Watch_Dogs - General moding

The POM has little to do with 3d models, it's a shader, and is usually set as an attribute of a material, probably they've just "unticked" it from everything, I'd say that we should move on this direction, our best bet is to find something like a config file of the materials that allows to re-enable it somewhat.

 

hmm , i was not aware that pom was a shader, the more you know i guess hehe, i never actually studied up on that kind of thing so thanks for informing me that!

 

since pom is a shader, have you guys looked at shaders.dat? it is filled with .fx files that i cannot really make out what you are supposed to do in them but some people might be able to figure out how and where to find the pom in there, just open the .fx in notepad+ and whoo you can see the shaders

 

inc.fx files seems to be code that can be modified ( you can open them with notepad++ ) i found something interesting actually

but i have no idea what that kind of code mean

anyways fx files in parameter folder seems to be cach or dont hold much usable information since they all stat at the start

maybe they are generated from the inc.fx files

the xmls files in materialdescriptors folder seems to define some of the value found in defaultrenderengine.xml, like min value and max, they are formated like environementlighting.lib files , at top you'll see the settings that are in the xml file and some values, then down all the settings from top with more detailed values/description

 

Another music cue that seem to be missing in the actual game is also this one..
@time 20.05
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWQNbRyKppA&list=FLb801Y9FybUgGqzRDh2DrGw

I think its actually a really nice chase music. I'm hoping somebody's been able to locate it.

 

ah, i love that song too, it is in Not a Job for Tyrone if i am correct, but it should be the actual chase music since it sounds so good.

As for the inc.fx, i was looking at those too and i was not able to make out anything that it was supposed to be lol, if only we had a guide from someone who made it lol. If only..

 

I think your work done "night rain", together with that of the day in your youtube video of June is already excellent. If you can add the POM becomes perfect. I hope you will soon release your patch :toke:

 

You're right, I can't believe I missed that, now if only that could be modded into a chase music, it would be AWESOME!!!!...:banana::banana:

 

i think i found that song the other day, i have to look again

 

looking through all these shader files is making me wonder how we would even be able to modify these files...
in other news, look what i found in the shadow.inc.fx file

Code:

#ifdef HACK_WATCHDOG_PC_SKU_FIX_FSM_IN_TUNNEL_FROM_MADMILE_TO_PARKERSQUARE
    //Hardcode an AABB to fix bleeding light in the tunnel from madmile to parkersquare on low end PC. where FSM is of too low quality
    //and produce artifacts in the distance. This should have been fixed by adding occluder in the data however data is already locked
    //as we are late on production.

It seems as if they were pressed hard on time and were late on production, that could explain a couple of things...

ALSO, take a look at "worldtransform.inc.fx" it could have something to do with the pom, it has x,y values in it so... I don't really know but i am just going on what i see...

 

nice find !

spent some times looking at inc.fx files yesterday, they have simple structure like most of the xml files

at top you have some description of what the file will contain, then bottom the values themselves to modify

some values are point float that you can easily modify by converting normal values to point float ( i guess ) then you have very simple " true " or " false " values that you can change

and then you have more complicated stuff like .x .z , algorithmic **** that i have no idea how to even read

also after watching PS3 footage of the game, i am pretty sure now that what we have on PC/PS4 is a port of the old gen version, they clearly couldnt even downgrade the old build (e3, ps4 reveal) to the old gen, they had to rebuild it somehow to make it work first on oldgen then port it to PC/PS4 ,and the fact that we have PS3/X360 config files on the PC version just confirm that, if it was a true PC version, ther's no way they would leave old gen config files, they unified all the versions

i have no doubt that the PS4 can run the old build ( PS4 reveal ) at least @900p, as much as i dont like consoles , they arnt that weak , at least for the PS4

 

you have made a major point! for a while now i have been thinking that they scrapped the game after 2012 and started making it again, maybe even after 2013 because of the old gen, it does not take that long to rebuild a game that was already finished, especially since what they were rebuilding were shaders and other things.
Our theories are supported by the fact that a bunch of the E3 stuff were left in too. They did not have enough time to thoroughly port the game to pc leaving all of the original files in there ( i am going to assume that they kept the original files in to put in the pc version but were too pressed on time and just kept what we had on release) I mean, it only makes sense, how else would they not be able to do things such as volumetric fog, csm shadows, soft shadows, higher quality bloom ( meaning no compression), the rain, wind, sky, pom. It seems as if their excuse was just to keep us from complaining more than we did in the first place, because if they just flat out said, we could not make it too pretty because we did not have enough time.. I mean, you gotta give them something for trying, at least they left the files in there, even if they were not meant to be tampered with....

