V 3.0: Lens flares & dirt, visor reflections / water droplets, god rays, depth of field, night & thermal vision scopes, dynamic wet surfaces with reflections, rainbows, volumetric light & fog, colored speculars and many other effects.
It's incredibly been one year and a half now since I published here on moddb the very first screenshot with sun shafts ever done in SoC, made by Ket and me. Other modders followed remaking the effect, some of them in all honesty quite nicely, others rather poorly.
After having been working on many other features since then, Ket and me have taken our time to make the best of our sun shafts effect, at least what we would define as being the best. The result is now very close to what could be called a final release state.
I am very well aware that not everybody will completly like the final results, but I can ensure that there will be more than enough settings allowing you to adjust whatever part of the effect you like to your personal favor ;)
It's the subtile effect that I like
you can have it even more subtle if you like, without completely loosing the effect. That's one of the tweaks we did in the past weeks. With some other mods, if you tone the sun shafts' intensity too much down you either wouldn't notice a thing, or the effect would not look nice anymore.
Wow...that's gorgeous man!
Thanks. And that one is just pure vanilla textures and weathers - only the shaders make the visual difference here.
IMO this effect is the biggest difference in visuals between SoC and CS/CoP.
I'm just glad that you guys are still working on this. Even if it's very slowly. Depressing as hell when promising mods end early. I'm leaving SOC installed until this releases.
I know that our progress is not as fast as most of you would have anticipated - me as well. But as you say we are still working on it and hoping to get a release ready at least before SoC is dead. Hopefully even much sooner ;)
I think what a lot of people didn't realise for a long time is that me and meltac chose to add godrays via shaders only. There might be other mods out there that hacked some DLLs and added godrays that way but to us it made more sense to do it purely in shaders to make the rays as versatile as possible. That did lead to some expected drawbacks to overcome but what took the longest was figuring out what to do with the unexpected hurdles and getting the very best possible settings.
Naturally settings are very subjective meltac likes one thing where I opted for another for concept/design/minor technical limitation reasons, but one thing is for certain - with the right settings these godrays are every bit as good and maybe better than those in CS/CoP because their so customisable :)