Can someone explain how to use this driver to me?

[GHG]

Right. I feel like a total idiot for this but I can't seem to figure out for the life of me how this driver actually works.

I'm using it with my Zalman M215W and can't seem to understand what the hell I'm meant to be doing. Thus far I've been using Tridef with good results... thats simple, download a profile from their website and away you go.

With this however I have the following issues:

Why is there a complete lack of game profiles in the driver settings? I look on their website and they say it supports loads of games... my list only has like 20 games on it. Is there something I'm missing?

How come whenever I start up a game (for instance one of the games on the puny list that I actually have... lets take Half Life 2 and Portal for example) its asking me to fiddle with settings in the wizard? What should I be setting these to? Are you trying to tell me I have to fiddle around with this for every game I want to ever play before I can actually play? And does that mean there aren't actually any game profile presets, but you do all of the work in terms of getting the 3D settings right per game?

Generally, what should I be setting convergence and seperation to? It defaults the same for every game I've tried and them tells me to modify it... The thing is though the defaults aren't really all that 3D at all, and when I mess with them everything becomes a mess or hurts my eyes. I want both a decent amount of popout and a sense of scene depth but can't seem to achieve that no matter what I do whereas with Tridef its set in the profile for every game and its spot on most of the time. What settings should I generally be using for the type of visual effect I want?

What if I just want mostly scene depth for a game? Then what should I use? And also what if I want mostly popout? And what about both?

I've looked at the MTBS guide regarding this and it doesn't really help for this driver...

I know this might sound like a bit of a rant but I'm frustrated. People on here and elsewhere have said that IZ3D is better than tridef but right now I'm not seeing it. All I see is a driver that is general and vague. The biggest kicker... it hardly supports any games and then makes you sort out the 3D settings for the few games it does have on its list. I thought it was meant to support Risen... why is that game not on the list?

I really don't... get it. I feel like such a noob because of it. Can anyone help?

[Neil]

Hi GHG!

Welcome to MTBS. For a user driven list of what games are compatible with what and under what circumstances, go here: http://www.mtbs3d.com/m3ga" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The drivers can have greater compatibility than the listed profiles. These are just necessary because special optimizations were required for specific games.

The wizard is there so when you play the game for the first time, you can easily set a depth only situation. I usually close the wizard and set it to not come on again (the C key I think).

I know you mentioned using an MTBS guide, was it this one: http://www.mtbs3d.com/index.php?option= ... &Itemid=98" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Regards,
Neil

[Likay]

The truth is that each and every user have their own preferences of settings. However you can very well match settings that comes in most peoples like which is what i believe tridef does. However you can most probably fine tune the settings to suit you even more.
The iz3dguide is a decent way to get a standard setting that works for most games. And once you start tinkering with the settings you'll soon get a feeling for what separation and convergence does. However i know it's difficult in the beginning trying to match two different settings. The key to totall success is daring to alter the settings and see what happens. Besides: "Listen" to your eyes when you alter some settings. The experience should be relaxing, not straining.

[GHG]

Hi GHG!

Welcome to MTBS. For a user driven list of what games are compatible with what and under what circumstances, go here: http://www.mtbs3d.com/m3ga" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The drivers can have greater compatibility than the listed profiles. These are just necessary because special optimizations were required for specific games.

The wizard is there so when you play the game for the first time, you can easily set a depth only situation. I usually close the wizard and set it to not come on again (the C key I think).

I know you mentioned using an MTBS guide, was it this one: http://www.mtbs3d.com/index.php?option= ... &Itemid=98" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Regards,
Neil

Hi,

Yeh that was the guide I was referring to.

So basically, the guide is for when you 1st start the game, you play with the settings and then you don't need it again once you get it right? Thats fine by me, but I'm having great difficulty even getting the settings right. Its like the sweet spot is impossible to find, I just end up with my eyes going crazy.

So I should try altering the settings with my glasses off? Wouldn't that make things more difficult since I don't even know what I'll be looking at properly and whether there'll be ghosting or eye starin as a result of what I'm altering?

What do I do about games that aren't listed in the profile settings? How do I get them to work? For example Risen is listed on the IZ3D site as a working game (there are hundreds more) but there isn't a profile listed for it in the driver. I don't understand how that works...

Thanks for the help guys, much appreciated.

[cybereality]

The iz3d driver is kind of hard to configure at first. I was confused for a while on how it works (in fact I am still a little unsure what its doing). But once you get the hang of it the compatibility is actually pretty good. I find the best place to start is with convergence at something ridiculously low like "-0.00005" and separation at around "100". I have not been able to figure out exactly what the convergence setting is doing as if you try to put it to anything above a few digits it seems to cap off. [Anyone care to explain what they think convergence does?] However even without understanding what is happening I can still get decent settings in many games. You just need to experiment a bit.

