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Mad Poster
#126 Old 7th Jul 2016 at 11:37 PM Last edited by GrijzePilion : 7th Jul 2016 at 11:49 PM.
So I've been playing with 0x00060019 for a while...I like this one better than the other setting. I haven't noticed it bleeding through the UI (that happened with another flag at some point but I can't remember which one) but this one doesn't show when I tilt the camera down to lower than about 30°. I managed to clean up my old, cluttered, huge save to the point where it's playable again...very playable, actually.As promised, here's a few screens.

AO doing it's thing on 3D grass:

It's a little over the top, but that's my own fault for using so damn much 3D grass.

For comparison, here's the same shot without the AO:


Though I have painted a bit of shading onto my Sims' skins beneath their jaws, the AO definitely adds a lot extra. It's also quite visible on her left arm.


Is it creepy if I take pictures of sleeping Sims? Well either way, you'll definitely spot the AO on their facial profiles, on Amber's shoulder, and for some reason on the pillows where their polygons meet. That's also something you might notice on some Sims if you get really close to them.


And although kind of unrelated, I took this sweet overview shot of downtown Bridgeport while looking around my world. It's actually three screenshots taken at different points during sunset, it's a multiple exposure thing. I've used this trick in the past. Other than that I didn't do anything except for adding a bit of a glowing effect on some lights.

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Field Researcher
Original Poster
#127 Old 8th Jul 2016 at 12:52 AM
The problem with some AO implementations is it would either be too strong or just flat-out wrong like a badly-filmed Kinescope footage from the 1950s:


Far Cry 3 is a particularly egregious example, with prominent halos over objects surrounding them without accounting for actual depth.
Instructor
#128 Old 8th Jul 2016 at 9:55 AM Last edited by alverdine : 8th Jul 2016 at 10:07 AM.
You guys had a look at ReShade 2.0's AO options yet? What I gather from this thread is that you're taking presets for AO from other games then using them in TS3, and the presets are either hit or miss - you can't actually change the settings in NVInspector, right?
With ReShade you can pick which method of AO to use between SSAO, Raymarch AO, SSGI, HBAO, Raymarch HBAO, SSGI, and Raymarch HBAO, and then change things like the amount of darkening and brightening, sharpness or blurriness, how far shadowing extends, depth cutoffs to ignore small geometry, etc.
It's pretty damn exciting! I wrote a tutorial on how to get started with it here, although sadly it doesn't work for people using laptops with dedicated NVIDIA cards for some odd reason. (Sarry potato!)

@nitromon, would you mind explaining to me what these bolded settings do:
setting $High
prop $ConfigGroup ShadowMapSize 2048
prop $ConfigGroup RenderShadowsEnabled true
prop $ConfigGroup InteriorLightProbeCount 1
prop $ConfigGroup LowDetailLightmaps true
prop $ConfigGroup ShadowColorFormatWorkaround $intelShadowColorFix
prop $ConfigGroup HighRezTranslucency false

@blakegriplingph in ReShade's HBAO there's a setting for that depth problem you mentioned. "fHBAOAttenuation: Affects the HBAO range, prevents shadowing of very far objects which are close in screen space."
Instructor
#130 Old 8th Jul 2016 at 10:29 AM
I see, I'll give it a go then and let you know if it improves FPS at all. Although I was wondering more about the technical specifics of those settings and what visual differences you would notice from the lowest vs highest setting and omfg I'm a derp - as I type this I realise I should just go check for myself!
Mad Poster
#131 Old 8th Jul 2016 at 5:02 PM
I've tried raising it - I think it's on 32 - but I haven't spotted a difference. I'd kind of hoped it would make the indoor shadows less blocky, but it didn't. Speaking of less blocky shadows, I did manage to make the outdoor shadows move a lot smoother - I think. They update 30 times a second now, I think the default was 1. I just wish it were possible to have more detailed reflections. The cubemaps are really low res, I'd definitely love to have higher res ones generated.

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Instructor
#132 Old 9th Jul 2016 at 9:06 AM
Considering the original settings for InteriorLightProbeCount are $Low: 3, $Medium: 8, $High: 20, raising it is going to make it better. Since I've got a third party AO on I tried lowering it to 1 as suggested by nitromon and so far haven't noticed any difference in lighting quality, but also haven't noticed much FPS difference either, will need to do more testing.
Mad Poster
#133 Old 23rd Oct 2016 at 2:35 PM
I decided that my framerate was too good - gotta stay humble - and I've now configured my stuff so that both ReShade and the Nvidia driver are applying AO. The longer I think about it, the more useless it seems, but I'm going to give it a shot now and see what happens.

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Field Researcher
Original Poster
#134 Old 17th Mar 2017 at 8:55 AM
Anyone tried AO on the latest drivers? I'm still yearning for a stronger occlusion effect, but not too strong to the point that it looks like a bad kinescope job as I mentioned.
Mad Poster
#135 Old 17th Mar 2017 at 1:37 PM Last edited by GrijzePilion : 3rd May 2017 at 12:46 PM.
EA coding at it's finest

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Mad Poster
#136 Old 10th Nov 2017 at 11:05 PM Last edited by jje1000 : 10th Nov 2017 at 11:23 PM.
Resurrecting this thread- any idea how to improve the shadow cutoffs in-game?

Shadows cut off an annoyingly short distance when the camera is close to the ground- and yet show up perfectly fine in neigbourhood view.

