I noticed you have quite a few ini edit recommendations on the description page... Are these changes very specific towards utilizing the complete setup only? (Having OR E3, and your ambient occlusion file in the files section) Or are the ini edits universal and could also work and give benefits if say running ORC with ENB and Dxvk
The INI edits are fairly generic, they control low level Gamebryo engine behaviors. Those settings mostly control the base Oblivion game engine, mods tend to put the spotlight on specific settings. Some of them I found from experimentation over the years, some of them were brought to attention due to the needs of this mod. All of them should be useful for all fans of Oblivion.
I purposefully included large descriptions beyond what is necessary for the mod; after experimenting with a wide variety of tweaks, I found the ones I emphasized have the most influence over the kind of appearance I'm aiming for. There was generally not a lot of information available online about the finer details of these settings back in the day, so I decided to contribute my findings here so that search engines may find it.
Anybody, graphics modded or not, can find benefit in at least some of the settings. Keep in mind though, all of the values I've given are suggestions only and may need heavy tweaking depending on the setup
After being forced to install Windows 10 by an increasing number of Steam games dropping support, and finally having time to revisit Oblivion on my Windows 7 drive that I have used for development up till this point, I have found there is a *substantial* difference in appearances between Oblivion as it appears in 7 vs 10. With absolutely no changes of any sort, a given weather has a wildly different, simpler, and somewhat worse appearance in 7. I will now be revisioning the mod around the look and feel of the Windows 10 appearance as I feel like that represents the majority of the userbase these days. Perhaps your bad appearance is due to this effect.
Edit: oops turns out it was just due to All Natural, I think... do you have that installed? I'm about to revamp the appearance based around the effect AN has on weathers. I was using a copy of Oblivion without AN installed to more quickly configure the base weathers, it's a little absurd with all the weathers AN adds. Also responded to the wrong person, classic...
Hiya! Wanted to give this a try, however, I'm crashing whenever I continue my save. I have DXVK, Oblivion Reloaded E3 v3.3mc, this mod and its ambient occlusion patch. I'm also using NAO - Natural and Atmospheric Oblivion with ILOO - Interior Lighting Oblivion Overhaul as I feel these are more lightweight than All Natural and still look really nice. Hoping you can maybe give me a tip as to why it might be crashing. As soon as I remove your preset my save loads with no issue... it's so weird!
Oh! Also, for installation I chose classic and base.
I repair electric bicycles these days, I have a hobbyist level of experience with programming and some other computer science topics. If you check my youtube channel you'll see I'm currently working on making a functional computer in a sandbox game kinda like Falling Sand, I just posted a basic SRAM implementation and probably within a week I'll be posting an ALU. Higher level game dev is something I'm working towards, I have no degrees in anything so going back to school is on the table at some point.
I'm somewhat back! Just a quick update to get playable with the latest E3 update which looks heckin amazing. Stay tuned because I'll be continuing to update the appearance to take advantage of the latest graphical effects!
I got a really low-spec computer I'm working with. Do you think just using Oblivion Reloaded's HDR shader alone is worth it over the strong bloom of vanilla HDR?
Definitely, HDR changes should have essentially zero performance impact, it's all the other stuff you'll have trouble with like shadows. Have you read through the mod description? I've posted a variety of performance tips as I too have a fairly limited machine.
Yeah, some good tips, thanks man. Don't think the BlurShader/ BlurShader HDR settings matter if using Oblivion Reloaded's shader though, as everything under shaders in the OR ini replaces the originals and have their own settings. Could be wrong however.
I do like the way the original "HDR" makes fire look as well though, and OR/ORC's bloom and coloring effects cost me too much fps.
I'm not sure actually, I have a fairly solid memory of finding a problem zone (a house interior in one of the cities, likely Cheydinhal) where there was very bad shimmering, and tweaking those particular values finding an improved appearance. But that was ages ago and I can't remember the context like if I had forced the settings via ingame console (which could possibly have overridden OBR) or whether I had All Natural yet (which mods interior weathers).
I can't see how the Bloom and Coloring effects cost too much FPS but I don't know your device. They're rather simple single-pass image adjustments that are quite crucial for the final appearance, HDR and Coloring each contribute about 50% of the final image appearance where Coloring contributes to the lower half of brightnesses and HDR contributes to the higher half of brightnesses. Using sHDR without the Coloring shader is like buying sunglasses then poking the lenses out. The HDR shader depends completely on the information provided by the Coloring shader, with the vanilla Coloring config (disabling the shader) it will produce a nonsensical appearance.
