Halo MCC

[frosty acorn]

I actually have a Reach addon mostly working on my end but the game will hang after you complete campaign missions

need to figure that out

[burnt hinge]

https://tenor.com/view/vince-mcmahon-intrigued-gif-27408103

[frosty acorn]

also reach loves to flash bang you

[burnt hinge]

well if you need a tester lemme know

unless it's a specific thing farther into the game lol

[olive sandal]

does it reach for the stars

[frosty acorn]

nope but it makes you reach for eye drops

[olive sandal]

or sunglasses

[solar thunder]

or the peak brightness slider

[burnt hinge]

reach is pretty rough lol

[south nymph]

What would 360 era games be without their poo poo water filters and bloom? It's part of the aesthetic

[burnt hinge]

just wish it had tonemapping

just seems to clip at a certain point i don't mind the bloom otherwise

[frosty acorn]

I don't remember it being that bad lol

funny thing is that halo 3 and odst had some form of tonemapping but reach doesn't

though it did barely anything in 3 / odst

[frosty acorn]

First release of Halo Reach (HDR + higher res bloom)
It should be mostly working but ping me if you run into any issues
and remember that you should only have one reno addon installed at a time

@burnt hinge

[burnt hinge]

will try tommorow thanks

[vestal kernel]

Sorry for the cheap screenshot, but I'm trying out halo 3 and it looks like the blood is detached from the world or something?? The bloom of the tree canopy here is detached from where it should be

It looks like it's tied around my camera and moves with it

This is with only the halo 3 addon installed

Also, I noticed in another level, a desert one, that the dynamic range seems pretty low all the time and things don't often go into HDR territory other than the brightest of lights.
But in this first level, I'm noticing there's an eye adaption effect that changes exposure based on if you're looking at something bright or dark. I imagine that's why the desert level didn't look all that bright. If it's possible, I think disabling this effect would make the game pop more in HDR if it's always tuned to be how it is when you look in a dark area.
That way dark areas are still detailed, and bright areas actually get up to HDR brightness.

Like when I have my camera pointed up here directly at this vegetation being hit by sunlight, there's no difference between Vanilla and Neutwo

I look down here though and that same vegetation is actually going up to HDR brightness
I think it would be nice for the game to just look like this all the time if it's possible?

Yeah, after looking at it more I'm almost certain this is the reason why I didn't initially think this mod was giving the "wow" factor I expected.

The auto exposure of the game is tuned for SDR displays, so whenever you look directly at something it's getting toned down to an SDR range. Ideally this effect could be removed so instead of the game faking HDR, all color info can be exposed at once so HDR users can actually see all the information and dynamic range all at once 🙏
Otherwise I don't think the game can actually truly look like it's in HDR, since it's arbitrarily dimming highlights

[frosty acorn]

that's bloom is because I'm arbitarily upscaling the bloom by a fixed percent instead of doing things properly. I wasn't thinking about the steam deck when I did that

and I think the auto exposure get's applied on the cpu or something

I haven't been able to actually find where it get's applied

I do know how to disable the auto exposure but that breaks the bloom so I would have to replace the bloom myself

[frosty acorn]

@vestal kernel try this version of the halo 3 addon
#1475023519560630364 message

[south nymph]

Is it gamma corrected? It doesn't seem like it, gamma doesn't change when turning off reno

[frosty acorn]

it doesn't need gamma correction

at least like standard reno gamma correction

[south nymph]

Mmmm why is that?

[frosty acorn]

gamma correction is usually for when a game encodes with the srgb in sdr

since srgb on a 2.2 display causes a mismatch you need to emulate that in the hdr mode if you want it to match the sdr

mcc uses 2.0 gamma + a contrast slider so I'm rolling with my own solution for this game

[south nymph]

Mmmmm but I remember that gta v encodes in 2.2 but reno still had 2.2 gamma correction in place, for example

[frosty acorn]

shortfuse probably just exposed that for those for people who wanted it

isn't technically needed

for MCC I was specifically trying to emulate the look of the xbox 360 versions of the games because those versions use a different gamma setup

[south nymph]

So technically in a game like gta v that encodes in 2.2 the "correct" setting is no gamma correction?

Corrent in the sense that it matches sdr

[frosty acorn]

yeah if it encodes with 2.2 in sdr, gamma correction shouldn't be needed if your trying to match the sdr

I do know that one of the versions of GTA 4 had an alternate more agressive gamma curve so that might've been why he exposed it

[vestal kernel]

Would this just disable bloom? I think it would be worth it without bloom at least as an option
Because currently it doesn't really feel like a true HDR game because of the auto exposure clipping stuff

Having a reimplementation of bloom at some point would be really nice but in the meantime I'd personally be ok with seeing it without bloom and just adding a bloom shader in reshade as a replacement

[south nymph]

That might explain why reach and gta v looked hella crushed when I played them with gamma correction

[vestal kernel]

thanks, I'll give that a shot and report back

[frosty acorn]

the issue is that the parameters for the bloom change between load zones so I would need to figure out how all that works to do a proper replacement

[vestal kernel]

This version seems to fix the issue 🙏

[frosty acorn]

wait are you like using a gamma correction reshade shader?

