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.
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