The Bloom shader pretty much tweaks only highlight colors, so is equivalent to a Coloring shader with a configurable band pass filter. It's completely optional for the configs and honestly I haven't investigated them in a while, their contribution is pretty mild.
Anyways the HDR shader requires 32-64 times as many passes to produce it's appearance and has a rather much more convoluted image analysis algorithm so if the Coloring shader hurts that much you likely won't survive with HDR enabled. I thought you meant the entire HDR package not just one component of the appearance, the singular HDR shader probably isn't all that useful on it's own. If your computer supports the SM3.0 shaders needed for HDR it isn't going to blink at OBR's Coloring and Bloom.
I'm telling you there is a notable 10-20 fps difference between turning the effects on and not doing so. And since I've seen some presets with OBR's HDR on and Coloring/Bloom off (notably one of OBR E3 defaults, as well as WallSOGB's preset in the now defunct Glory of Cyrodiil Guide), I don't think it's quite nonsensical to do so. The effects seem to be always added "on top".
Granted your presets, which are dope and unique btw, wouldn't look good, but I believe there can be an improvement over vanilla; and the new HDR shader interprets the coloring in the last relevant plugin with HDR info for weather, or the Interior HDR settings in Oblivion.ini for interiors without modded weathers (granted the coloring info itself is nonsensical in interiors in this case-- interpreted as white AFAIK, but OBR still offers a way to manage over-bloom).
Let me know your thoughts when you read this--it's hard to find enough info about exactly HOW all this stuff works online.
Hotfix up which should solve a lot of crashing. Hopefully OBR:E3 fixes that annoying behavior soon, for now even non-All Natural users will need to install the entire VolumetricLighting config file for compatibility reasons.
It's actually rather stressful and difficult making comprehensive weather overhauls in OBR with the current state of things, the UI is rather bad. It would be a lot farther along by now if I wasn't playing Tap Tap Revolution for every setting change. This version is probably going to stew for a while as apparently there is a big update for E3 brewing and there's kinda no point in me going any deeper if half of it will need to be redone again.
I think the thing that surprised me most from this update is Medium Roast - I've never really liked the overly saturated look but with the recent adjustment it's captivating. It makes SI have this odd... storybook appearance somehow. The HDR is a touch heavy in some places and may need a tweak but... I kinda like it. In the beginning I made it to fill in a niche, I knew there would be an interest in a more saturated appearance. That's kinda the whole point of the Roasts, a diversity of looks to suit different needs, I "calibrated" them wildly different because I know every screen is different. Really though try it sometime - take a screenshot of a place you really know, a good quality shot with lots of detail and variety, get familiar with it on your normal display. Then look at the screenshot on different devices - absolutely every screen you can bring it up on it will have a totally different feel. Maybe the Medium didn't work on my screen as well back in the day but it rapidly become one of the most popular. I am entranced with the new Medium appearance and might actually play it now. But that exasperates a certain little problem I have... they all look so good! How can I pick one?! Will there someday be a... Unified Roast...?
SI is remarkably hard to tune for, even more so that it has so many quest-specific weathers. It's just so off the wall it's hard to find a good compromize. However it works amazingly well with the volumetric lighting, all the megastructures create a rich and variable lighting environment. Light and Medium are a bit rushed, but they were actually bad with the new HDR look and urgently needed correction whereas the rest are quite fine.
Just found out the Clear sunset horizon color is ridiculously green lol. Perfect example of why excessive testing in one area is harmful - the Nibenay Basin has sides high enough to fully obscure the horizon from the center...
This is the best time for feedback! The appearance is quite incomplete and I'm more receptive to big changes. mcstfuerson says to wait because they are making another large update soon but this is just too darn good to sit on. And then it's all going to have to be redone again probably for the new appearance, so now is the time to make your thoughts heard! Shivering Isles is remarkably hard to tune for, in Cyrodiil everything is much more plain and balanced and tinting is low. SI is zany and wacky and sometimes it's hard to know when there's too much of a good thing.