[south nymph]

for gta v I was using the reno gamma correction at 2.2, for reach I was using the HDR color profile from github for gamma correction

[vestal kernel]

Yeah I imagine reimplementing it would be alot of work 😓
Do you think we could get a version without auto exposure or bloom to see what it looks like?

[frosty acorn]

well the game will average like 80 nits for me in some scenes if I disable it

makes the paperwhite slide not very useful

[frosty acorn]

yeah if a reno mod doesn't have a gamma correct slider exposed it's safe to assume that it doesn't need it or the mod author hardcoded it

[vestal kernel]

Oh damn so it sounds like disabling it does the opposite of what you'd want. Just caps the exposure to being really low
Do you think there's potentially a way to lock the auto exposure in place instead then? As in, have it function as if the player were constantly looking at a dark area of the screen?

I imagine that's easier said than done, don't know if that would actually be possible but
The way the vanilla system functions it's just arbitrarily capping the exposure and not allowing the game to actually shine in HDR :/

[frosty acorn]

I would try to do something like that if I knew where the auto exposure is being actually applied but I haven't been able to find where that is

[south nymph]

weird that gta v reno defaulted to having gamma correction 2.2 tho, I guess it was preference

[frosty acorn]

could ask shortfuse about it
theres probably a reason he did that

[vestal kernel]

Yeah that makes sense. Best of luck, I hope you can manage to find it. Thanks so much for the mod, really appreciate the work you're putting in 🙏

[frosty acorn]

want I think is happening is that the game downsamples the scene to get the average brightness on the gpu but the actual auto exposure logic is on the cpu

I would have to null out the downsampling so that the game doesn't do the auto exposure and I would have to interecept the bloom shaders and do the downsampling myself or replace the bloom lol

[frosty acorn]

honestly think replacing the bloom and auto exposure would be the cleanest way of doing that...

[south nymph]

#1412067930673512509 message I asked him, he said that reach would in fact need gamma correction? I'm hella confused ngl

[frosty acorn]

my mod doesn't

[frosty acorn]

So what he's talking about is adjacent to what I was saying earlier
Most games use srgb textures and stuff like albedo textures (the base texture with only the color information) will get linearized on read but stuff like the UI doesn't linearize on read so there isn't an explicit gamma encoding for it in the shaders but you still need to account for that

which is something I did for Halo 3 and Halo 3 odst (I just don't expose a slider for it) but Halo 4 and Halo Reach don't need it for whatever reason

[south nymph]

My issue with this is that the game doesn't look quite right with the mod, it looks washed out, this is the section just before the first night vision mission, where things are supposed to be super dark
These are: SDR no mod/Reno/SDR no mod with TRC fix

[frosty acorn]

well I'm intentionally not matching the vanilla sdr

I'm trying to match the xbox 360 version of the game

[south nymph]

Was the 360 version so washed out? I remember it being much darker

[frosty acorn]

I really need to bust out my xbox 360 to verify but my math should be fairly close

found my 360
hopefully it and my reach disc still work

[south nymph]

It really jumped out at me during this night vision mission, I firmly remember it being really dark on the 360, but with reno you can basically see everything no problem, I could be misremebering of course but my instincs tells me that it doesn't look right, I guess we'll see

[frosty acorn]

it's alive

[frosty acorn]

okay so i fixed a few things
this is much closer to how the 360 version looks

between the bloom and the film grain the game isn't going to very have perfect blacks

fixed some of the logic with the gamma and whatnot

[spare shoal]

im ready for the bloom to flashbang me though

[south nymph]

definetely looks more like what I remembered, I might actually dust off my 360 as well to check for myself

[vestal kernel]

Very inexperienced with the technical stuff, but would it maybe be possible to replace the downsampled scene with just a pure black image so the game is exposed to be as bright as the auto exposure can make it? That way no blacks get crushed and highlights are actually within HDR range

I would also hope that if a new bloom system were to be made, all parts of the image that get bloom in the original game would still have bloom applied instead of just being reserved for the HDR bright bits to match the original game🤞 maybe with a slider for user preference
I think when bloom gets reduced it tends to mess with the art direction and make the game look alot worse

[frosty acorn]

I can try just passing in black into the output of the downsampling shader
I'm honestly not sure if that's any different than just skipping the downsampling shader entirely though

[frosty acorn]

yeah the bloom does very much hides technical imperfections with the game

in some ways it kinda fakes the look of global illumination in scenes

Also have to realize that Halo 3 isn't a pbr game (that wouldn't really be a thing for another ~7 years)
non pbr games don't have the same hdr punch that pbr games do

[vestal kernel]

Yeah I've played other games in HDR around the same time though like Far Cry 2 though and it really does shine with HDR tho
The bright areas of the screen look great in HDR, just only when you're looking into a dark area lol

So I'd love to see it without the auto exposure, I really appreciate all the work you're doing for these games 🙏

[frosty acorn]

hot

[frosty acorn]

honestly not sure what to do with CEA

game is so ugly

[south nymph]

Was the bloom always so pixelated?

