@FD - Hidden Graphics Settings ?

[Dicehunter]

I just had a little play around with a graphics tweak and mod for this game, The tweaking part was a text file basically, And the results were amazing, I started with this -


https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/4vc5fn/so_i_edited_the_graphics_config_file/


And minus the galaxy map which is a tad bright now, I cannot for the life of me think why Frontier Developments would not "Turn On" these settings as they give the game a fantastic visual overhul, The galaxy actually has detail now, The HUD has a lovely glow to it, Materials have more detail in general, Stars look like stars with actual brightness to them now, Even ships look, Well, Better, Whether this is due to the surrounding environmental detail or the settings themselves I'm not sure.

The mod part of the game was the "Squeegee" mod and the "Space Dust" mod, 2 items which really clean the game up, The space dust mod gets rid of the small particles that appear onscreen when in normal flight or super cruise, Sadly only works with Nvidia cards at the moment, And it makes the game so much more realistic.

The Squeegee mod gets rid of those dirty smudges and smears on your ships windows, Making them look nice and clean.

Come on devs, I know you lot despise intercting with your customers but can you please give a valid reason as to why these things like planet detail with 4K and even 8K textures, Planet cloud detail, MUCH higher star count, Nebula size, No space dust, Clean looking ship windows etc... are not toggleable options ingame ?

It can't be peformance as I tried this on a system with an AMD RX-580 and performance was not changed much minus 1-2 FPS here and there.

The only logical conclusion I can come to is that these may be implemented in a future update and you'll be like "look at what we did" even though these have been ingame for quite some time now, OR, It's just laziness, I'm betting it's the former.


Some images that are like a whole new game -


http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1181030993
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1181031170
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1181031286
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1181031343
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1181031406
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1181048067


A good before/after example of the detail gained not just on planets but the galactic background -

Before -

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1181070187


After -

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1181069365



Side by side -

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1183766688



NOTE: This topic isn't about the oversaturated and overly bright areas, It's about the details that this tweak brings out.

[Julius Sebastus]

Obviously its not perfect, the only way to make it perfect is for the dev to raise the resolution of every texture and implemente what is hidden in the files and rework them inside the engine. But still some of us think its pretty cool, its like we are in witchspace since the thargoids have came out. I will say like the trolls: ''If you don't like it its because you don't have enough imagination''.

And yes obviously one day I will revert to vanilla, I just wanna see some planet and nebula's with those effect before that.

Here some new shots, tweaked a little more:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1182843464

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1182843525

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1182843578

I need a shot of a thargoid ship with this background. ^^

[One Eye Jack]

I just tried this. Thanks Dicehunter.

Very nice so far. Everything looks much nicer. Far greater detail in distant objects. Stations look better too.

[Julius Sebastus]

Originally posted by astroknott58:

I just tried this. Thanks Dicehunter.

Very nice so far. Everything looks much nicer. Far greater detail in distant objects. Stations look better too.

Pretty sure it would be doable to mess with the file and tone it down a little and only keep the best of those setting. At least to make the Galaxy map look good, and the galaxy itself with less exposure to see more stars. Now I need to find a nice planet to land.

[Drum]

Thanks for the notice Dicehunter. Anyone try it with a VR-set?

[Dicehunter]

Originally posted by ZombieHunter:

You aren't adding details to anything. You are using different lighting values to show more or less details that are already there or altering blend amounts between two or more textures. You can't add detail that simply isn't in the texture.

This is why I think most ReShades and so forth are pretty hideous. They usually ramp up the contrast to make the textures look grainy but grainy doesn't mean more detailed. This isn't CSI. You can't create data where no data exists in an image. Also when you lower the diffuse lighting and ramp down the ambient the ambient occlusion shader will look much better. Too much diffuse lighting kills this effect. In the early days of shaders blur and glow was in and now I'm glad to see it ramped down a lot. Overbright and oversaturated graphics look awful to me.

And of course it is still stable. You aren't adding anything to the engine or taking anything away. In fact under the hood it is doing the same EXACT things it has always been doing albeit with different values. It's just simple math.

The thing is, The textures are already there, Just look at this before and after of a planets surface, While the default looks ok, The tweaked version which uses 4K textures looks noticeably sharper, It's not just tweaking the lighting and colours, Higher resolution textures do exist within the game for planets, Ships and stations that the devs are currently not using.

http://i.imgur.com/M8ugqoQ.jpg

[Walmart]

Is there a way to use the higher textures without all the other stuff?

[Dicehunter]

Originally posted by Walmart:

Is there a way to use the higher textures without all the other stuff?

I'm sure there is but I'm not so tech savvy to go digging :P

Originally posted by Drumatiko:

Thanks for the notice Dicehunter. Anyone try it with a VR-set?

Yep I did on my Rift, Looks truly amazing, I'd love to sit down with a dev and ask, Saturation and brightness aside, Why they have by default only up to 2K textures enabled instead of the available 4K and 8K textures which are in the files aswell as much more details in various ships, Nebula, stars, Planets etc....

[Julius Sebastus]

Originally posted by Walmart:

Is there a way to use the higher textures without all the other stuff?

Ask the guy on Reddit who found it a year ago, maybe he will answer, he seem like a nice guy. They talk a lot about those modification on that reddit, I will probably tweak a little to see if I can make it better for my taste, as we do not have the same taste.

I love my Fallout and Skyrim to be modded to death, and would love to have Elite treated the same way. (If you don't like mod just don't install them)

I can understand someone running Elite on a potatoe to be mad at those who can use it, I would be jealous too, as I am jealous of those who have a rift or a vive ^^.

