Amazingly Realistic Immersion Mod

@Old Duck i sincerely appreciate all the work you've done and time you've taken to help us all out. i play E:D in VR exclusively and won't be getting Odyssey so i'm kinda stuck with Horizons for the time being..

i'm on my way to Colonia and out in the middle of nowhere. is there a way that i could keep your shader setup but also use another key bind (like F6 or some other unused key) to turn all the space shaders on and off. the reason i ask is that being waaaaay out in the middle of nowhere i may want to look at the full colors of nebulas and such (and take pictures of them) while keeping the ability to keep the inside lights off. the only way i know how to do it is to put a dash '-' in front of your shader filenames to temporarily disable them and then restart the game.
That's a good question. I don't know if there is an EASY way to disable custom shaders via the ini file. I would think there is, but I'm unaware of the specifics. The hard way is to pass a variable to the shader itself to bypass my customizations, but I doubt you want to mess with that.
 
Cool mod. I was able to map F1 to my PS4 touchpad, so I can toggle the HUD on and off easily. And the other tweaks you made make everything look much more clear. Thanks.
 
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@Old Duck - Thanks for all your hard work on this. The positive community response is a testament to it!

I hate to press, but since Odyssey won't be supporting VR, it would still be awesome to at least get whatever work you've done on "blue skies" for Horizons. At least us VR-heads will be able to experience something akin to Odyssey. Do you feel you could release whatever progress you've made?

-z
 
@Old Duck - Thanks for all your hard work on this. The positive community response is a testament to it!

I hate to press, but since Odyssey won't be supporting VR, it would still be awesome to at least get whatever work you've done on "blue skies" for Horizons. At least us VR-heads will be able to experience something akin to Odyssey. Do you feel you could release whatever progress you've made?
It’s more about the problem that a major update like Odyssey is very likely to mess with shaders, what they do and how they work. So, even if he (or anyone else) were to do a “blue sky” shader mod for Horizons, he would be ill-advised to do it before at the very least the first Odyssey beta.
 
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I was finally able to get rid of that annoying "float right in your face in VR" notification! I was also able to get rid of those side lines without losing the important bits. This was not trivial (the coding is simple, but solving the initial puzzle was not). I also don't know if my code would work on radically different screen resolutions.. I'll test in VR later.
I'm going to be suspending work on the shaders until next year. I'll also be removing all blue skybox code from my own shaders (I'll make a backup first) in preparation of Odyssey. I just watched the Dev Diary, and their atmospheric worlds definitely look better than anything I can whip in with a shader hack. That said, I do foresee making a "thick atmosphere" mod when Odyssey is released, which will be much easier than trying to simulate an atmosphere on our current airless moons.

Sometime in the next month or two, I'll release the latest stable version of my d3dx.ini file along with some of the shaders I am using. After that, I'm going to wait for Odyssey, as I suspect there will be serious changes to the current shaders, along with the addition of new ones. It is likely I'll have to redo this mod for Odyssey, which is another reason I'm going into "feature freeze" now.
I think your HUD looks amazing. Thought it's not using the colours I would personally use, I can tell that you have managed to alter the shaders so that one thing doesn't automatically change most other things as changing the HUD in the normal way does.

Would there be a possibility that you could consider releasing shaders for changing the HUD like that, with some comments included for where to alter the code for changing the colours? I particularly would like to be able to change the "main" HUD colours independently from the radar, target, and "mouseover" colour of targets, such as enemy ships, friendly ships etc. For example, if I wanted enemy ships to always be red on radar and in space, targeted or not, that's not possible right now independent from the rest of the HUD. Similarly, I would like to be able to change the target reticule, leading circle, and module target independent from the rest of the HUD.

I'm not expecting you to do any extra work for anything you're not interested in, but I think it looks like you've been able to do this already. Would love to be able to do that myself! I've been trying to make a generally dark HUD and lights of to be more forgiving on the eyes, as you do inside a ship at night, but also want a high contrast on the reticule so that it doesn't bleed into bright backgrounds such as stars or thrusters.

Love all the work you've done and all the patience you've shown with us!
 
Thanks for your hard work - this mod looks lovely! Is there a way to use it to get rid of these two (IMO) excessively intrusive side lights in the AspX? The F2 toggle dims the shadows some, but doesn't disable the main light sources themselves.

(Lights on: Source: https://i.imgur.com/CzKmgfG.png
, lights off: Source: https://i.imgur.com/DL8oOiA.png
)
I don't have an AspX, but I believe one of these two segments will do that for you:

Code:
 ;Turn off Interior lights. This turns off annoying flashing red lights, but it also turns off
; some external lights as well (including station lights). Recommended for miners. Toggle with key.
[ShaderOverrideCockpitLights]
Hash=8330ab10a104d1b1
if $showInteriorLights == 0
  Handling=skip
endif

; This turns off the lighting around crew stations in the cockpit (it also turns off many lights externally on the ship & at star ports).
[ShaderOverrideExternalLights]
Hash=4835e73a2f5d3f63
if $showInteriorLights == 0
  Handling=skip
endif
 
I'm not ignoring you folks. Well, okay, I confess, I am ignoring you at the moment because I have this new toy called FS2020, so all things ED have taken a back-burner for awhile. Give me a couple of weeks to get past the honeymoon phase (and to finish some IRL projects) and I'll see what I can do with these requests.
 
