MMORPG Archives - Page 350 of 400 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Shaders in Minecraft

July 16, 2014 by Belghast

Modding State of Mind

The other day I decided to try and mod Fallout 3 to look like a series of images that I had seen… and it seems to have opened up a rabbit hole that I am still falling down. Yesterday I decided to try and get shaders working in Minecraft. For some time I have seen videos of minecraft that just look insanely detailed for what is essentially the blockiest of games. I would do a small bit of research and pretty much halt when I heard that it involved a modification to the game. Granted I have applied a ton of mods to minecraft, primarily adding in a minimap to make connecting tunnels up easier. Ultimately this involved me configuring something called the “Magic Launcher” to mod my game JAR file on the fly.

Once upon a time you used to have to open the JAR file in 7zip and manually replace individual files inside of the archive. This was tedious and also involved a lot of trial and error as you were ever quite certain what order you had to load the files in with. When I started down the path of trying to figure out shaders a long while back… this was still the method of getting them to work. However a wonderful invention seems to have sprung up in the Minecraft world called Forge. Once installed it essentially allows you to fiddle with mods on the fly from within the game itself, and gives you a “Mods” directory to dump things in.

Shaders in Minecraft

So while this process is a bit of a pain still… as you can see from the above photo the end result is very worth it. It feels like a bit of an understatement, but this completely changes the feel of the minecraft experience. So many things just feel better from the way fire reacts, to the way spider eyes glow out in the instance of the night… to the fact that the day night cycle actually feels like something that is more predictable. When you get close to evening it starts to feel like maybe you better duck in for the night as the light begins to significantly dim as the sun nears the horizon. Granted you can install shaders without the use of a custom resource pack, but I decided to take the advice of SonicEther the creator of the shader preset I am using and go with the ChromaHills texture pack.

I mean everything about Minecraft is still very much a blocky game, but for some reason adding realistic lighting makes everything immediately feel that more real. There are little touches that I think are adorable like the fact that at this moment I had just gotten into a fight with a skeleton. You can see the shadow of all of the arrows sticking out of my head as I prepare to fight a zombie that has caught fire and is still lumbering towards me. But I have to say the place where it gets most impressive is underground, giving an entirely different feel to moving about in the long tunnels I am prone to build. When you are down there it feels like you are playing some updated version of Doom or Wolfenstein 3D and not really a building game. I would imagine that bow sniping in this mode would be extremely fun.

Faffing about with Blocks

Last night I streamed some Minecraft for roughly an hour mostly to show off the shaders in action. The true effect really only hits you when you see it in motion, with the depth of field and the way the shadows and lights work. My primary project of the night was to work on my tunnel system and try and burrow out far enough to get somewhere interesting. Legdur one of the other users on the server at some point during the night came over and gifted me an insane silk touch diamond pick and thats when the construction really kicked into overdrive. I go over this in the video but basically I started out in a small cave and then built out from there over top of the water forming my first “base”. Instead of abandoning the cave I opted to simply connect it to the tower.

One of the things I have learned about myself thanks to Minecraft, is that I am most comfortable when underground. As a result instead of building pathways on the surface or roads… I end up building deep tunnel systems that get me where I want to be. Primarily I think it is that when I am underground I have more control and am ultimately safer because I can control my surroundings. As a result I have three main tunnels that lead out of my initial base. One of which leads back to the spawn point and I have crafted a little hut of sorts to mark the entrance to my territory. Think of it almost like a subway terminal or the Dragon Age deeproads. Another tunnel I simply dug until I broke ground in what is a nice secluded valley. I have not actually done anything with this path but I intend to have it be another intended place of expansion.

The tunnel that I built last night, or completed last night connects up to this building that I am currently working on. Ultimately it will be significantly larger than the island tower I initially built primarily because I have a hell of a lot more resources stockpiled right now. It is nothing terribly special yet but I am working on it slowly. Essentially right now it is spider proof and generally monster proof and hopefully I can use it as a way to lure some chickens down into my complex. Animal husbandry is one of the things I dig about Minecraft and sooner or later I always develop an underground farm that allows me to harvest and breed animals for food. I try to generally place said farm as far away from my main area as humanly possible… because the looped sounds of chickens, cows and sheep will drive you to drinking.