I'm currently only at the Classic Roast stage of tuning the final appearance so ymmv with the others. My process usually goes something like this: I start with Classic Roast as it's the most forgiving and balanced. Lately I've been sitting on the SI gate island as it's rather well suited to ballparking a target appearance and configuring the largest scale, atmospheric settings like fog tint, sunrises and sets are facilitated by the lack of mountains at that latitude, and the wide open water doesn't clutter the view or impose any colors that would complicate balancing. The island also has widely varied geometry, coloring, and a bit of lighting making it a good test-bed. After getting things vaguely where they should be I'll usually hop to Cheydinhal or wander a few well trodden areas seeing how things measure up. At this phase I'm doing smaller adjustments and messing with the magnitudes of things like brightness levels and fog distances to look good in actual gameplay, the SI island is too bare to really get a sense of scope and balance. In Shivering Isles I go through one of the gates then hang around the area just outside as there is a very sharp transition there for testing and balancing the appearances for both sides. SI usually gets a lot more trial by fire since the realm is so varied it's hard to find one spot that typifies the entire place. Once you've seen one town in Cyrodiil you've more or less seen them all, at least from a lighting perspective. Once I'm happy that I have a cohesive enough appearance, I'll switch to Dark Roast. Classic Roast is rather "flat" in it's dynamic range and is poor at judging relative luminosities. Dark Roast is the highest contrast setup but has minimal color inflection so I use it to fine-tune the brightest and darkest areas only. I'll go over all setups at all times of day again, tweaking appearances so things don't look too excessively bold, which Classic tends to permit. I'll then switch to Medium Roast as it boldly richens colors, but has low luma contrast. I'll use Medium Roast to adjust tones only and do minimal brightness adjustment, if any, once again going over all weathers at all times, usually from a static position such as the SI island, the Infernal Shack, whatever city I'm in at the time. At this point the appearance is probably quite playable and fairly close to the final look, but lacks much playtesting, and I'll have uploaded it since it's fairly stable. I'll start playing like normal so that different lighting and environmental conditions are put to the test, and my eyes can have time to reset and my inspiration to refill. Sometimes you gotta shelf it for a bit and come back with a fresh look to see that thing that was really wrong. I'll switch Roasts periodically while looking for anything off, gradually adjusting tints and tones as I grow used to the appearance and get a better idea of what that last little touch might be.
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I purposefully included large descriptions beyond what is necessary for the mod; after experimenting with a wide variety of tweaks, I found the ones I emphasized have the most influence over the kind of appearance I'm aiming for. There was generally not a lot of information available online about the finer details of these settings back in the day, so I decided to contribute my findings here so that search engines may find it.
Anybody, graphics modded or not, can find benefit in at least some of the settings. Keep in mind though, all of the values I've given are suggestions only and may need heavy tweaking depending on the setup
Edit: oops turns out it was just due to All Natural, I think... do you have that installed? I'm about to revamp the appearance based around the effect AN has on weathers. I was using a copy of Oblivion without AN installed to more quickly configure the base weathers, it's a little absurd with all the weathers AN adds. Also responded to the wrong person, classic...
Oh! Also, for installation I chose classic and base.
I just got a new computer so it will take me a while to get Oblivion up and running. Hopefully I can test some stuff out for you soon :D
I do like the way the original "HDR" makes fire look as well though, and OR/ORC's bloom and coloring effects cost me too much fps.
I can't see how the Bloom and Coloring effects cost too much FPS but I don't know your device. They're rather simple single-pass image adjustments that are quite crucial for the final appearance, HDR and Coloring each contribute about 50% of the final image appearance where Coloring contributes to the lower half of brightnesses and HDR contributes to the higher half of brightnesses. Using sHDR without the Coloring shader is like buying sunglasses then poking the lenses out. The HDR shader depends completely on the information provided by the Coloring shader, with the vanilla Coloring config (disabling the shader) it will produce a nonsensical appearance.
The Bloom shader pretty much tweaks only highlight colors, so is equivalent to a Coloring shader with a configurable band pass filter. It's completely optional for the configs and honestly I haven't investigated them in a while, their contribution is pretty mild.
Anyways the HDR shader requires 32-64 times as many passes to produce it's appearance and has a rather much more convoluted image analysis algorithm so if the Coloring shader hurts that much you likely won't survive with HDR enabled. I thought you meant the entire HDR package not just one component of the appearance, the singular HDR shader probably isn't all that useful on it's own. If your computer supports the SM3.0 shaders needed for HDR it isn't going to blink at OBR's Coloring and Bloom.