[south nymph]

the purple on the Gadulo needles seems a bit off, vanilla purple looks a bit nicer imo

[south nymph]

kinda strange how the reflection on the ground is brighter than the light itself but other than that it looks great

[calm hatch]

It could be pretty good for hdr,

[frosty acorn]

maybe I'm just a diva but I really don't like CEA lol

just doesn't look right

[south nymph]

It's slop

[hard pine]

So I have to only have one installed at a time? Is it possible to one day have an MCC addon that intelligently switched between games when loading them?

Loading add-on from 'G:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Halo The Master Chief Collection\mcc\binaries\win64\renodx-halo3.addon64' ... 16:16:55:266 [15224] | ERROR | Failed to register add-on, because another one with the same name ("RenoDX") was already registered! 16:16:55:266 [15224] | ERROR | Failed to load add-on from 'G:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Halo The Master Chief Collection\mcc\binaries\win64\renodx-halo3.addon64' with error code 1114! 16:16:55:266 [15224] | INFO | Loading add-on from 'G:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Halo The Master Chief Collection\mcc\binaries\win64\renodx-halo3odst.addon64' ... 16:16:55:276 [15224] | ERROR | Failed to register add-on, because another one with the same name ("RenoDX") was already registered! 16:16:55:277 [15224] | ERROR | Failed to load add-on from 'G:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Halo The Master Chief Collection\mcc\binaries\win64\renodx-halo3odst.addon64' with error code 1114! 16:16:55:277 [15224] | INFO | Loading add-on from 'G:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Halo The Master Chief Collection\mcc\binaries\win64\renodx-haloreach.addon64' ... 16:16:55:289 [15224] | ERROR | Failed to register add-on, because another one with the same name ("RenoDX") was already registered! 16:16:55:289 [15224] | ERROR | Failed to load add-on from 'G:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Halo The Master Chief Collection\mcc\binaries\win64\renodx-haloreach.addon64' with error

[burnt hinge]

looks better for sure sorry i forgot to look at it

[bold hemlock]

very true

[vapid vapor]

is this recommended?

[frosty acorn]

the newer addons are the reccomended ones unless I say otherwise

[vapid vapor]

does the newest one use some ITM?

[frosty acorn]

I removed it iirc

didn't end up needing it after I fixed some math

[vapid vapor]

ah sweet

[vapid vapor]

noticed that the lightning in reach has a certain blockiness effect to it

not sure if its from the game or from the mod

[vapid vapor]

@frosty acorn

[frosty acorn]

have any screenshots

[vapid vapor]

its more noticeable with movement

I'll record some gameplay when I can

[vapid vapor]

OBS didn't seem to record it in HDR, maybe I needed to switch another setting

also pressing F11 makes the window smaller

but you can still see the issue

[vapid vapor]

look at the small highlights once I move

@frosty acorn hopefully everything I say and show is clear to you

[south nymph]

It's something I noticed as well #1475023519560630364 message

[vapid vapor]

yeah

and the pixelated effect can be quite distracting during movement

[frosty acorn]

@vapid vapor what resolution are you playing at?

[vapid vapor]

4K

[frosty acorn]

are you on windows?

[vapid vapor]

yeah

[surreal raft]

I'm guessing this can't be used with the anti cheat?

[frosty acorn]

yeah
unfornately

[surreal raft]

that was wishful thinking on my part but still thanks for the mod

[frosty acorn]

@south nymph you playing at 4k also?

[south nymph]

3440x1440p, but I don't think it matters, it just seems like the bloom is really really low resolution, or filtered really badly, or both

[frosty acorn]

Asked because I'm actually scaling up the bloom lol

[frosty acorn]

Kinda juggling multiple projects at once right now so I haven't been able to make time for MCC

but do y'all expect a Halo Campaign evolved mod from me when that comes out?
They haven't announced any pricing details but there is a rumored paid 5 day early access period and that can be pretty pricey lol

[copper oyster]

I don't.

[calm hatch]

theres game pass

that wouldnt be as expensive

[frosty acorn]

yeah I might end up doing that

[upper geyser]

A mod would be nice if necessary but there is really no need to rush it. We can wait

[vapid vapor]

@frosty acorn with some weapons, zooming leads to lower peak HDR brightness

in halo reach that is

[frosty acorn]

chances are ue extended will probably just work

hopefully

[frosty acorn]

how much lower?

[vapid vapor]

like going from HDR to SDR

[frosty acorn]

ah