Installing the Shaders

At this point you may want to follow me down the rabbithole that is modding Minecraft and installing these spiffy shaderpacks. Like I said yesterday one of the things that has always frustrated me about the modding community is how arcane the directions can be, and how it is generally a fairly exclusionary group by nature. You have to have a certain level of knowledge of the inner workings of a game before anything that folks are saying on the forums will make any sense at all. Here goes my attempt to explain how the installation process works so that my readers can follow along in this journey.

Downloads Needed

Minecraft Forge [webpage][download you need]
GLSL Shaders Mod [webpage][download you need]
Sonic Ether’s Unbelievable Shaders [webpage][download you need]
ChromaHills Resource Pack [webpage][download you need]

So after collecting all these bits you should have a handful of files…

forge-1.7.10-10.13.0.1180-installer.jar
ShadersModCore-v2.3.18-mc1.7.10-f1179.jar
SEUS-v10.1-Ultra-DOF.rar
ChromaHills-64×1.7_1.0.8.rar

Creating the File System

So for this part of the tutorial… I will admit I am a windows user. I realize that Minecraft can run on a Macintosh, but I have no clue how that works. I have a Macbook 1440 sitting in the closet, and that is the last time I have used anything vaguely resembling the Mac operating system. So if you are not a windows user you are pretty much shit out of luck. My steps might make sense to you, and if so hopefully you can follow along enough to make sense of what you actually have to do in your file system.

First we need to make sure we have the directories that we are going to need for this to work. We have to navigate to our minecraft directory, and to get there the easiest way is to use the hotkey [Windows Button] and [r key] at the same time. This should bring up the run prompt. I pretty much do all filesystem navigation by typing in directories that I want to go to in the run prompt. As my friend points out regularly I am a “power user” but quite honestly I have no clue how to get to this directory through the file system without typing it in. Basically in the run prompt you want to type “%appdata%” without the quotes. This is a windows shortcut that gets you to the application data roaming directory. Inside of there you should see a “.minecraft” directory. This is where your system actually has minecraft installed.

We will need to make sure your folder has three directories. If they are not there then you need to create them. All of these directories are lowercase names, and I am not sure if that matters but since Java is a language capable of case sensitivity… I would suggest you just save yourself some hassle and name them lowercase as well. Create/verify that you have the following directories…

resourcepacks
shaderpacks
mods

Setting Things Up

Now we get to the point where we actually have to do some things. First you need to install forge-1.7.10-10.13.0.1180-installer.jar and if Java is configured correctly on your system… you should just need to double click this file to install it. Accept the defaults and this will install forge and create a profile called Forge under your Minecraft installation. Next we are going to need to copy the appropriate files into the right directories.

Copy “ShadersModCore-v2.3.18-mc1.7.10-f1179.jar” to the “mods” directory
Copy “ChromaHills-64×1.7_1.0.8.rar” to the “resourcepacks” directory
Unzip “SEUS-v10.1-Ultra-DOF.rar” to the “shaderpacks” directory

If you do not have a way of unzipping a RAR file, then I highly suggest you check out 7zip for all your archiving needs.

If you open the Minecraft launcher you should now have a profile in the drop down called “Forge” go ahead and log into Minecraft and hit the play button for that profile. If everything went correctly with the installation of Forge, you should now see a [Mods] button on the front menu for Minecraft that looks a little something like this.

Now we need to turn on the shader which should be possible if the Mods button is showing up. To get there you click [Options] and you should see a new option called [Shaders] appearing there in Options Menu.

When you click shaders you get a menu system that looks a little something like this. Make sure you have selected the SEUS-v10.1-Ultra-DOF option. I have a few more things in my menu than you will have if you have followed this guide. There are lots of different shader packs out there that you can play with, but that is for another day.

Finally we want to turn on our resource pack. At this point your menus will look a little different because I have the ChromaHills pack already turned on when I am recording these screenshots. But to get there you want to back out to the Options menu and select [Resource Packs].

Again I have another resourcepack in my list that you will not have if you are following the guide to the letter, but the important thing here is that you want to make sure ChromaHills is on the right hand side of the screen meaning that it will be used. When you hit done, your system might freeze for a bit but this is completely normal. The game is essentially unloading all of the textures and reloading the ones from the resource pack which includes the various menu textures as well.

If Everything Went Right

Then BAM! You’ve got shaders. If you have any pointed questions about the process let me know, but I tried to make this as straight forward as possible. If you have specific questions about the various items, I posted both the webpage link and the actual download link. It is possible that at a later date some of the download links I posted may not work. If that is the case refer back to the webpage link because they have probably iterated the version of whatever the item is. So far I am loving Minecraft with more realistic lighting, and hopefully you will too. Happy digging!