[ZombieHunter]

Originally posted by Dicehunter:

Originally posted by ZombieHunter:

You aren't adding details to anything. You are using different lighting values to show more or less details that are already there or altering blend amounts between two or more textures. You can't add detail that simply isn't in the texture.

This is why I think most ReShades and so forth are pretty hideous. They usually ramp up the contrast to make the textures look grainy but grainy doesn't mean more detailed. This isn't CSI. You can't create data where no data exists in an image. Also when you lower the diffuse lighting and ramp down the ambient the ambient occlusion shader will look much better. Too much diffuse lighting kills this effect. In the early days of shaders blur and glow was in and now I'm glad to see it ramped down a lot. Overbright and oversaturated graphics look awful to me.

And of course it is still stable. You aren't adding anything to the engine or taking anything away. In fact under the hood it is doing the same EXACT things it has always been doing albeit with different values. It's just simple math.

The thing is, The textures are already there, Just look at this before and after of a planets surface, While the default looks ok, The tweaked version which uses 4K textures looks noticeably sharper, It's not just tweaking the lighting and colours, Higher resolution textures do exist within the game for planets, Ships and stations that the devs are currently not using.

http://i.imgur.com/M8ugqoQ.jpg

There is a reason the super high res are not used. When FD QA does testing I'm sure they have target systems and if those textures cause memory issues on those system they don't use it. I remember when everyone released super high res textures for Skyrim and then wondered why the engine crashed. You can mess with the defaults but understand you know nothing about the engine itself or any issues it might have with specific settings. There is a reason a studio sets the defaults where they are. You can ramp it up in the options but ramping them up via editing a file is tricky and dangerous b/c those have no clamps on what you can do and you can introduce issues with memory and so forth if you set things too high. All games have more settings than are allowed in the options menu but there is a good reason for it. So high res textures might not crash your system but it might crash others.

[Dicehunter]

Originally posted by ZombieHunter:

There is a reason they are not. When FD QA does testing I'm sure they have target systems and if those textures cause memory issues on those system they don't use it. I remember when everyone released super high res textures for Skyrim and then wondered why the engine crashed. You can mess with the defaults but understand you know nothing about the engine itself or any issues it might have with specific settings. There is a reason a studio sets the defaults where they are. You can ramp it up in the options but ramping them up via editing a file is tricky and dangerous b/c those have no clamps on what you can do and you can introduce issues with memory and so forth if you set things too high. All games have more settings than are allowed in the options menu but there is a good reason for it.

I understand that but looking at this from the way devs of late in the industry do things it wouldn't surprise me that they bring out in the coming months/next year, An update that enables the selection of these settings ingame and make a big noise about them.

[ZombieHunter]

Originally posted by Dicehunter:

Originally posted by ZombieHunter:

There is a reason they are not. When FD QA does testing I'm sure they have target systems and if those textures cause memory issues on those system they don't use it. I remember when everyone released super high res textures for Skyrim and then wondered why the engine crashed. You can mess with the defaults but understand you know nothing about the engine itself or any issues it might have with specific settings. There is a reason a studio sets the defaults where they are. You can ramp it up in the options but ramping them up via editing a file is tricky and dangerous b/c those have no clamps on what you can do and you can introduce issues with memory and so forth if you set things too high. All games have more settings than are allowed in the options menu but there is a good reason for it.

I understand that but looking at this from the way devs of late in the industry do things it wouldn't surprise me that they bring out in the coming months/next year, An update that enables the selection of these settings ingame and make a big noise about them.

It is possible b/c of the new cards coming out but then understand not everyone is going to go rush out and buy an 8GB+ card for one game. Most games will run far above the memory limit but it means at some point the game must send the textures / data across the bus to the GPU and this is where the hitching and bottleneck comes in. Until we get a better computer architecture that is not Von Neumann and is not hampered by the bus this is something we will have to deal with.

[Julius Sebastus]

As long as my save game is on the Frontier server I am not afraid of the engine killing me during the night, and: ''verify integrity of game files'', is a pretty cool tool if the engine crash too often and we want to repair the mess we did, and obviously we all probably made a backup of the file we are talking about. We didnt messed with the sys32 here, we changed values in the hidden configuration panel.

[ZombieHunter]

Originally posted by SebJulien:

As long as my save game is on the Frontier server I am not afraid of the engine killing me during the night, and: ''verify integrity of game files'', is a pretty cool tool if the engine crash too often and we want to repair the mess we did, and obviously we all probably made a backup of the file we are talking about. We didnt messed with the sys32 here, we changed values in the hidden configuration panel.

You can just backup the config file and then rename when you get strangeness.

[Dicehunter]

Originally posted by ZombieHunter:

It is possible b/c of the new cards coming out but then understand not everyone is going to go rush out and buy an 8GB+ card for one game. Most games will run far above the memory limit but it means at some point the game must send the textures / data across the bus to the GPU and this is where the hitching and bottleneck comes in. Until we get a better computer architecture that is not Von Neumann and is not hampered by the bus this is something we will have to deal with.

Well I've tried this tweak on a 290X 4GB at stock + FX-8320 at stock with 16GB DDR3 equipped system, 5 year old parts at this point, And with this tweak at 1080P it ran really well, No crashes or hangups and that is why I think a graphical update enabling 4K textures, 8K textures etc.... will be coming out next year as part of a new expansion, Obviously optimised though.

[Julius Sebastus]

I don't see any frame drop since I touched the settings.