Support For Post Processing Addons

MajinCry

One o' the fairly lacking areas of ESO, is those good ol' screen shaders. The game has fairly eye-straining contrast in pretty much every environment, the bloom might as well be non-existant (does it even use multiple passes?), and the ambient occlusion is too conservative.

Seeing how we are able to interact with the game through Lua, I'd wager we'd see some damn fine eye candy made by the community, if we were able to create HLSL addons for the game. Sure, there is ReShade, but that is a far cry from decent; whilst there are a plethora of interesting shaders, we're still working with an 8 bit, LDR frame with post processing already applied. And we are also unable to access the depth buffer through ReShade, as that's been relegated to a single-player-game-only feature. There's also the fact that ReShade's HLSL code inevitably touches the UI, as we're dealing with the final frame. That's not so good, what with being able to read the chat being fairly, err, important to the game.

And there's also the fact that having a Direct3D wrapper doesn't exactly help performance, what with it having to intercept draw calls issued by the game.

I've tried my hand at getting as nice a looking going as I could with ReShade, but damn, running effects like tonemapping, and modifying the saturation 'n' contrast, butcher the image when applied in anything more than a slight uplift. 'Ere's the best I could do. The before image is shown first, with me hacked together shader code shown below it.

If ya ask me, that looks a bit better, and if I were able to work on the HDR image that the game works with internally...Oh my. And if we got interior/exterior and day/night HLSL variables to use the lerp() function with? We could make some pretty fancy presets that'd not be too far away from an ENB preset for Skyrim.

So aye. Having HLSL shader addon support would make the game look a damn sight better.