#Minecraft

SweetFX and ESO

July 15, 2014 by Belghast

Fallout and HDR

Last night when I got home I continued down the dark journey of messing about with Fallout 3 mods and trying to achieve that look I had seen in many screenshots. As of last night I had gotten a “better” looking experience but I wasn’t quite there. It seems like the thing I was missing was one of the many post processing shader injection tools out there. Apparently to get the best possible appearance you need to actually tag team them and use both SweetFX that seems to work with damned near any game, and one called ENB that seems to work with a much smaller subset of games. The above shot was pretty much my first test after turning both on and going with pretty much the stock settings. It is okay but feels a little technicolor, and the sky still seems to be a grey mess.

After trying a few more presets I settled on this one because it feels far more realistic. It is insane to see this game in action with all the shaders running. I am not sure if I can actually record footage and have it capture it in full glory since the screenshots come out a bit darker than it feels on screen. I might do some tests tonight with streaming some gameplay to see if it translates well. For those who are curious I am going to attempt to rattle off the mods that I am using to achieve the look and feel. It is pretty damned impressive that a game from 2008 feels so cool to play. Granted I need to do all the same things to see if I can get a version of Fallout New Vegas that runs this cool, because that game has far more bells and whistles available than Fallout 3.

The Mods Used

When someone posts their spiffy pictures of a modded up Fallout or Skyrim… they never seem to post the absolute list of what they used to get there. It is almost like the special sauce at your favorite restaurant that no one quite wants to give away the trade secret to. It annoys the hell out of me so as I dabbled into modded games I plan to do a complete list with links if they are available to exactly what I am using to get the effects. Here is the total rundown of everything I am using… and compared to a lot of the listings I have seen… this one is fairly spartan. Namely because I am only using graphical mods and none of the various game enhancement ones other than the unofficial patch which ultimately just fixes a bunch of bugs left in the final release of the game.

The only puzzle that still has yet to be solved is that I cannot figure out why I am not seeing the brilliant skies that I have seen in some screenshots. I feel like maybe this is just a problem with the area surrounding Megaton, and as I have not really ventured out further I am not sure if the sky clears up significantly out there. I am pretty happy with the results of this combination of mods and post filtering however. While I enjoy my consoles, this is the reason why PC gaming will always ultimately be superior in the long run. I’ve taken one of my favorite games that just happens to be over six years old… and brought it up to something modern feeling. You just can’t do that with a console game, ultimately because you have to wait for the company to do it… and not the army of dedicated fans.

SweetFX and ESO

The cool thing about SweetFX is like I said before it works with damned near any piece of software. Since you can use a third party software called Radeon Pro to “Inject” it into your video drivers… you can make it work without any actual modification to the original game files. In spite of the name, Radeon Pro works perfectly well with Nvidia cards and I am running it with my 750 ti 2 gig card without issue. This is awesome because it means you can apply it to things like MMOs with some fairly anti-modding terms of service. All you are doing is basically wedging some extra shader work into the rendering pipeline between the game itself and your video drivers. So after some fiddling I found a preset that I liked and am up and running with SweetFX in Elder Scrolls Online. There is talk that you can use one of the versions of ENB designed to work with Skyrim to process the graphics even further, but I have not had the chance to test that out.

So far I am pretty happy with the results… there are times when especially where flame is concerned that some of the lighting gets a bit trippy. But overall I am enjoying running around in a post processing world. The big thing that changes is that the world feels more realistic to me, with far better lighting and shading. The impressive thing is that I really see no noticeable hit to my framerate. In fact it might actually have improved it since I have completely turned off all anti-aliasing because SweetFX is ultimately taking care of that now. I am guessing their processing routines are a bit more efficient than the standard ones that the games seem to use. One of these days I am going to try the trick of running at 1440p and scaling the viewport down to 1080p instead of actually using post processing, but I have not gotten around to trying it yet.

Depths of Madness

When I was not fiddling with graphical settings… which in truth ended up to be most of the night. You can ask PKdude, but I was popping on and offline for damned near all of the night trying out various settings. When I finally got around to questing I completed one of my favorite Auridon quest chains called Depths of Madness. What is cool about it is that you are essentially trying to free three people that are trapped in dimensional sub pockets that have them bound by fear, rage, lust etc. Each one is a little mini adventure that you complete to free the spirit so they can move on. I guess to some extent the quest sequence reminds me quite a bit of the whole madness of king pellagius quest chain from Skyrim. It happens in a super secluded are of the map called Glister Vale and the first few times I played the Auridon content I didn’t actually find it.

