[DISCUSSIAN] Sins .FX Shaders

from Sins Forums

Hello everybody, I am starting a discussian about the sins .FX shaders that sins uses. Has anyone made any headway in modding these HLSL shaders in a way that looks good and spacy? Or atleast better then they are now?

modding
8,987 views 10 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

Well someone did a fix on the ship shader that reduced the lines of white pixels when zooming out, but I think Stardock actually incorporated that change (or something similar). I'll be dealing with Shaders in a class I'm in later so I hope to really examine them then.

That said, considering the shaders are going to be the main graphics change in Rebellion, I don't think its worth messing with them to much right now.

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

Shaders

touch them and the game explodes

that's what I learned

WindowBlinds - Free yourself of the default settings, customize your desktop.
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

For real? Lol that sucks. I know someone who did an insane modification of the shield impact shader, which added little circles that rippled out from the weapon impact point.

Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top

That was me.  I've tweaked it quite a bit over the past couple of years as I continue work on my Star Trek mod, as I've never been able to achieve just the right liquid-looking effect that I want.  I've also adjusted the Phased Out file so that cloaked ships completely disappear from view.  Unfortunately, they also disappear from view during phase jumps between planets, but I'm still working on that one.

Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top

Thats because the Cloak and phase jump effects use the same shader. So you cant tweak one without screwing up the other. We found this out the hard way with SoA 2 because we didnt want the ships to become transparent in warp.. Fixed that issue, but then cloaking didnt work :/ So we wound up reverting it. Better to have shimmering warp than no cloak.

There is some minor things you can do with the fx shaders, but yea we generally just leave it alone. If it aint broke. Dont fix it.

Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top

Obviously I realize they use the same shade filer.  To specify, I'm attempting a work-around that solves the transparent phase jump issue.

Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top

Is it not possible to use shaders to code animated textures?

Reply #8 from Sins Forums Top

It's not quite the same, but you can make it look somewhat animated.

Reply #9 from Sins Forums Top

Okay, because I hear HLSL shaders are pretty advanced stuff.

Reply #10 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting Major, reply 5
There is some minor things you can do with the fx shaders, but yea we generally just leave it alone. If it aint broke. Dont fix it.
End of Major's quote

Yeah, a while back I've tried to get myself around to learn enough to do a parallax shader supplanting the dot3BM but I failed miserably. HLSL 2.0 does not support parallax NM the way it's best implemented and I'm to noob in shader programming to get around the issues. (Besides, the vars Sins supports in shader files seem not to suffice... if anybody could please prove me wrong :blush: )