My custom ENBseries settings for Wings Over Russia

[+Stary]

Ok, I absolutely love Wings of Prey. The immersion given by the amount of detail and sound effects makes it the best WW2 aerial combat environment up to date. For me, of course.

 

So I took my chances at giving the "Wings Over Russia" by A-Team a bit of WOP-style look.

 

Here are current results side by side:

 

 

 

 

 

and at dawn, ENB shot is the lower one:

 

 

 

I'm using ENBSeries v0.075: GTA San Andreas edition, and custom palette.bmp I made to give the screen a bit greenish, higher contrast look.

Unpack to your main Wings Over Russia installation folder:

 

 

 

feel free to tweak it more

 

Stary

[FalconC45]

Pretty sweet dude. I love the ENBseries. Easy to tweak once you know the right fields to tweak.

 

Falcon

[+Julhelm]

Looking good! Too bad we can't do the same in SF2. I'd really like the ability to use a custom palette for each terrain to do color correction.

[+Stary]

Looking good! Too bad we can't do the same in SF2. I'd really like the ability to use a custom palette for each terrain to do color correction.

 

I think we can ForceDX9= in options.ini (or somewhere else -haven't tried this one) to use DX9, but then we loose all the shaders... I really love WOP color correction and bloom, personally I don't think new(er) terrain engine TK's cooking will give us such eyecandy

[+X RAY]

Stary I think WoR needs desperately one of your special tileset mod!

Anyway i normal use HDR plugin in my all SF-2 series games without any problem!

[+Stary]

Stary I think WoR needs desperately one of your special tileset mod!

 

yeah I have plans to make one for Edward's default tileset, or maybe brand new one, time and other projects depending

[+X RAY]

Ok mate you asked for that and this is the answer!

 

ODS:

 

And finally.....SF-2E (Various heights,various weather,various Stary mods):

 

Now that's the real thing man!!!!!!

Converting all my installs to that!

[+Stary]

looks good I have yet to test it in non-WOR install, ie. WOT

[+Julhelm]

We should just petition TK to add the color correction palette to the SF2 titles. He could code that in a day if he wanted to.

[+Stary]

He could code that in a day if he wanted to.

 

that's being general problem with TK, you never know what he wants. Not allways doing what customers would expect...

And I'm with you Julhelm, additional simple postprocess eyecandies would improve the look even further

(yes, I love the vignetting)

[+Julhelm]

I honestly think his sales would improve if he tried more to improve the visuals. The stock lighting in these games is atrociously bad, and it's not all that difficult to fix, either. The main problem with SF2 is that while you can improve the contrast a bit by tweaking environmentsystem, there's no way at all to do any kind of color correction like in WoP. So no matter how you tweak the values you end up with the same bland all-white lightmodel.

 

Maybe you should go post these before-after screenies at his forum. If we had this kind of vivid lighting + dx10 normalmapping and tweaked bloom it wouldn't look so dated anymore.

Edited June 21, 2010 by Julhelm

[+Stary]

Actually we can tweak sun color to give sort of correction the screen, I was doing some experiments waaay back, son't know if I still have my blueish environment backedup, will search. It was before WOI came out so pretty outdated

[+Stary]

try these Depth Of Field settings:

 

 

 

taken in SF2 merged, forced Dx9 mode:

 

 

[+X RAY]

try these Depth Of Field settings:

 

 

 

taken in SF2 merged, forced Dx9 mode:

 

 

 

 

Note that all my screens are taken using DX9 in my XP install

[+Stary]

Note that all my screens are taken using DX9 in my XP install

Win7 Dx10 here,

I'll check these settings in Series1 Wings Over Russia install after work

[+X RAY]

Win7 Dx10 here,

I'll check these settings in Series1 Wings Over Russia install after work

 

 

Tried the DOF mode,the result is overall good,but too blurry for me,expecially on the models

[+Stary]

hmm... it works quite ok for me, will check again, I'm trying to make distant landscape blurry, not the models

[+Julhelm]

Here's what I have so far in dx10. There's lower ambient lighting and more directional light from the sun so as to give it more contrast. No luck in getting the greenish tint, though. Also I've tweaked the postprocess shader to increase the bloom effect. This drowns out the horizon but can be counteracted somewhat I think by tweaking the horizoncolor values. At any rate it only becomes a problem during dawn/dusk when all of a sudden it looks as if a nuke went off.

