subtle, programmable delay switching from one to the other. Quite amazing and very realistic.

The ingame Movie Lighting mode will exaggerate a lot of the artefacts and odd shadows, and your GPU may also have some influence depending on settings. If you use ReShade it’s best to not run it with Movie Lighting as the two can clash and are effectively doing similar jobs. Having said that if you only have simple things running in ReShade like a colour LUT and letterboxing then there won’t be much of a problem. Movie Lighting and ReShade don’t mix whenever anything depth-related or focus/AAA related is applied in ReShade. I think this is because Movie Lighting in the game turns off the AAA effects and has some unknown effect of depth

3 hours ago, Erwin said:

Are you also using Reshade?  (FWIW I have Lucky's mod without Reshade and it seems to be working well.)

This goes to my points about contrast and colour making some of the odd in-game artefacts more noticeable. If you run my mod with just the normal game lighting then you’ll see that the colours are not so far from the original game colours. BF were quite careful when they made the original textures to give us fairly natural colours. We see them as quite bright and almost lurid, but actually nature is bright. The big difference is that when we look at nature most of what we see is reflected light one way or another, whilst looking at our screens is illuminated or projected light, we’re inclined to turn it down a bit. We generally only turn down nature in bright sunshine, or reflected bright light like from snow, when our eyes just can’t cope - sunglasses or a big hat brim.

[Lucky_Strike]

3 hours ago, Warts 'n' all said:

The "Enable status updates" takes you from Junior to Senior.

And there was me thinking it was longevity on the forum, eighteen years and a senior for the last three or so, which was actually down to the flick of a switch!

4 hours ago, Warts 'n' all said:

After that you can call yourself what you like.

That’s the wife’s job, she definitely has all sorts of wonderful names for me.

[Lucky_Strike]

3 hours ago, Vacilllator said:

Juvenile

This isn’t so bad, better than Senior Member, more character to it somehow. I’m also thinking of other titles, not for yourself of course, just something with a bit of character, for some reason Village Idiot sprung to mind. Has fantastic connotations...

Who runs this damn place anyway? We need to ask one of those in the know, Warts obviously doesn’t have a clue and we are completely feckless, how can we attract some attention to our plight?

[Warts 'n' all]

3 hours ago, Lucky_Strike said:

 Warts obviously doesn’t have a clue 

Well I changed my title with no trouble. So not totally clueless. But without seeing what happens when you click on "Edit Profile" I can't really help any more.

[Vacillator]

3 hours ago, Warts 'n' all said:

Well I changed my title with no trouble. So not totally clueless. But without seeing what happens when you click on "Edit Profile" I can't really help any more.

Well to sum it up, we have no 'title' field to edit in our profiles.  But I can see again that you obviously do , I like your new one...

Edited November 12, 2020 by Vacilllator

[Vacillator]

7 hours ago, Lucky_Strike said:

And there was me thinking it was longevity on the forum, eighteen years and a senior for the last three or so, which was actually down to the flick of a switch!

Interestingly (perhaps just to me but anyway) I only joined in May and became a Senior Member about a month later.  I have seen others with many years under their belts, with more posts and more likes and they are still shown as Junior Members.  Plus my switch was not 'flicked' until 2 days ago as reported earlier in this thread, and my date of birth had not been entered either (but it may be on the BFC site).

So it's still a mystery to me.

[Warts 'n' all]

That is very weird that some people a different layout to others. I was hoping to see you change yours to "Cider Boy", and Lucky Strike change his to "Smoke 'em if you got 'em". Or, something along those lines.

Meanwhile it's back to the hedgerows for me.

[Vacillator]

7 hours ago, Lucky_Strike said:

Ah, I think the light patch is an effect of LOD and those mini ground tiles...

Thnaks for taking the time with all of that.  It makes me think I need to experiment with settings a bit more and also the different res versions of the mod.  If all else fails I can blame my GTX 1060...

For what its worth I'm using Vsync off, 3D models better, 3D texture quality better, Tree detail high, Shaders On.

Does that sound about right?

The draw distance on crops in fields can be as low as 35m in the really dark shots above, up to perhaps 90m on a sunny day.  Don't think I ever get the 350-400m you mentioned.  Unless our definitions of draw distance are different of course.

[Lucky_Strike]

6 hours ago, Vacilllator said:

Interestingly (perhaps just to me but anyway) I only joined in May and became a Senior Member about a month later.  I have seen others with many years under their belts, with more posts and more likes and they are still shown as Junior Members.  Plus my switch was not 'flicked' until 2 days ago as reported earlier in this thread, and my date of birth had not been entered either (but it may be on the BFC site).

So it's still a mystery to me.

Yep, mystery indeed, as I said I think we need some How to instructions from one of the elders. It’s a bit like the issue that comes up time and again with people running out of picture storage space. It’s only when someone like Warts bothers to explain that we find out how things work around here. God knows what we do when there’s a fire, where’s the exit ...

5 hours ago, Warts 'n' all said:

That is very weird that some people a different layout to others. I was hoping to see you change yours to "Cider Boy", and Lucky Strike change his to "Smoke 'em if you got 'em". Or, something along those lines.

Meanwhile it's back to the hedgerows for me.

Well when the time comes, or if the time comes, I may have to forego ‘Mod God’, which does actually already belong to Paul Weller, and use ‘It’s toasted!’ instead.

BTW I like your new title, very appropriate. We could all use that...

 

[Lucky_Strike]

5 hours ago, Vacilllator said:

Thnaks for taking the time with all of that.  It makes me think I need to experiment with settings a bit more and also the different res versions of the mod.  If all else fails I can blame my GTX 1060...

For what its worth I'm using Vsync off, 3D models better, 3D texture quality better, Tree detail high, Shaders On.

Does that sound about right?

The draw distance on crops in fields can be as low as 35m in the really dark shots above, up to perhaps 90m on a sunny day.  Don't think I ever get the 350-400m you mentioned.  Unless our definitions of draw distance are different of course.

I define draw distance to the line at which the mini ground textures kick in. I guess there are also other distances such as how far before certain doodads disappear, though this can vary quite a bit as you noticed with crops. Some of them, like brush seem to never quite disappear. Trees change at another distance, so it’s really a case of which bugs one first I would say.

Your settings look fine, I don’t know if Vsync on or off has much of an effect, don’t really know what it is. I think Better is fine for most settings, I run 3D models at Best with 3D textures at Better. Do you have Anti Aliasing on or off? Or are you letting the GPU control that? One thing to remember is that the game engine runs on fairly old technology by today’s game standards so there’s only so far we can push it, or that it’s worth pushing. The nVidia drivers allow for custom settings at a per game level so it’s worth taking advantage of this if you run other more modern games as well.

The difference between High Res and Medium Res is quite minimal. You have to get right up close to really notice. If you haven’t tried them then a quick swap is worth a go. I generally run the Medium Res. It’s only when I test and develop stuff that I use High Res. Also I have the luxury of two systems so I can keep the gaming rig set up at a sweet spot whilst I tend to design the mods on my Mac.