Pinball Arcade with SweetFX - lightness control, bloom, etc.

[mpad]

Hey SilverBalls,
thanks for the links. you don't need anything else like radeonpro with win8.1, but reading through this got me on the right track!
it had to do with the 32 and 64 bit version of the dll's. you need to use it according what the game is programmed like, not the OS.
so it was my fault because I thought I used the 64 bit dlls before, but apparently I hadn't.
I used sweetfx mostly on 64bit crysis, som my standard was 64 bit... whatever.
No I'm gonna test your settings switcher...Thanks again!

So whoever has issues getting it to run:
TPA (and most games) need the standard 32 bit dll's.
You can leave the TPA Postprocessing ON (ball).
You can make further adjustment via NVIDIA control panel (I do all the FXAA and Anisotropic filtering there).
It is advised to uninstall Geforce Experience (who needs that anyway), it causes isssues sometimes.

I'm a bit curious if this also works for VP, now that it is dx9.
even zen could get a little darker for me
...so lot's of things to try.

UPDATE: zen getting more colorfull is a pain, have yet to find good settings.
VP is awesome! Just testet with indiana jones and it is a blast.
my god why has nobody tried this. and it was there all the time
thanks again PinballPerson for reminding us !

 

[SilverBalls]

Glad you got it working.

I also tried SweetFX with VP this week and it works well. The night mod tables are now even darker and better in my opinion.

 

[mpad]

yeah, just tried indy and didn't stop playing since

posted it over at VPU, maybe if more people use it we get better settings and maybe someone comes up with a settings switcher through pinballX (you haven't, have you ?)
http://vpuniverse.com/forums/topic/1788-sweetfx/

 

[SilverBalls]

Actually the switcher is quite generic so should be configurable to work with VP. Might just need to add some ini defined params for the table name and tweak some things but it is doable. I am working next 2 weekends and am away from home so might not get to it for a bit, but will at some point.

 

[shutyertrap]

You guys are coming up with some interesting looks to the tables. I wish could it could overcome some of the poor choices for light sources that FS used. I refer to where light seems to be coming from overhead and lighting the tops of things. It is readily apparent when the apron or coin door is glowing same as the table. But I like that you all have found something that works as a mod. If only FS would let the community go hog wild in this respect, because the results would no doubt be incredible.

 

[SilverBalls]

You guys are coming up with some interesting looks to the tables. I wish could it could overcome some of the poor choices for light sources that FS used. I refer to where light seems to be coming from overhead and lighting the tops of things. It is readily apparent when the apron or coin door is glowing same as the table. But I like that you all have found something that works as a mod. If only FS would let the community go hog wild in this respect, because the results would no doubt be incredible.

And it would be nothing for Farsight to be ashamed about. They are a small team and with their monthly commitments they cannot afford to let a resource spends many hours per table tweaking lighting. Drawing on the community would be the ideal situation.

 

[Jim O'Brien]

Using this with Radeon Pro and it is so simple with that program because it already has a tab dedicated to SweetFX, it's as simple as copy and paste for the text and setting your defaults were the program will launch from.

 

[mpad]

And it would be nothing for Farsight to be ashamed about. They are a small team and with their monthly commitments they cannot afford to let a resource spends many hours per table tweaking lighting. Drawing on the community would be the ideal situation.

Absolutely.

 

[SilverBalls]

SweetFXIniSwitcherVP for Visual Pinball

I just managed to update my switcher script to work with Visual Pinball and PinballX. The only change from the PinballX side is to change the LaunchBeforeEXE name in the Pinball.ini file. Instructions are in the readme.
You can switch between ini files and SweetFX off all of the press of a single button. I now do this in my cabinet for PA and VP.

This is a SPECIFIC version for VP as extra things were needed:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/7wt0vf94a8fo0zw/SweetFXIniSwitcherVP.zip?dl=0

Mpad: You settings look really good - if you can send it to me I can add it to the zip. Thanks

 

[SilverBalls]

Just reuploaded SweetFXIniSwitcherVP with mPad's excellent SweetFX setting files, however I changed the SweetFX keys to have the default ones.

 

[SilverBalls]

Sorry to anyone who has setup the VP version - there is another change to the Visual Pinball version. Please re-download SweetFXIniSwitcherVP v1.2 and in the PinballX config and make it call SweetFXIniSwitcherVP using the LaunchBeforeExecutable param instead. The readme.txt is updated. I found problems when exiting other versions of Visual Pinball fron PinballX when using it's System_1, etc. By launching with LaunchBeforeExecutable the whole thing is cleaner as my script no longer needs to launch VP, and it works for all VP versions in PinballX.

Same link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/7wt0vf94a8fo0zw/SweetFXIniSwitcherVP.zip?dl=0

 

[Rooter]

I just stumbled upon this. It's great! This thread should be stickied. Thanks everyone.

 

[nudnick]

My God ... I'm having so much fun with this. This is one of the best post tips ever. This and the Nvidia tweak for flipper lag and the up and coming Free Camera Mode. Thanks to those who made these things happen. WOW. No need to keep *****in at FarSight with the kick ass moders around.

After playing around with it a bit, I recommend taking a screen shot of your Pinball Arcade folder before SweetFX in it. I've tested. Just delete anything that the Sweet FX extract adds and your back to normal. Having the ability to edit the Settings.txt is just awesome. This is something that FarSight will not offer us. I've got mine set up really sweet. I don't know what FarSight has to do to add the "dark Room" effect, but I can guarantee they are editing the same gamma and gauss settings but will not offer the ability to change saturation or bloom strength or room brightness, etc.

 

[Indy99]

Wow, great thread!! Some very good ideas here. This gives me some hope for the future....haven't felt that way for a long time. Very cool!

 

[_gl]

Haven't tried but I have programmed glow effects.

The reason everything goes blurry with strong glow intensities is that you normally don't actually want to blur everything, only bright pixels above a certain threshold. That's why you see parts of the playfield glowing that shouldn't as they're not light sources, and everything goes blurry.

Ideally you actually want to do glow processing during lighting calculation, because there you typically have realistic light intensities per pixel (aka HDR), and you can then isolate those for physically realistic glows. It's more correct than just glowing everything afterwards when it's all 'clipped' in the final image - so you avoid eg. a plain white surface glowing just as much as a bright white light, even though the light is supposed to be much brighter.

So basically you do want to do it in the engine for the most realistic results. But the more subtle glow screenshots look pretty good anyway.