Fellow WCPI member Alufei of The Blue Scribes recently came across a trick on the Alliance forums for enabling a “bloom” effect to the game. Those of you who play Warcraft or EverQuest 2 (or the hordes of other games now supporting this technique) will know just how dramatic an effect this can have on the visual quality of a game.
The trick is to copy a modified DirectX rendering DLL into the same directory as WAR.EXE. Games instinctively look for DirectX DLL’s in their installation directory before falling back to the latest version in your system folders, primarily so that older games can ensure a compatible version is installed with the game and will continue to work years after release. This gives talented developers a means of doing interesting things like this.
I loaded it up this afternoon and I have to say, I love it! It makes the lightmaps really pop and noticeably reduces the jaggies around models. I haven’t noticed any drop in performance for using the effect, either. I’m really curious why Mythic didn’t include this effect in the client itself.
Read more about enabling this bloom effect over at The Blue Scribes, and the original forum thread over on Warhammer Alliance.
Tags: directx, hacks, modifications, warhammer online, WCPI
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Thanks for the shout out, and glad you liked it. Though I should really add proper instructions to the actual blog post, instead of making people go all the way to youtube to read the instructions.
Its kind of interesting you are a video game designer, since I’m studying to be a game programmer, and am into Open source and so on. Hopefully my MMO is the first quality MMO written entirely in Java and OpenGL.
Hey Alufei; small world! Are you studying game programming in school, or on your own time? I’d love to see a well-built Java/OpenGL MMO. The handful that are out there are really give the technologies a bad name.
Well I am studying general programming in school. C, C++, etc. But game programming is what I kinda want to get into. Yes I’m going to try and shoot for a quality Java/OpenGL MMO that I really hope I can get off the ground. Right now with my limited programming knowledge in general (I mean I can program real well and do some advanced things, but nothing on teh level of games yet) I have to wait a bit. I’m going to shoot for a AAA Java/OpenGL game if I can get backers once I start looking. Right now I am going to try and write as much as possible on my own and then probably see if I can get EA to help me or something. I used to QA Test professionally for them, and this summer I might start working as an Intern there as a game developer, so we will see.
I plan to use Project Darkstar, Ardor3D (similar to JMonkeyEngine), and see if I can implement Quel Solaar’s Verse somehow to use as my base. Still have to talk to the author of Love to see how Verse works and what limitations it has.