I feel like maybe the time away from the game has helped my enjoyment, because the last few nights I have been running around in Elder Scrolls Online I have really enjoyed myself. I am not sure if I am ready to return to group content again, but I am definitely enjoying the slow pace of poking my way through the veteran levels. They still feel super grindy mind you, but so long as I focus on completing quests and not leveling I seem to be doing just fine. As silly as it sounds, I am really enjoying seeing the game with the SweetFX shaders. There are times where Elder Scrolls Online felt a little technicolor for my tastes and this version feels a bit more realistic and gritty. Fallout and Elder Scrolls in general have both been very gritty games… and while I don’t think everything needs the “quake palette” I do think the game feels more realistic with darker tones.

#ElderScrollsOnline #Fallout3

Wandering Auridon

July 14, 2014 by Belghast

Cheating on AggroChat

I don’t believe I said anything about this beforehand, but once again I was invited to guest host on Game On the MMORPG.com podcast hosted by @GameByNight and @Liores. I guess this means I didn’t make an ass of myself the first time they had me on. I have a lot of fun doing the podcast with them, because since I have known both for quite some time… it just feels like having a conversation with friends. This time around they also invited @AppleCiderMage so it was awesome getting to properly meet and hang out with her as well. The two of us have operated in the same circles for awhile, but never really had any direct interaction other than through twitter.

The podcast generally releases around Wednesday and I will post a link when it is up and ready to go. I feel like we maybe derailed the podcast, because they had this long list of things to talk about and I think maybe we got through three of them in the allotted time. Then again anyone who has listened to AggroChat should know that I can ramble on about nothing at length. AppleCider held up her end of the rambling as well, and I feel like the two of us combined pushed the train good and solidly off the rails. That said it was a blast to do it, and I look forward to maybe filling in again sometime in the future. I have to say though that since we record AggroChat on Saturday nights, it was weird to get up the next morning and prepare to do another podcast.

Wandering Auridon

While waiting around on podcast time I decided to stream a little Elder Scrolls Online. The other day I was absolutely shocked that someone posted on my youtube channel asking why I had stopped playing. It made me realize just how much time had passed since I had streamed anything, let alone Elder Scrolls Online. I guess maybe I am poking my head out of turtle mode, because streaming didn’t seem that bad yesterday. I am still poking my way around Auridon working on the quests there. In the video I play for roughly an hour and complete a couple of different quest chains. Most of my morning however was spent trying to sort out my addons. It seems like recently they had a patch that broke several of the addons that I was using. The weird thing about it is that several of the addons were apparently working, but being suppressed by other addons that were not.

While I still really enjoy Elder Scrolls Online, it had been quite some time since I had logged in. I of course logged into a mail message from my research assistant, but the one prior to that was from 19 days ago, so that means I had been offline for at least that long. The pace of the veteran content is a bit of a problem to be honest. While it is enjoyable to quest my way through the Aldmeri content that I had not seen… in the video I complete a handful of quest chains and my experience bar makes no noticeable movement. It gets frustrating to feel like you are making no forward momentum as you quest your way around the world. I talk about that a bit on the Game On podcast but when you move into veteran content it feels like you get stuck on high center. There are some rather sweeping changes coming in August, so here is hoping it improves the feel of the veteran experience.

Modding Fallout 3

The other day I stumbled across a series of pictures of a completely modded out Fallout 3 install. This combined with me playing some FO3 on the PS3 made me want to try playing the game with the same visual effects as shown in those photos. While I am getting closer, I can’t seem to get the visual splendor shown there. Right now I think I have all of the mods mentioned in the description installed and it looks much better than a default install, but something is still missing. Namely the sky is still the ominous grey blob that it has been on previous plays of the game. I am wondering if this is just a side effect of being in the Megaton area, and as I move out into the game proper maybe that changes. In any case I am going to keep trying to mod it until I can achieve the kind of clarity that you see in the images.

