Cel Shader mod for Crysis Wars

Cel Shader

Crysis Wars mod | Released 2010

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Welcome in your Crysis hand-drawn world! If you ever asked yourself if Crysis could look in another way, here you have found your reply.
Cel Shader mod for Crysis and Crysis Wars is made to alter the graphic output of the game but still allowing you to play in the original game maps and expecially without request you to load any mod.
The modification is based on modified shader files, this allows the players to play using it directly into the original game maps. The mod does not request any configuration and/or installation and it works in DirectX 10 and 9 with and without Anti Aliasing.

Features

Hand-drawn world
Playable in Crysis and Crysis Wars
Working in DX10 and DX9

How does it work?

Danny02 wrote: When modding shaders for Crysis or any other game you always face 2 problems.

How to implement the desired effect?

How to integrate it into the game?

First problem: I wanted all edges of objects to be colored black. So I needed to detect those edges with some algorithm.
In image processing in most cases filters are a good point to start if you want to highlight something. So I tried a simple edge detection filter which give me some mediocre results.
Normal edge detection filters work the way, that the check all pixels of a image and highlight pixel which are not similar to their neighbors.
Cause I applied this filter on the final image I got all sort of false edges, not only at object edges but also on edges in textures.

The final solution was to apply the filter on the depth of the scene and not on the color and apply the colored edges to the final image.

Second problem: Modding Shaders follows the same way as modding any other editable file of a game, like LUA files, textures or models. You can't change the behavior of the game on which files it uses or loads, but similar to modding LUA files you can change how the game is working.
So when modding a shader you have to look at what resources your shader needs and in which stage of the rendering process your shader should be placed.
Then you have to find a already existing shader of the game which matches those criteria and modify it the way that it not only does the work it was made for but also the work of your desired effect.
In my case I altered the shader which normally is used for rendering fog in the levels.