Reshade is not real raytracing for fear. I explain why....

[Mark!!]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaQemvTCjww

[UmbralPenumbra]

Reshade will never be real ray tracing. I guess they claim ray tracing to piggy back on RTX popularity

All the game needs to really shine is indirect illumination and order independent translucency sorting, both of which can be done fine without ray tracing or DX12

I doubt Sierra would ever retool Jupiter EX to support this stuff natively. Especially because they don't exist anymore

I never saw the appeal of Reshade either way

[Mark!!]

Originally posted by Apricot:

Reshade will never be real ray tracing. I guess they claim ray tracing to piggy back on RTX popularity

All the game needs to really shine is indirect illumination and order independent translucency sorting, both of which can be done fine without ray tracing or DX12

I doubt Sierra would ever retool Jupiter EX to support this stuff natively. Especially because they don't exist anymore

I never saw the appeal of Reshade either way

True, but I think it could use way more than just indirect Illumination but that is my opinion tho. Not important......

[UmbralPenumbra]

Gi and OIT are the two major things I see that most older shadow volume / normal map games like FEAR and D3 lack. There are other things sure but these would have the biggest benefit to visuals. Well, OIT woulod benefit every game, tired of seeing translucency sorting still an issue even in 2021

[Mark!!]

Originally posted by Apricot:

Gi and OIT are the two major things I see that most older shadow volume / normal map games like FEAR and D3 lack. There are other things sure but these would have the biggest benefit to visuals. Well, OIT woulod benefit every game, tired of seeing translucency sorting still an issue even in 2021

True.....

[StreamWhenGuy]

No sh*t Sherlock.

[Mark!!]

Originally posted by Apricot:

Gi and OIT are the two major things I see that most older shadow volume / normal map games like FEAR and D3 lack. There are other things sure but these would have the biggest benefit to visuals. Well, OIT woulod benefit every game, tired of seeing translucency sorting still an issue even in 2021

Well, Order-independent transparency is a great choice for some instances in computer graphics but is only 1% of what fear needs in updated graphics.

Fear, already has a 3 layer mip map texture style "a diffuse-map , specular-map , normal-map" with a shader objects to allow the lighting to move across the texture mapping with more realistic manner but it does not have depth or realistic feel as if it was a real brick wall.

The reflections in fear are basic not great light does not interact very much with the reflections only hit and bounce off kinda never blends or dynamically reflect or change behavior treats light as a static hit never reflects or blends.

Physically based rendering can allow me to increase the light interactions with the walls and floors, ceilings, mirrors, water, etc. And give way more depth to the world with reflections more dynamic would also but more better.

Also, fears lighting mechanics is it's downfall it is basic lighting techniques that has been seen in a lot of games as well.
It needs to be more dynamic and work with objects in a way that is more like light should be in IRL.

Also, fear uses an old d3d9 render which is why most of the .fx shaders are limited in a sense utilizing d3d12 or 10 or 11 will bring more chances to add more features to the game to enhance what is already basic graphic implementation that we have seen over and over again in most fps games today or back a few years give or take.

Now, that being said I did not mention some things as well in this but that is not important my main reply was to say that "Order-independent transparency" is not enough to make fear look more realistic and better in today's graphics but it is a start and a good choice for some graphic practices for some model scenes in-game and so on.

[UmbralPenumbra]

OIT is 1%, GI is the other 99%

There are multiple situations in FEAR where OIT interferes with fidelity
GI is more important because like D3 it's too dark due to only using direct lighting

I'm not interested in a total rewrite of the game to give it PBR, GI and OIT would fix the most glaring of problems to me, you may think otherwise though and more power to you because what either of us want is likely never going to happen unless they release the source code

[Mark!!]

Originally posted by Apricot:

OIT is 1%, GI is the other 99%

There are multiple situations in FEAR where OIT interferes with fidelity
GI is more important because like D3 it's too dark due to only using direct lighting

I'm not interested in a total rewrite of the game to give it PBR, GI and OIT would fix the most glaring of problems to me, you may think otherwise though and more power to you because what either of us want is likely never going to happen unless they release the source code

True, well you can do Global illumination , & Order-independent transparency with "Reshade" I'm sure but that is only Directx effects changing or just enhancing what is already there so worth a look into to test out with but will never be done right.

But, at the end of the day these 2 things would change fear nicely but that is only a piece of what is required so much more is involved.

But, Rewriting Fear is the only option to enable "RTX" or "Physically based Rendering" or "Order-independent transparency" , or "Global illumination" correctly I mean you can memory patch it but if you want to do it right a re-write is in order and is not impossible either, been doing my thing for a long time so none of this is new to me.

[UmbralPenumbra]

Rewriting is why I gave up on the idea since it's not feasible

This reminds me of years ago I read Ambient Occlusion Volumes paper, something planned for Battlefield 3. Never happened as far as I know, they stuck with screenspace AO. Cool stuff I wanna see but probably wont

[Mark!!]

Originally posted by Apricot:

Rewriting is why I gave up on the idea since it's not feasible

This reminds me of years ago I read Ambient Occlusion Volumes paper, something planned for Battlefield 3. Never happened as far as I know, they stuck with screenspace AO. Cool stuff I wanna see but probably wont

Yeah, I can see why you feel like so, honestly it is possible I have done some small rewriting
of a few software exe's in my private time for practice and found success so it is possible but require's a lot of work.

My goal is to remake fear with rtx instead of re-writing the game exe but I will still need to know the game exe's logic.

May, I have something to show only time will tell I lost all my project remaster data for the fear remaster project I worked on for over 3 years due to my hdd failing no backing up either so this is my attempt at bringing something to the community worth there time playing it.
Only time will tell I will be glad to share it on here with a link to youtube when I get some progress made.

I feel fear deserves more attention from other devs to make more mods for it.
But, sadly enough there is a very weak modding community for it at the moment nothing new in months or even years besides complete edition and I am not sure if they even had a finished release I think they never did but I could be wrong of course.

Either way, glad talking to you man.
It is very nice to hear from some great super casual people on here.