Guild of Writers

I've been working since the source code was released to try to get a native Mac/Linux version of Plasma running, and over the past year I've been poking a bit at porting the rendering pipeline to OpenGL with shaders.
It's slow progress, since I'm essentially the only one working on it (not just the OpenGL stuff, but also other cross-platform issues). It took me the better part of 11 months to get to this point, considering that I don't actually know OpenGL very well and I've only been able to spend a few hours a month on it.

The DirectX code in Uru is not using shaders, and is basically too old to support any of the new effects that people want to add. Getting it updated would basically involve rewriting most of the pipeline to be shader based (which is a pretty big change).
I'd rather do that shader conversion while also porting to OpenGL, so that we get Mac and Linux support at the same time - essentially for free.

Once the existing pipeline is fully ported, then discussion can start about what sort of things to add and how to add them and how to update existing content. Unfortunately at the current pace, it's going to be a long while. (Even longer for full native Mac/Linux since nobody is even looking at the netcode or PhysX replacements that need to happen)

That looks quite nice already! Is this vertex colors or real-time lighting?

I feel a bit bad for not helping you out on the Mac/Linux front, seeing as I have a personal interest in at least the former. Hopefully I’ll have a bit of time for that in the future. I need an excuse to brush up my 10-years-old OpenGL knowledge! (On the other hand, I seem to recall that using C++11 was a bit of a pain on Mac OS X 10.6. We’ll see.)

Well... I managed to get Myst V and realMyst ME to work with ReShade + SweetFX 2.0. Here are some screenshots:

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eoa 2015-10-25 10-58-55.jpg (1.3 MiB) Viewed 10478 times

eoa 2015-10-25 11-06-23.jpg (786.37 KiB) Viewed 10478 times

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Nice pictures ! The light saturation boost makes the whole image a bit nicer to look at (especially since I'm using a laptop screen which isn't very colorful).

Some time ago I tried to use ReShade+SwFX on Uru, but the D3D8 converter they use has the same problem as the one from ENB. It always crashes the game at some point. Shame
I didn't know it works with Myst V, though, that's good to know.

It doesn't surprise me it works with RMME, though. Unity has good compatibility with wrapper dll's. And those pictures of Channelwood look really good.

It's just a shame there isn't a straightforward way to mod RMME. Reshade may improve things a bit, but the game still needs tons of work on models, textures and shaders before looking right.
And here I'm whining about RMME again...

Got it working in MOUL. The trick was renaming reshade32.dll to d3d9.dll rather than d3d8.dll:

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UruExplorer 2015-10-25 13-41-18.jpg (1.07 MiB) Viewed 10460 times

Before/After

UruExplorer 2015-10-25 13-48-55.jpg (1.07 MiB) Viewed 10460 times

UruExplorer 2015-10-25 13-52-26.jpg (1.06 MiB) Viewed 10460 times

Before/After

Here are the settings I used:

MOUL

Myst V:

realMyst ME

Download ReShade + Sweet FX: Here

Got GEMFX

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Now to try with Uru.

Edit: removing bloom in realMyst and using the GEMFX bloom proved wayy better. Also, now paper looks like the original Myst paper textures. These screenshots look more akin to the original renders now that I've messed with GEMFX settings.

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EDIT: It also works in MOUL...

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Found my best config for Uru:

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Edit: Tweaked a bit:

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Wow some of these improvements look fantastic, especially the book shot of realMyst. The problem I think that needs to be overcomed is that many of the textures in screenshots of Uru and Myst V are so dated and low res, graphical mods won't have the same effect unless they're combined with texture mods.

I found https://www.nexusmods.com/mystonlineuru/mods/2, which works fine on MOUL(a) (the "Pos1" key of my keyboard, I think it's the "Home" key on english keyboards, opens the ReShade panel), but it don't seems to work on "offline Uru CC + Drizzle" (the "Pos1" key don't open the ReShade panel).
Please, do you know if we can use it (and how) on "offline Uru CC + Drizzle", please?

Download this dll and put it into Uru's directory (it's made by the same guy who made ReShade, so it's safe). This makes Uru use Direct3D 9 instead of Direct3D 8, which is required for ReShade to work. (Make sure you already have a d3d9.dll in your Uru folder - if not, reinstall ReShade and make sure it installs the Direct3D 9 dll.)