For instance, notice how the buildings in the midground have no shadows being cast. This makes objects from far away look flat and featureless- this is my #1 complaint about the game graphics at this moment in time.

Same here- the shadows fade out halfway through the building.


I wonder if there might be any sort of file in the Game Data or GraphicRules that might control the camera/shadow cut off parameters. I know that there are XML files that control the cameras, there must be a XML file here or there that controls the shadows as well.

Perhaps as a first question- where are the Game XMLs stored?
Mad Poster
#137 Old 13th Nov 2017 at 2:06 PM
Sorry to disappoint, but that won't be possible. Shadows are off-limits, they can't be modified without entirely reverse engineering the game's engine. And, surprise surprise, we haven't figured out how to do that yet.
It's a damn shame, and it sucks, but I've tried to decompile the game's shader data and haven't gotten very far at all. So I suspect it will require much further investigation than anyone has done so far.

In the meantime, try zooming all the way out before going into freecam. That's been known to help a lot.

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Mad Poster
#138 Old 13th Nov 2017 at 6:41 PM
Do you know where the XML files that control stuff like the cameras are stored?
Mad Poster
#139 Old 13th Nov 2017 at 10:16 PM
The Sims 3/GameData/Shared/NonPackaged/Ini. That's the ones that you can edit, anyway. Those files won't let you fix the shadow rendering problem but you can mess around with how the cameras work...
And as a fun bonus, there's also a bunch of files in there that control certain visual aspects of the worlds. What the water surface looks like, how it refracts and reflects, how the trees are animated and other fun stuff like that.

If you want to edit the freecam, try VideoCamera.ini.

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Mad Poster
#140 Old 17th Nov 2017 at 12:20 PM
I know about the INIs (you use them to change the weather in custom worlds)- but I remember that there were XML files that could also be changed.

I.e. this one here changes the camera itself via XML values:
http://simulis.blogspot.ca/2011/12/about-peepshow.html

I wonder if the XML files are buried inside the actual game package files.
Mad Poster
#141 Old 17th Nov 2017 at 7:55 PM
Camera mods are done via the INIs too. TS3 doesn't use XMLs for config files.

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Mad Poster
#142 Old 17th Nov 2017 at 8:45 PM
For all I know, if you open up the package, there's an XML file inside.
Mad Poster
#143 Old 17th Nov 2017 at 8:57 PM
I assume it's the same file, then, in another format. It doesn't let me download the file so I can't be sure.

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Mad Poster
#144 Old 18th Nov 2017 at 1:06 AM
I don't think that files change format in a package.

All the INI files I've edited have kept their _INI designation in the package.

@igazor @Lyralei

Do you know a bit more about this?
Mad Poster
#145 Old 18th Nov 2017 at 4:09 AM
Can't think of any reason why file formats would change just due to package inclusion and I can't download the file in question either. Guess that doesn't really help much, perhaps someone better informed should confirm this.
Mad Poster
#146 Old 18th Nov 2017 at 11:22 AM
Here's the file.

It's interesting that there are INIs to change the camera fade and GraphicRules.sgr to change things like shadow quality, texture sizes and view distance. Then there are some XML files that change the camera settings itself.

I'm really hoping there are some settings that change change when shadows are cut off- it's not that the game can't do it (if you zoom out with the camera, the shadow do become longer as well as in neighbourhood view), but that there are rules artificially constraining this.
Attached files:
File Type: zip  EyePatch_CameraMod_2012-04-01.zip (6.3 KB, 29 downloads) - View custom content
Mad Poster
#147 Old 18th Nov 2017 at 12:31 PM
Whatever the case, I know for a fact that the shadow issues are imposed by the lighting engine itself and cannot be solved completely.

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Virtual gardener
staff: administrator
#148 Old 19th Nov 2017 at 11:45 AM
For the shadows, etc. that's indeed the way the game renders and thus isn't possible to edit unless you pull it back to the engine it was made in (which is a private engine EA made and never released as far as my knowledge goes.) you can read more about the shadows here: http://modthesims.info/showthread.p...776#post5076776

Which... seems to be a throwback of your thread Sorry...

Anyways! I do however know that (and you might have been confused by that) That camera settings for generating in-game thumbnails, and a few other camera related stuff are INI files inside the Deltabuild (or fullbuild). However I don't think that will help regarding finding out about the sunshadows since these are indeed render based and I can understand that those can only be found in the engine settings which... I guess no one really have been able to open it up.
Mad Poster
#149 Old 19th Nov 2017 at 1:24 PM
Now of course there has to be SOME way to reverse engineer the game's engine, but it hasn't been found yet. I've looked into it, but haven't gotten very far. I really should spend some more time on that.
If that were done, and if it would enable us to modify the game's shader data, the potential would be very significant.

And you're right, there's a few more INIs in the DeltaBuild/FullBuild that I forgot about. There's a value in there somewhere that lets you change the colour of the top of walls, which for some reason can't be done in-game.

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Lab Assistant
#150 Old 14th Jan 2018 at 6:25 AM
Hi! I would like to know, to have AO in TS3, do you have to use driver version 314? It might be dangerous because my card is pretty new and my cable is going loco (I have to weirdly unplug and plug it every time on startup) and I don't wanna have to bring my PC to the shop again. Are there any other ways to get AO on Nvidia Cards?
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