Granted your presets, which are dope and unique btw, wouldn't look good, but I believe there can be an improvement over vanilla; and the new HDR shader interprets the coloring in the last relevant plugin with HDR info for weather, or the Interior HDR settings in Oblivion.ini for interiors without modded weathers (granted the coloring info itself is nonsensical in interiors in this case-- interpreted as white AFAIK, but OBR still offers a way to manage over-bloom).
Let me know your thoughts when you read this--it's hard to find enough info about exactly HOW all this stuff works online.
It's actually rather stressful and difficult making comprehensive weather overhauls in OBR with the current state of things, the UI is rather bad. It would be a lot farther along by now if I wasn't playing Tap Tap Revolution for every setting change. This version is probably going to stew for a while as apparently there is a big update for E3 brewing and there's kinda no point in me going any deeper if half of it will need to be redone again.
I think the thing that surprised me most from this update is Medium Roast - I've never really liked the overly saturated look but with the recent adjustment it's captivating. It makes SI have this odd... storybook appearance somehow. The HDR is a touch heavy in some places and may need a tweak but... I kinda like it.
In the beginning I made it to fill in a niche, I knew there would be an interest in a more saturated appearance. That's kinda the whole point of the Roasts, a diversity of looks to suit different needs, I "calibrated" them wildly different because I know every screen is different. Really though try it sometime - take a screenshot of a place you really know, a good quality shot with lots of detail and variety, get familiar with it on your normal display. Then look at the screenshot on different devices - absolutely every screen you can bring it up on it will have a totally different feel. Maybe the Medium didn't work on my screen as well back in the day but it rapidly become one of the most popular.
I am entranced with the new Medium appearance and might actually play it now. But that exasperates a certain little problem I have... they all look so good! How can I pick one?! Will there someday be a... Unified Roast...?
Light and Medium are a bit rushed, but they were actually bad with the new HDR look and urgently needed correction whereas the rest are quite fine.
I'm currently only at the Classic Roast stage of tuning the final appearance so ymmv with the others. My process usually goes something like this:
I start with Classic Roast as it's the most forgiving and balanced. Lately I've been sitting on the SI gate island as it's rather well suited to ballparking a target appearance and configuring the largest scale, atmospheric settings like fog tint, sunrises and sets are facilitated by the lack of mountains at that latitude, and the wide open water doesn't clutter the view or impose any colors that would complicate balancing. The island also has widely varied geometry, coloring, and a bit of lighting making it a good test-bed.
After getting things vaguely where they should be I'll usually hop to Cheydinhal or wander a few well trodden areas seeing how things measure up. At this phase I'm doing smaller adjustments and messing with the magnitudes of things like brightness levels and fog distances to look good in actual gameplay, the SI island is too bare to really get a sense of scope and balance.
In Shivering Isles I go through one of the gates then hang around the area just outside as there is a very sharp transition there for testing and balancing the appearances for both sides. SI usually gets a lot more trial by fire since the realm is so varied it's hard to find one spot that typifies the entire place. Once you've seen one town in Cyrodiil you've more or less seen them all, at least from a lighting perspective.
Once I'm happy that I have a cohesive enough appearance, I'll switch to Dark Roast. Classic Roast is rather "flat" in it's dynamic range and is poor at judging relative luminosities. Dark Roast is the highest contrast setup but has minimal color inflection so I use it to fine-tune the brightest and darkest areas only. I'll go over all setups at all times of day again, tweaking appearances so things don't look too excessively bold, which Classic tends to permit.
I'll then switch to Medium Roast as it boldly richens colors, but has low luma contrast. I'll use Medium Roast to adjust tones only and do minimal brightness adjustment, if any, once again going over all weathers at all times, usually from a static position such as the SI island, the Infernal Shack, whatever city I'm in at the time.
At this point the appearance is probably quite playable and fairly close to the final look, but lacks much playtesting, and I'll have uploaded it since it's fairly stable. I'll start playing like normal so that different lighting and environmental conditions are put to the test, and my eyes can have time to reset and my inspiration to refill. Sometimes you gotta shelf it for a bit and come back with a fresh look to see that thing that was really wrong. I'll switch Roasts periodically while looking for anything off, gradually adjusting tints and tones as I grow used to the appearance and get a better idea of what that last little touch might be.