JURASSIC WORLD EVOLUTION - 3D Vision (shadows off)

[Zappologist]

JURASSIC WORLD EVOLUTION

Wow! What a game! A big surprise for me. Released in 2018, I’m only discovering it now.
I was in a mood to watch the Jurassic Movies as three of the five of them are in Bluray 3D (don’t dismiss the first one, Spielberg’s masterpiece not only stands the test of time as a movie, but the 3D conversion is probably one of the best I’ve seen). And after watching the movies I remembered about the game, which is endorsed by Universal Pictures so it’s not kidding around.

I won’t speak about the gameplay. Only one thing: ignore all reviews and try it for yourself. You might be surprised to play one of the most technically impressive and fun management game. With dinosaurs! In 3D! Not that there’s any competition, but if you’re into dinosaurs this game will showcase them for you as never before.
Visuals are gorgeous, dinosaurs animations are mindblowing, there are so many species, it’s really awesome.

Now for the 3D technical bits:
- Shadows must be turned off
- If you’re on a 4K OLED you will have to turn down most graphic options to get good performance (unfortunately upscaling suffers from the “reduced mouse range” issue)
- Due to 3-core bug, or CPU bottleneck, the frame rate tanks drastically when in first person (driving the jeep, or just watching the park from a horizontal viewpoint, as all the buildings, landscape, sky etc are visible in the frame. Usually you give orders to jeeps and choppers to do tasks, but if I want to do something myself I’ll just switch to 2D)
- The above scenario also involves the usual issue with too much convergence in the jeep versus normal park management. This can be addressed by creating a key toggle via 3DFM, I simply did not bother.
- Interface is at screen depth, but that never bothered me, and in this game it’s mostly irrelevant as there are no health bars or other icons attached to game entities (animals, buildings, guests, etc). If you click on anything it will usually just bring up an info window, at screen depth. Nothing annoying.

Now, you lose quite a lot of atmosphere/mood by turning off shadows, but I don’t think I’m smart enough to look into that. I’ve looked at Bo3b’s shaderhacking info, and I’ve even found a video from DarkStarSword on Youtube about fixing shadows, but if I understand correctly shadows are not like putting a texture at a fixed depth, you enter the realm of deferred rendering and the video pipeline, and that’s quite intimidating.

If any shaderhacking gets into this game and plays it (it was great fun for me!) maybe they can take a look and see if anything can be done quickly. There might not be any headers, or other complications like that, in which case it’s probably not worth it.

Last thing I wanted to mention is:
I am truly impressed with developers Frontier about what they did with this game.
And I know they have another similar game out: Planet Zoo. It seems this game might be even more impressive than JWE (the park management and build creativity were extremely toned down for the dinosaur game).

Does anyone know if Planet Zoo also works in 3D? Maybe also with shadows off? Might be the same engine.
If this is the case, I’m extremely excited. Judging from my experience with JWE we will be in for quite a treat with Planet Zoo!

Hope you liked my write-up, and hope that many of you will experience the pure joy of playing JWE in 3D. I probably don’t need to mention it anymore, but I would not even have looked twice at this game in 2D. But seeing dinosaurs recreated so well in 3D, managing they needs, building little ecosystems where you see Brachiosaurs cohabitate with T-Rexes and some velociraptors in the same paddock, seeing them run about, socialize, panicking one another, looking for food, etc, with such gorgeous, movie-grade visuals, it was really entertaining to me. It was one of the rare games that made me play it back to back twice.

I would share some gorgeous photos but my PC only creates ginormous 30Mb .pns files (and I don’t think you can even post photos here on MTBS).

Thank you all again for this wonderful 3D community!

[skyrimer]

Great news, got this game on the latest humble bundle but since it's 2d I couldn't care less, now I will redeem the key and add it to my way too big 3d backlog, thanks for sharing!

[Losti]

Is there a way to kick MIGOTO in ? As far as i can remember the games crashes using MIGOTO hoock, even with several versions and the loader. Without MIGOTO any actions for fixing or learning fixing will be useless ^^

[Zappologist]

Hi Losti, I did not try hunting mode, but wrapper features such as upscaling and SBS/TAB alternative modes work.
Planet Zoo however, which apparently has the same engine, crashes immediately if I install the wrapper via 3DFM, saying something like "no graphics adapter found".

[bo3bber]

Is there a way to kick MIGOTO in ? As far as i can remember the games crashes using MIGOTO hoock, even with several versions and the loader. Without MIGOTO any actions for fixing or learning fixing will be useless ^^

3Dmigoto 1.3.16 works fine with this game, and shader hunting is working. No crashes. Performance was truly abysmal, but I did not look into it much.

