Battlefield Modding Tutorials BFMODS

Love the plugin...Testing it with buckloads of other ancient DX8 games and works like a charm...also use it for DX9 games (ENB was developed for DX9, only one version was made for DX8 to please the beggars). E.g. BF2 with Bloom is quite nice too . Not to forget this plugin also adds SSAO, enhanced metal reflections, water reflections (this alone is awesome), enhanced shadow processing, Motion Blur and Depth of Field effects. Of course not all these work in every game, some games are just too crappy for that . E.g. reflections on water do work in BF42, but they are flickery and also reflect the HUD...this is a problem of the way the HUD is implemented as well as the poor water which has no real depth information whatsoever, making it difficult to calculate proper reflections.

And all of that fully configurable in a .ini file, fully documented on the homepage.

That's the best one can reflections get to look...

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Kampagne XI - Vereinte Achsenmächte


xFire: wgpsenshi

Now that's cool.

Can we stick it on random arbitrary things?

Afraid not. The plugin is a "simple" d3d8.dll and it also only accesses the usual features used in DX. Thus, featuring a certain element "water" or "reflective". In BF42 AFAIK that's only the real water, and the reflection sucks completely. It's weirdly distorted and has no wave effect (as BF42 water is a simple texture plane, not much bumpmapping involved), but worst of all EBN can't extract the water plane height, thus the reflection is not locked to the water surface, but to the viewpoint of the camera. Only if you look straight at the shoreline the reflection looks okay and in place. If you look down, it reflects the upper part of your current screen, including the F1-F8 HUD line and minimap. Looks funny, but awfully wrong. If you fly over it or similar, the reflection is very off.

Problem is Boris (the dev) developed several adaptions to make EBN fit better to certain games, but BF unfortunately wasn't among them...and there also is only one real DX8 version avaible, later he used a dx8-dx9 converter file to use enhanced options, but that version makes BF42 crash during startup .

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Kampagne XI - Vereinte Achsenmächte


xFire: wgpsenshi

Ah, well. It's always important to remember this game was written in 2000-2001, and so there are a ton of features missing that can't be added in any way.

True.

BF42 Engine was way too demanding back then, and nowadays it can play its strength: awesome modding capacities and a relatively open engine, at least in some issues. Of course it's pretty restrictive in things not laid out in the official code...almost no variables...no real scripting...

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Kampagne XI - Vereinte Achsenmächte


xFire: wgpsenshi

I wouldn't really call it relatively open, things like the Source Engine in Counter Strike: Source are open. They allow anybody to inject arbitrary code through plug-in DLL's and that opens up so much functionality it's almost impossible for me to explain how much you can do. In fact, one mod called Eventscripts has allowed anybody to use their plugin to run any Python code on the server, hooked to events, making it even easier for a regular administrator to mod their server.