These are my customized shaders for Amnesia: The Dark Descent, which I've been messing around with in random intervals for the past ~2 years (it wasn't much different most of that time, I'm only releasing it now because I'm really happy with it and I think people might be interested).

The shaders have been heavily modified using a number of mathematical functions. As a result, there will be a small performance difference, but in my testing it has been extremely minimal.


The exact changes I've made are as follows:

Physically Accurate (Linear) Lighting:

  • Real light operates linearly, meaning two identical light bulbs together will always be twice as bright as one. Computers, however, operate perceptually, a holdover from CRT monitors that tried to optimize readability in certain lighting conditions. What the new shaders do is convert lighting to a linear colorspace at the time of computation, and then afterwards convert it back to a preceptual colorspace for display, through simple gamma correction. This means that light adds together physically correctly now, so colors are cleaner and more accurate.
  • I've also replaced the default linear light falloff with a semi-quadratic falloff, which is more realistic and plays better with the linear colorspace.

Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion:

  • Ambient shading is now significantly softer and more accurate, basically meaning it looks more natural and realistic.
  • Artifacts have been greatly reduced, so the entire image is cleaner. I designed the effect to look good even at the lowest settings (Medium Resolution - 4 Samples) so you don't have to crank the samples up to get rid of blocky shading.
  • Over-shading is no longer a problem, so things that shouldn't be darkened aren't. Most notably floors and walls running parallel to where you're looking aren't completely shaded over their entire surface, which was one of the biggest problems with the original effect.
  • Dark halos (those unrealistic outlines around objects) have been corrected, so shading is only where it should be (minus the artifacts cause by skyboxes, which can't be helped).

Bloom:

  • Bloom is softer, providing more natural gradients around bright objects and preventing harsh brightness clipping.
  • The bloom shader's additive blend function has been completely replaced with my own custom blend function, which actually serves to even out bright spots as well as making bloom much softer.
  • NOTE: The blue object outline effect uses the same blur shader as the Bloom effect. Since bloom is softer now, so is the object outline, to the point that you can barely see it. There's no way of preventing this, and I don't mind myself, but it's worth pointing out. The object rim light is unaffected, so you can still tell what items you can pick up.

Dissolve:

  • This one's pretty much just personal taste. The new dissolve texture is based on blue-noise, which is more evenly distributed and less grainy. Again, personal taste, it's just different from the original.
  • The source of this texture can be found on Christoph Peters' blog here.

Enemy Glow:

  • Enemies don't glow in the dark anymore! Well, they still do, but it's so faint now you can only see them when they're moving around a lot and/or uncomfortably close to you.

Now obviously these shaders still aren't perfect (see: I don't know how to write OpenGL shaders), but I'm very happy with the results, and consider it a marked improvement over the original shaders. There are a few things I still want to fix, but I want to see what everyone thinks about it in the meantime.

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Stayd's Enhanced Shaders v3.0

Stayd's Enhanced Shaders v3.0

Full Version

Added gamma correction to lighting, for physically accurate colors. Also made numerous tweaks to SSAO and Bloom.

Stayd's Enhanced Shaders v2.0

Stayd's Enhanced Shaders v2.0

Full Version 1 comment

Overhauls bloom blending function and tweaks SSAO.

Stayd's Enhanced Shaders v1.1

Stayd's Enhanced Shaders v1.1

Full Version 1 comment

v1.1 - Small update that fixes a problem with the object highlight shader (when you pick items up) which evidently shares the Bloom shaders' blur file...

Stayd's Enhanced Shaders v1.0

Stayd's Enhanced Shaders v1.0

Full Version 1 comment

v1.0 - Initial Release. Contains improved Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion and Bloom shaders, as well as a new blue-noise texture for the solid dissolve...

Post comment Comments  (0 - 10 of 14)
deus_nsf
deus_nsf

Looks fantastic for bloom and color correction for lighting, however I am less convinced with SSAO, SSAO looks worse than before and is just way too large.

I would suggest everyone to install those, except the ones for SSAO.

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RoozyDB
RoozyDB

When I tried to launch the game with this, a BlackBox Error popped up. Can you help me please?

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TheWitherPlayer
TheWitherPlayer

Hi, When I try to launch Amnesia, it gives me a FATAL ERROR. Am I doing something wrong?

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Badcat5550
Badcat5550

Looks great, Good job!

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Sandro1996
Sandro1996

Looks interesting. I will test it while I can :)
It works in full conversion mods too?

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Stayd Creator
Stayd

Yep, it works perfectly with full conversions too (given that they don't modify the same files, which I don't believe any other mods do).

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ʟogan
ʟogan

The bloom effect is messing with the overall image contrast, burning the colors, and creating banding at lower light levels. I have an off/on pic set for comparison Imgur.com

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Stayd Creator
Stayd

Thanks for the heads up!
v2.0 is now up, which should fix most of the problems with the old bloom. It still alters image contrast, but now it's intentional, and only evens out bright spots.

Reply Good karma+3 votes
ʟogan
ʟogan

Much nicer! Thanks for the update

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Guest
Guest

se ve muy bien

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