I don't have an AspX, but I believe one of these two segments will do that for you:

Code:
 ;Turn off Interior lights. This turns off annoying flashing red lights, but it also turns off
; some external lights as well (including station lights). Recommended for miners. Toggle with key.
[ShaderOverrideCockpitLights]
Hash=8330ab10a104d1b1
if $showInteriorLights == 0
  Handling=skip
endif

; This turns off the lighting around crew stations in the cockpit (it also turns off many lights externally on the ship & at star ports).
[ShaderOverrideExternalLights]
Hash=4835e73a2f5d3f63
if $showInteriorLights == 0
  Handling=skip
endif
They do not! Subjectively this second setting turns off a bit more lights around the star ports, but these two are still not one of them. (Thanks for the suggestion, though!)
 

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Well, okay, I confess, I am ignoring you at the moment because I have this new toy called FS2020
Quite alright, my friend. I'd just come off an X-Plane 11 binge so hard my family was beginning to wonder about me before I came back to ED, so you just go ahead and enjoy FS2020 for as long as you feel like it (I'd love to join you, but that will have to wait until I win the lottery and can afford a rig that will run it).

You've already done amazing amounts of work to increase my enjoyment of the graphics in ED, although I must admit to lusting heavily for your HUD setup. There just aren't any of the "regular" NO2O settings that work for me.

Keep flying, CMDR, and keep the blue side up!
 
(I'd love to join you, but that will have to wait until I win the lottery and can afford a rig that will run it).
FWIW, I had the XPlane demo, and MSFS runs better on my humble gaming laptop than XPlane does. In other words, you might already have a rig that can run it, unless you were playing XPlane in the lowest settings. MSFS has done some truly amazing coding when it comes to performance. It blows FSX out of the water on the same hardware, despite looking 1000 times better.

Speaking of mods, I've already taken my camera to my local airport to get all the photos I need to build a detailed replica in MSFS. I did this years ago for FS2004. I'm just waiting for a good (free and simple) scenery editor tool to be released.
 
FWIW, I had the XPlane demo, and MSFS runs better on my humble gaming laptop than XPlane does. In other words, you might already have a rig that can run it, unless you were playing XPlane in the lowest settings. MSFS has done some truly amazing coding when it comes to performance. It blows FSX out of the water on the same hardware, despite looking 1000 times better.
Hmm. You're tempting me. :)

I was running X-Plane with some pretty taxing settings, and it still ran fine on my aging i5/970 box (oh, and almost exclusively ran the Zibo 738 too, which doesn't make the load any lighter), so maybe I can run FS2020! Thanks for that info. All I had to go on previously was the testimony of Race Rig YouTubers, which wasn't helpful to me at all.
 
Hmm. You're tempting me. :)

I was running X-Plane with some pretty taxing settings, and it still ran fine on my aging i5/970 box (oh, and almost exclusively ran the Zibo 738 too, which doesn't make the load any lighter), so maybe I can run FS2020! Thanks for that info. All I had to go on previously was the testimony of Race Rig YouTubers, which wasn't helpful to me at all.
Well, research before you bite the bullet. My specs are Intel i7-9750H, GeForce GTX 1660 Ti 6GB, 16GB DDR4 (gaming laptop) and it works amazing well.
 
My plan is to map the toggle for this to my FSS key, so that entering the FSS automatically turns on the HUD shader and exiting turns it back off again.

That sounds ideal.

I'm still working my way through this thread, so I apologize if this has been subsequently answered already, but are you binding to your keyboard or HOTAS?

I know you've mentioned playing in VR, so I'm assuming HOTAS - How would I know what the "button" on my HOTAS is to create my own toggle bindings?

For example, in the ED binding settings, the trigger on my joystick is "Joy_1", but it also refers to a button my throttle as "Joy_1". They're referred to by the same name, yet they obviously function and bind independently, so there must be an additional variable or button name I'm not aware of.

Hopefully, my question makes sense and you can see what bit of information/understanding I'm lacking.
 
That sounds ideal.

I'm still working my way through this thread, so I apologize if this has been subsequently answered already, but are you binding to your keyboard or HOTAS?

I know you've mentioned playing in VR, so I'm assuming HOTAS - How would I know what the "button" on my HOTAS is to create my own toggle bindings?

For example, in the ED binding settings, the trigger on my joystick is "Joy_1", but it also refers to a button my throttle as "Joy_1". They're referred to by the same name, yet they obviously function and bind independently, so there must be an additional variable or button name I'm not aware of.

Hopefully, my question makes sense and you can see what bit of information/understanding I'm lacking.
I'm using keyboard, as I don't know how to map anything else except an XBox controller (which I don't have).

As for the post you are quoting, I've since figured out how to do conditional shader skipping, meaning that the HUD shader will automatically turn on whenever using the FSS regardless how one activates the FSS. I was running into trouble with the previous system falling out of sync (in my case, it was mapped to the X key, which was great until I typed in chat "Hey dudes, I'm eXploring right now!"). The new and improved d3dx.ini is much better than what I've posted here, but I need to do more work on it to make it ready for public consumption. Because of IRL projects, this probably won't happen until late September or early October (worst case scenario).
 
Here you go!

Code:
<MatrixRed> 0, 0.2, 1 </MatrixRed>
<MatrixGreen> 0, 1, 0 </MatrixGreen>
<MatrixBlue> 1, 0, 0 </MatrixBlue>
That will give you my "before" color scheme.
just making my way thro
I may be a noob, but I'm a very very clever noob ;)
You are indeed a very clever noob, im reading this thread, been here for two hours now, I dont understand most the conversation but like the primary school kid I am, I'm loving the pictures! Frontier need to take notes, for real. Id pay ARX for some of this stuff.
 
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