Anyways, i found an xml that controls how the textures look, you can control whether or not the texture is compressed ( all of them are ) you can make it so the textures are sharpened (it is disabled, this is more than likely why the textures look like shista without msaa), there is something for blending the textures ( would not use that as it sounds more negative than positive), you can also change the color of them, pretty much you can imagine this xml to be the control panel for texture quality. This is great! We can have textures that look much better! But, the xml is quite large since the xml is filled with all of the textures and quality control for each, that means that if you want all the textures to be uncompressed and sharpened, you would have to put in 1 or 0 for each texture ( that is a lot to go through ) i could start doing it now, but the thing is,
school has been going crazy for, I have to study for the A+ test ( the major one for being in IT, one of the most important certifications), also i am getting certified in windows, making things for my school website, it is a lot of work.
I can start working on that xml today though since it is friday, but it would have to be after hours.
Thanks for reading this post with an overage amount of text! lol

 

man just hit enter sometimes when writing a wall of text

anyways what's the xml that you're talking about ? i could take a look at it

 

lol, i edited my original post to make it more readable, here is the name of the xml i am talking about : textureprofiles.xml
it can be found in this directory, shaders_unpack\engine\shaders
it is pretty long, i remember looking through the whole thing thinking i would find something of value in it but it is a bunch of texture names and the quality control for each one.
This is very interesting though considering that we could get textures of the same quality as in the E3 builds.
You know how the textures look so good when you are photoshopping them? But then when you are in game they just don't look as good? This could be what controls the quality of those textures
It is not for each individual texture though
Still, this can increase the quality of the game substantially...

Just so you get a quick preview of what all of them will look like, here is the line of code that you will see for each texture:

wait, what... I just found this while getting an example for the code...

Code:

<profile id="13" displayname="NormalMap Parallax" legacyid="583770668">
		<description>
			<image type="Texture" />
			<color type="NormalMap" />
			<alpha type="Height" values="Smooth" />
			<colorspace type="Linear" />
			<premultiplyalpha enabled="0" />
			<renormalize enabled="0" />
			<bordercolor enabled="0" color="0" />
			<lowprecision enabled="0" />
			<qualityressplittype type="Default" />
		</description>
		<compression enabled="1" weighting="Normalmap" />
		<mipmap type="Auto" filtering="Kaiser" sharpening="None" count="4294967295" disableskipmips="0">
			<fade mipstart="0" blending="0" />
		</mipmap>
	</profile>

normal parallax, that could be of interest...

 

every time I look at the trailer for this game ....I remember always watchdogs ...

 

What game is that..?

Never mind, found it here..:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHNmeA7RFxQ

 

Hello. Essenthy? Could you also upload your modifications? For example, your wet roads?

 

yes i just need to fix one texture and then release it, will post on the first page too

 

damn so much settings, cant recognize any type of texture beside this one, its the fake reflection texures on windows :

Code:

<profile id="17" displayname="Cubemap AlphaBlend" legacyid="1106021792">
		<description>
			<image type="Cubemap" />
			<color type="ColorMap" />
			<alpha type="Blend" values="Smooth" />
			<colorspace type="sRGB" />
			<premultiplyalpha enabled="0" />
			<renormalize enabled="0" />
			<bordercolor enabled="0" color="0" />
			<lowprecision enabled="0" />
			<qualityressplittype type="Default" />
		</description>
		<compression enabled="1" weighting="Color" />
		<mipmap type="Auto" filtering="Kaiser" sharpening="None" count="4294967295" disableskipmips="0">
			<fade mipstart="0" blending="0" />

 

maybe with this though we can get some high quality textures looking the way they are supposed, it might be a big performance hit but some people with a powerful rig would be able to out put the textures at an uncompressed quality, we should look through this more, just saying... especially since i found what normalmap parallax. maybe with this we are one step closer to enabling the parallax occlusion mapping