 

Play around with it and see where you end up.

Juls_Envtweaks.rar

[Bandy]

While tints etc. are certainly a matter of personal taste, what really happens at altitude is aerial perspective [Definition Here], the terrain colours become desaturated and contrast decreases due to atmospheric effects.

 

I like all the other effects illustrated, etc. but the green tint looks kind of day-glow to me and unrealistic on my monitor (maybe that's it, monitor differences?), but just my humble opinion, nothing personal.

Edited June 22, 2010 by Bandy

[+Stary]

Julhelm thanks, will test it!

 

Bandy, the idea behing is to make the look highly saturated and with some kind of odd color correction, not exactly recreacte real life views.

Edited June 22, 2010 by Stary

[Lexx_Luthor]

Enbseries is amazing. I don't need the overpowering Enb "glare" look as I use Enviro file to tweak visuals, but I love the framerate increase from Enb. And I waited over a year before trying it. Man what an increase in performance (DX-9).

 

 

Julhelm::

I honestly think his sales would improve if he tried more to improve the visuals.

 

 

That's why I always documented my work at the Thudwire site. My stuff depends on deep tweaking and pushes the game too hard for alot of folks, but I always hoped TK could use the basic raw ideas, never seen in any of TheSims until now, and make them work consistently in his game, and do it far better. There's alot of nice visuals that were possible using the SF1, before the Patch 2008.

 

 

Classic SF1 Patch 2006 level, with smooth colour transition half hemisphere sky glow in the direction of the setting SF Sun.

Stary 9-pine trees stretched to Siberian shape, very few to save frames on budget video card.

Thirdwire MiG-21F with Mirage Factory MiG-21F cockpit.

 

Edited June 23, 2010 by Lexx_Luthor

[+Julhelm]

I like those cirrus clouds a lot.

 

The most annoying thing with TK is that he doesn't seem to understand that improving environment visuals goes a long way towards drawing in more customers compared to adding whatever new plane. I mean, if you look at a screenshot of SF2 with one of Stary's mods, it almost looks like jet-wings of prey. If you look at the stock game, it looks ugly and 10 years dated, no matter how nice the aircraft models are. It's like having a beatdown s**tbox and only ever putting new rims on it.

 

And what really ticks me off is that I know from experience that a lot of these effects like SSAO and DoF that are industry standard today are not only well documented, but can be coded into a rendering engine with a few days of work. And it'd make things look a lot better.

[+Stary]

I've seen many posts either on english aviation forums or even polish ones where people were mostly reacting like "that's ugly! not interested", without searching any info about actual features and planes...

 

not exact quote, but gives you general response.

 

On the other side, TK most probably won't affort licensing hires satellite tiles etc, but sticking with rotating tiles technology that go back to times of EAW (1998) is a NOGO (even Oleg's incoming Storm of War rely on hand drawn tiles as I've seen on WIP shots, but it's much better quality and covers much more area per tile. So does WOP and ROF. All use repeating - but not rotating - tiles)

 

Single shot of new terrain engine would explain a lot...

 

and -if any or all above makes no sense, sorry, I had exhausting day

[+Julhelm]

Well he'd only have to match what you've been doing for it to look considerably better. If you compare, say, stock Israel map with your modded one, it makes all the difference in the world. And he has the resources to actually make those kinds of visuals run optimized if he wanted to.

 

But I guess it makes more business sense to spend the resources on modelling more planes and keep the same ugly environment and then complain about how noone buys the expansions.

[+Stary]

Israel was the best map out of the box so far. It's the lack of custom 3D shapes for .tod ground objects and absence of level of detail for them that makes the terrain so generic. I'd love to make proper Germany mod with all the architecture and variety of objects, but I'm stuck limited to simple boxes for buildings. Check OFF Phase3 cities and forests for comparision. And level of detail=better framerates and higher detail, but you know it better than me already.

 

And after reading today posts by TK on Thirdwire I got impression the new terrain engine won't be much of a breakthrough.