Other major change this play through is that I am trying to stick to using the Xbox 360 controller. Basically I have reached a point where I feel like the mouse and keyboard artificially limit me in the number of games that I can play. Right now the consoles seem to be the primary target for game developers, and the PC market gets ports namely, and that means all of these interfaces are designed with a controller in mind… and then later retrofitted to work with a keyboard and mouse. I feel like at this point I need to teach myself to be better at using a controller or ultimately there will reach a point where my chosen way of gaming is no longer supported. Hell to be honest it feels like the keyboard and mouse thing is already a rarity among anything that is not an MMO. With games like Destiny looming on the horizon, I feel like training myself to get by with only the controller is going to be a good thing… and I will go through the growing pains with games that I am already very familiar with before branching out on new titles that I am not.

#Fallout3 #ElderScrollsOnline

Tunnel Works

July 12, 2014 by Belghast

Hurry Up and Blog

This mornings blog post is likely going to be a quick and abbreviated one as we need to get on the road soon. The wife and I are going off to Oklahoma City today in search of the illusive Half Priced Books store and my mission for the day… lots and lots of Cash America pawn shops. Last weekend I managed to pick up some amazing deals on used PS3 games at that chain, and there are far more of them in OKC than here in Tulsa. Basically I am cheap, and I would love to pick up more PS3 and Xbox 360 games… but I only really want to pay $5-$10 for them. I had a blast playing Fallout 3 on the PS3 even though I had played it countless times on the PC, so I would be interested in visiting lots of titles I had played on the PC as well.

In part because playing on a console is so easy… you pop the disc in and go. The negative however is that you can never really improve the experience. Example here is a modded up version of Fallout 3 that greatly improves the look and feel. Seeing this yesterday pretty much guarantees that I will play through the game at least one more time on the PC as well. Another prime example of better living through software is the whole Skywind project, where they are completely redoing Morrowind using the Skyrim engine. These things will never be able to function on a console, but I have to admit there is something nice about the simplicity of just pressing play. My only complaint right now is that I wish the modern generation of consoles would allow me to install the disc to the hard drive and then not have to worry about having the disc any longer. That is the thing I like the most about my PlayStation Plus titles, the ability to have lots of them “on tap”.

Tunnel Works

Most of last night was spent working on my extensive tunnel network… or what will soon BE an extensive tunnel network. Across a bridge from my main building is the first area I started out that I am using as some what of a stone quarry. At base floor I started a tunnel to see just what I might intercept digging in a straight line. Generally speaking I dig 3×3 tunnels because they feel about right, not too closed in and not too open. After quite a ways of torching every 7 blocks I came out on the other side in what appears to be a riverside valley. There is a cobblestone wall there so I am not sure who has been building in the area. Hopefully I am not impeding on someone else’s land too badly, but I like as many entrances and exits from my area as possible.

I built up a really simple fenced in area so that hopefully I won’t end up with too many creepers lurking there. One of the interesting things about the lockette mod we are using is that supposedly if you lock a wooden door it makes it so that zombies cannot beat it down. Traditionally I have used fence gates to bar entrance into my areas, because villagers cannot open them and zombies cannot break them. However I have started trying out the whole locked door thing to see if it works. I am not purposefully really trying to keep people out of my stuff, but more that I don’t want to come home and find everything full of mob spawns.

Cactus Shield

The other thing that I worked on last night was redoing the approach to my house. I ended up extending the path to make it far less likely for me to kill myself trying to leave it by hitting lots of cactus. This almost happened a few times as I seem to be unable to walk a straight line. Essentially I started the dual tier row of cactus a block further out so I have a 3 block walkway to get in and out of my area. I might add a third row of cactus because I actually managed to have a creeper make it through earlier. Granted the creeper only took a single hit to kill after being chewed up pretty badly by the cactus to get to me… but this in part was because some of the cactus has not fully grown to 3 block height yet. The creeper was able to hop up onto a single block height one and use it to make his way in.

Now that I feel like my base is fairly defensible, it is just about time for me to start back working on the “mine to bedrock” project. Essentially in every build I have done in Minecraft I eventually create a tunnel network that goes all the way to bedrock and start branch mining for diamonds. It is my hope that I picked a decent spot to mine, because so often you get down to bedrock and struggle with lava. Right now the project has been derailed in that I hit a fully enclosed cave system, but I need to build my way through it and continue digging. So far I am finding playing on the Alliance of Awesome server to be fun and refreshing, since more or less I am having to play legitimately again. If you are interested ping Zelibeli and she can get you white listed… but of note this is open to existing members of the AofA community and its requisite groups.