Dev update: new bloom pipeline working news - Serious Sam Fusion: HDR postprocessing mod for Serious Sam Fusion 2017

I didn't really expect this to work, but after getting some really annoying problems out of the way I managed to get the custom bloom pipeline integrated and working inside the game.

This means bloom is more pronounced now and responds a lot more to different brightness levels, giving everything a more dynamic and appealing look. On top of that, due to the somewhat "physically based" nature, it softens up the overall look and makes things blend together a bit more. (Also, the lens-dirt effect works way better now)

One of the downsides is that the game wasn't designed with more responsive HDR effects like this in mind, so some objects or textures have less then optimal brightness levels or colors: causing either too intense highlights or not being visible enough. To name a few:

• some weapons and other surfaces have fairly bright reflections that can look a bit overkill (but turning down bloom intensity would make it practically invisible on other objects)
• laser projectiles in general have "bad" brightness & color values
• some things like torches/flames, a few projectiles types, particle effects, etc. could use more brightness to make them pop out better

But still, there's a lot of things that work suprisingly well, like:

• lava textures in general
• some enemy projectiles
• pretty much anything that glows (glowing eyes, etc; highlighted objects are a bit bright, though)

Here's a bunch of screenshots of the new look in action. I hope they can convey some of the changes as well as the overall feel, since these are getting close to the intended final look:

As of now, there's no download, yet, sorry. There are still a few things that need to be done, including:

• value tweaking
• detecting the right current resolution (in this specific version I'm simply assuming 1080p)
• detecting resolution changes (and reacting to them properly)
• the new bloom is independent of the graphics settings. if the default bloom is enabled in the settings it's still rendered in the background but ignored (-> wasted performance)
  -> some elegant way to either prevent the original bloom from being rendered or a way to notify the user that they should turn it off, to ensure optimal performance
• cleaner resource management
• fixing some minor glitches
• test if there are settings-combinations which break things
• framework related things (might be too technical and boring to explain here in detail)
• settings? (not really planned and probably not even needed)

After solving the most important ones, I think I'll release another test version.

That's it for now, cheers :)