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This Could Be Very Interesting - AnKor's Shaders

I've been going though all of my sky box textures and weather/cloud xml files to insure that they are tuned for use with AnKor's 2017 shaders. In particular, I'm adjusting the fog color to create a seamless blend at the horizon. AnKor did a fairly effective job of automatically eliminating the old grey band at the transition from terrain to sky, so my work is just an attempt to make the blend a little smoother and rebalance the color gradation from zenith to horizon to be more like what I see when I look out the window.
 
I've made a few other edits to some of weather xml files to eliminate the flickering line that forms when a cloud texture intersects the surface of the terrain. This was generally done only where it was quite noticable and was accomplished by raising the minimum altitude of individual cloud effect entries.


The cloud texture dds files have been checked and edited to eliminate any stray non-transparent corners or edges that may have snuck in the alpha layer.

I've also done a better job with smoothing the skybox files to reduce the speckling you see in the background sky and the seams at the corners of the box.
 
Smooth Blue Sky
AnKor%202017%20Smooth%20Blue%20Sky_zpsxgdfbfgb.jpg


Before and After Elimination of Gray Band at Horizon
AnKor%202017%20Before%20and%20After%20Elimination%20of%20Grey%20Horizon_zpse2zg733k.jpg
 
no idea on these clouds they look ok ,,is mix
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First I feel this shouold be a sticky provided people keep to the point!

Second; how do I make the night darker with Ankor as it still seems too bright if I can see field outlines clearly.
 
One thing that AnKor's shaders do that we don't always appreciate is that they provide different levels of lighting at night as well as in the daytime. If you fly when there is a full moon in the sky objects will be significantly brighter than on a moonless night.

AnKor will have to comment on how he is is setting the overall ambient light level at night, but the effect it has on the ground is controlled in Light.fx by #define GroundBrightness, and #define SunStrength effects both the Sun and the Moon intensity that it adds to the background of ambient light. I'm not sure where the ambient light effect on scenery objects is set.

As has been mentioned before, sometimes it's best controlled simply by temporarily turning down the brightness on your monitor.
 
I couldn't find #define GroundBrightness in the fx file although did see #define SunStrength. I have changed monitor brightness but don't like that approach. Daniel had done a lot of work on making nights darker but UI haven't ried those recently to see how they work with Ankor. So far I am talking about clear skies with stars but no visible moon.
 
#define GroundBrightness should be the very first line in Light.fx and is 1.0 by default. 0.5 makes the landscape a lot darker, but then the airfield scenery objects jump out as being too bright.
 
Sorry, that' s a legacy parameter that has not been included in the recent upload packages, but it still works.

#define GroundBrightness 1.0
 
I am using AnKors_Shaders_25_Feb_2017. Should I replace /#define Winter_Heavy_Snow with #define GroundBrightness 1.0 or just add that?
 
gosd said:
Almost there; when I remove Ankors shaders from the games they run well (in Win 10), but if I attempt to put them back in the game d3d8 and shaders30 are ok but not d3d8.dll that causes the game from not running "config override fie is either corrupt or missing" . Tried running the config file and updating it but no success. So I cannot get the Ankors shaders to work.
Click to expand...

Near the top of your ConfigOverrides.xml file there are a couple of entries that AnKor's 2017 shaders are looking for.
<VersionNumberLowPart val="0"/>
<VersionNumberHighPart val="589824"/>

If you have it working without the shaders, make a copy of the one in \AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\ then try changing those entries to match for use when the shaders are installed.
 
MajorMagee said:
Near the top of your ConfigOverrides.xml file there are a couple of entries that AnKor's 2017 shaders are looking for.
<VersionNumberLowPart val="0"/>
<VersionNumberHighPart val="589824"/>

If you have it working without the shaders, make a copy of the one in \AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\ then try changing those entries to match for use when the shaders are installed.
Click to expand...

They are the same but the shaders still do not work and I still have to remove the d3d8.dll to avoid the game from crashing with the " The configuration override file is either corrupt or missing Please re-run CFS3. CFS3 will now exit " notice.
 
Don't forget there is an entry at the start of the d3d8.ini that fools cfs3 not to try to update the configoverrides file? Is that mentioned in this thread somewhere?
 
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