[iondrive]

hi,

the gamelist:
First off, don't fret about the list in your profile section of the iZ3D control panel. For some reason, it doesn't show all. To see more, you can open BaseProfile.xml with WordPad and see lots of entries there that don't show in your list. On winXP, BaseProfile.xml is in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\iZ3D Driver. I'm not sure where it is for Vista. Anyway, just look if you're curious and you're not supposed to edit anything there. You don't need to ever bother to select the profile unless you're changing something in it. The iZ3D driver auto-detects which game you're running and automatically uses that profile for it and if it's a new game it doesn't recognize, then it creates a profile in your UserProfile.xml. Also, when you adjust your settings, you don't need to save your new settings, they are auto-saved which could be a problem if you want to get back to your original settings. You may want to keep a backup copy of your original UserProfile.xml as a reference.

Separation and Convergence:
If you take two cameras next to each other and snap pictures with them, that's like the rendering done for a 3d scene. Separation controls the distance between the cameras and that results in changed image content due to the new perspective. Convergence control does not change the perspective content of the images. It's like if you make two physical photos of your snapshots and put one in front of each eye and then slide the pictures left and right in opposite directions. That's the classic convergence control that iZ3D uses and it effects how comfortable things seem based on how close or far it seems or how much your eyes cross or uncross. Basically, I like the shoebox diorama analogy. Separation controls how deep the shoebox is and Convergence controls how close it is to your face. Increasing convergence brings the scene closer and makes your eyes cross more. Try this, set your hotkeys to Alt-/ to increase Convergence and Alt-' to decrease. / is closer than ' so it helps you remember that Alt-/ pulls the 3d scene closer to you and Alt-' pushes it away although some weirdness appears when the HUD stays 2d. I also suggest Alt-; to increase Separation and Alt-. to decrease it, then Alt-, to toggle 3d on/off. This way you have a cluster of 5 keys in the same area that you can use with either hand with your thumb on the Alt key. Summarizing hotkeys:

increase Convergence: Alt-/
decrease Convergence: Alt-'
increase Separation: Alt-;
decrease Separation: Alt-.
toggle s3d on/off: Alt-,


What causes a little problem is that the classic use of Sep/Conv makes the focal plane change when you change separation alot in the beginning with some games. Decide what you want to keep at screen depth and use Convergence to converge on that (with your glasses off if that helps), then increase Separation with your glasses on and if you see that you've lost that focal plane, re-adjust Convergence to fix it. Yes, some games seem to have a narrow sweet spot while others have a wider range of good settings. It just depends on the game.

I never use the wizard, it just bugs me. You might just want to shut it off in the default profile if it bugs you too.

For the most part, yes, you have to adjust your own settings for each game but that doesn't bother me but then you're not me. I haven't made profiles for HL2 or Portal yet or else I would point you to them. Sorry. I don't know if others have made good profiles for those games. For "a decent amount of popout and a sense of scene depth" move in 2d to a place in the game where you see a line on the ground going into the distance like a hallway, road, bridge, or wall and with your glasses off, make that line into a long "X" shape using Convergence to set the cross-over point and Separation to adjust how wide the X is. Put on your glasses and adjust from there. Lots of games have a 2d crosshair though and I wind up converging on the "average target distance" with most of the scene popping out. This makes the HUD and the gun awkward but I manage to ignore it. Lower Separation to where you can stand it. For mostly scene depth, converge on something close, for mostly popout, converge on something far.

I think Tridef has better s3d but I prefer iZ3D since it has blue-line-code shutterglass support and has 3 hotkey presets and that's a very important feature to me. It really makes a big difference in how good of a profile I can make.

Good luck with all that info and I hope I didn't strain your eyes/brain with all that reading. Just be glad this text isn't in s3d where you have to adjust your settings in order to read it.

--- iondrive ---

[GHG]

Thanks so much iondrive, thats exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. Explains everything to me clearly. Will give it another go later on using your advice and see how I get on, but i'm a lot more confident going into it now that I actually know what the settings actually do. The shoebox analogy is perfect.

You should write the user guide for IZ3D because that just explained it about 100 times better than their guide does .

[cybereality]

@iondrive: If you are correct than the iz3d driver naming convention is the exact opposite of what the Nvidia driver does. With Nvidia the convergence controls the perspective and the depth (previously called separation) controls the parallax between the view. At least thats what I think is happening. What I do know is to get a good setting on iz3D I must set separation to around "150" and convergence to "-0.0005". On Nvidia I have to set depth to very low, like 3 bars and hold convergence + button for a few seconds. Then they seem to look about right to me.

