FUEL RESHADED v5.0 (2024 Feb 01) addon

At my limit with what I can do w/o having access to game engine. Would love to add SSAO, God Rays and better shadows. But, can't figure out how with what I'm limited to in just the shaders. Contacted Asobo year or so ago asking if they could make FUEL game code open-source, but never heard back from them.

Spent time messing with The Dark Mod's shaders, and applying fake PBR / specular BRDF to them. Was interesting learning experience. Swiped a nice rimlighting / rimshine algo from them, but replaced it with one of my own that uses a different fresnel equation.

EmilyWasAway contacted me and pointed me to the FMTK which lets you run FUEL and tracks problems with shader compilation. This saved my sanity on several occasions, as FUEL shader compile would blow up due to a random missing parenthesis, or a variable I renamed and didn't realize was used later in some code or some other crazy stuff I would have pulled my hair out figuring out long ago. It's amazing how quickly development can occur when you have an actual error log to refer to! Thanks, EmilyWasAway!

I get a hair up my rear and mess with the shaders every now and then trying to bolt on new effects, esp as folks creating shaders come up with quick-n-dirty versions of things that might be able to bolt on to the limited shaders FUEL exposes. But, I think I've reached the limit. I get more frustrated than anything working on the shaders now, b/c I'm just constantly reminded how difficult it is trying to do anything new with them. I watch tutorials of folks working with Unreal or Unity GUI's and they just click a few buttons to add God Rays and what-not. Meanwhile, I'm over here wondering how I'd be able to do a new render pass to bolt on Volumetric Fog / God Rays. I think there has to be some way to do it in the horizon scattering code, but can't figure it out. I'm reaching my level of incompetence and frustration.

If you download ReShade, you can make it tie to SecuLauncher.exe (which is the actual program that runs FUEL). Then you can activate Anti-Aliasing, Sharpening & various Color effects shaders. I haven't been able to get any AO shaders to work. It has some 'debanding' shaders, which I was hoping would keep the colors in FUEL from creating the ugly banding (esp noticeable in specular shine lighting). But, doesn't work. It's hit or miss which shaders in ReShade work.

I don't think I can get any more special effects bolted on to the FUEL shaders. Only other one I think I could figure out would be the Oren-Nayer diffuse PBR/BRDF.. but that's for making diffuse colors on objects rough or not rough. It's to do things like skin, cloth, etc colors better. Can't differentiate between material types in FUEL well enough to justify implementing such an expensive diffuse color rgb formula to replace the simpler Lambert diffusion method.

Anyways, I don't think there's any issues. I played quite a few areas to spot-check, and they looked good. Night time transitions are still awful. Headlights are still trying to faux their way through night time. I checked on some optimization tutorials for shaders, and am constantly impressed by all the hacks and tricks Asobo already knew about and baked into the shaders to make absolute magic happen with the limitations of DX9 at the time. (all the optimized math, partial derivitive normals, etc). There are still parts of the code I dont' touch much, b/c I can't figure out what they do (eg: horizon scattering). But, I digress.