[iondrive]

Hi guys,

You are very welcome GHG and thank you for the nice compliment. Some of the comfort level with s3d gaming comes from the difference between the 2d HUD and the 3d scene so just remember that the convergence controls control the scene and not the HUD. In other words, if you want to push the HUD back into the scene, then you have to pull the scene out because that's what you control. Regarding hl2.exe, I did try Team Fortress 2 recently and I wasn't happy with it since I couldn't get rid of the 2d crosshairs and Texmod didn't work with it. Selecting "none" for crosshairs in the game menu only makes each weapon have it's own reticle and so "none" really means "no single preferred crosshair". Maybe I'll find a mod for it someday or just use alot of popout like other games I've played. It can be OK. I think that if you find good settings for one Source game, they might work fine with all other Source games so you won't have to monkey around too much with that.

Cyber,

Yes, nvidia (at least old-school and new-school too if it's the same) apparently decided to do something a little differently than classic sep/conv s3d theory. My struggle to understand/dissect/analyze it is here on the nvidia forum:

http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=96112&hl=" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

It's pretty long so I'll try to summarize. Basically, with the old nvidia drivers right from the beginning (even below driver 30.87), they have sep/conv controls that both move the camera positions and I put much effort into trying to figure out what was going on and I noticed some things that helped me so that. I eventually figured out that they had just labeled things according to their own ideas and functioning so that their convergence control controls the separation of the cameras. This turns out to at least make a little sense since increasing camera separation makes you cross your eyes more and so makes them converge. Image your head swelling to 10 times its current size, you would need to cross your eyes more to look at your monitor. So it gets confusing when convergence controls actually control camera separation and it begs the question, "then what do the separation controls do?". From your experience, I assume you know that when you increase separation with nvidia, the 3d projection system keeps the same point/plane in the scene in focus or at screen-depth or at the zero parallax point. I think this is a nice feature because it lets you control depth without changing the "crossover point". In other words, if your 3d scene includes a line on the ground going to infinity like a straight flat road to the horizon, you can set a point on the road to be at screen depth and without your glasses on, you will see two lines crossing at that point. With nvidia's separation controls, you control depth without changing the location of that point whereas with iZ3D and classic sep/conv controls, increasing total scene depth (via camera separation), that point does move. So what nvidia's driver separation controls do is change the camera separation plus a counteracting classic convergence image horizontal shift that keeps that focal point constant. So both sep and conv with nvidia move the cameras, but sep does a counteracting image shift to keep the same convergence point while conv does not. This is evident when you have good separation and then push convergence back because you can see that the scene loses depth. This was frustrating for me before I figured this out because I would find a good separation setting that I liked with good depth, then I would use the convergence controls and I would lose the good sense of depth that I had as if the scene were flattening out so I eventually figured out that it's because the scene really was flattening out since the convergence controls were moving the cameras. You can think of their separation controls as having a kind of auto-convergence. Note I never did figure out how or what those drivers' autoconvergence function did. It looks like it never worked or did anything. Sometimes I still take a look at it to see if I can tell something about it but I don't recommend that since it seems like such a waste of time.

That's a summary?!

--- iondrive ---

[cybereality]

It seems to me there should be 3 controls. One called "separation" which simply adjusts the spacing between the two cameras. Two, what I would call "convergence" which adjusts the focal point of the cameras or rather changes the symmetrical angle of view (toe-in). Third "parallax" which lets you shift those two buffers on the screen horizontally to push or pull the whole thing in or out of the screen. It seems like with Nvidia all these things are happening at the same time or something. Very confusing.

[iondrive]

I would like to see a driver with a "toe-in" control that I could play with and "convergence" is a good word for describing toe-in but anyway, here is my idea for testing a driver to see if it does any toe-in. There are other situations you could use but lets say you move your guy in your s3d game under a wide doorway so that, while looking out through the doorway, you can see the top of the doorway in each eye and it is parallel to the top of the screen. In order to get such a view, the cameras must be looking in parallel directions and if your driver does classic convergence (image slide), then you should be able to change convergence to any value and the doorway top should remain parallel to the top edge of your screen. Similarly, if your driver does classic camera separation, the doorway top should still stay parallel to your top screen-edge regardless of any separation value you change to. If your cameras ever do any toe-in, you should see it in your images which would result in the doorway top no-longer being parallel to the top of your screen's display. Of course, if you go looking for this effect, you should try to increase your values to some extreme amount in order to maximize the effect and make it easier to detect. If it's undetectable even with extreme amounts of adjustment, then I would say it does no toe-in.

--- iondrive ---

PS: I still have to work on understanding all that TriDef does. It seems they do something a little more complex that I haven't figured out yet. It's kind of low on my list of things to do though.

PPS: actually, I would like a second convergence control that slides the entire 2d HUD away from you. Then I could use the in-game crosshairs after I set it to some further depth. I think TriDef has something like this but you can only make the HUD closer, not farther.