An example shadow file is attached. This might just be a shadow mask, did not spend much time on this.


Thanks for the great writeup Zappologist. Would not have taken a look otherwise.

[Zappologist]

Thank you Bo3b, appreciate the compliment.

Losti, as I've said before, in case you look at this don't spend more than 1-2 hours max. If it's a quick fix, fine, otherwise we will have to accept it as it is. At least the option to disable the shadows already exists in the game. Thank you even for your reply here. Time is precious, and finite.

[Losti]

I have tested it a second time those days and i was able to start in 3D with some ini settings and i was able to move the shadows into depth but not with the right alignment. The shadows has to be adjusted in the vertex shaders. No PS here as peer. Seldom but possible:-)

But as i wrote i will not fix games i will not play just quick attemps to keeping up shader hacking knowledge and not let get lost But i was not able to find the right formula. Behavior is strange here.

Btw the book jurassic park is highly recommented to read

The Performance of this game in 3D is really wors for me. But anyway, no quick fix possible so i skipped further attemps here. Sorry.

[a31632]

JURASSIC WORLD EVOLUTION

Wow! What a game! A big surprise for me. Released in 2018, I’m only discovering it now.
I was in a mood to watch the Jurassic Movies as three of the five of them are in Bluray 3D (don’t dismiss the first one, Spielberg’s masterpiece not only stands the test of time as a movie, but the 3D conversion is probably one of the best I’ve seen). And after watching the movies I remembered about the game, which is endorsed by Universal Pictures so it’s not kidding around.

I won’t speak about the gameplay. Only one thing: ignore all reviews and try it for yourself. You might be surprised to play one of the most technically impressive and fun management game. With dinosaurs! In 3D! Not that there’s any competition, but if you’re into dinosaurs this game will showcase them for you as never before.
Visuals are gorgeous, dinosaurs animations are mindblowing, there are so many species, it’s really awesome.

Now for the 3D technical bits:
- Shadows must be turned off
- If you’re on a 4K OLED you will have to turn down most graphic options to get good performance (unfortunately upscaling suffers from the “reduced mouse range” issue)
- Due to 3-core bug, or CPU bottleneck, the frame rate tanks drastically when in first person (driving the jeep, or just watching the park from a horizontal viewpoint, as all the buildings, landscape, sky etc are visible in the frame. Usually you give orders to jeeps and choppers to do tasks, but if I want to do something myself I’ll just switch to 2D)
- The above scenario also involves the usual issue with too much convergence in the jeep versus normal park management. This can be addressed by creating a key toggle via 3DFM, I simply did not bother.
- Interface is at screen depth, but that never bothered me, and in this game it’s mostly irrelevant as there are no health bars or other icons attached to game entities (animals, buildings, guests, etc). If you click on anything it will usually just bring up an info window, at screen depth. Nothing annoying.

Now, you lose quite a lot of atmosphere/mood by turning off shadows, but I don’t think I’m smart enough to look into that. I’ve looked at Bo3b’s shaderhacking info, and I’ve even found a video from DarkStarSword on Youtube about fixing shadows, but if I understand correctly shadows are not like putting a texture at a fixed depth, you enter the realm of deferred rendering and the video pipeline, and that’s quite intimidating.

If any shaderhacking gets into this game and plays it (it was great fun for me!) maybe they can take a look and see if anything can be done quickly. There might not be any headers, or other complications like that, in which case it’s probably not worth it.

Last thing I wanted to mention is:
I am truly impressed with developers Frontier about what they did with this game.
And I know they have another similar game out: Planet Zoo. It seems this game might be even more impressive than JWE (the park management and build creativity were extremely toned down for the dinosaur game).

Does anyone know if Planet Zoo also works in 3D? Maybe also with shadows off? Might be the same engine.
If this is the case, I’m extremely excited. Judging from my experience with JWE we will be in for quite a treat with Planet Zoo!

Hope you liked my write-up, and hope that many of you will experience the pure joy of playing JWE in 3D. I probably don’t need to mention it anymore, but I would not even have looked twice at this game in 2D. But seeing dinosaurs recreated so well in 3D, managing they needs, building little ecosystems where you see Brachiosaurs cohabitate with T-Rexes and some velociraptors in the same paddock, seeing them run about, socialize, panicking one another, looking for food, etc, with such gorgeous, movie-grade visuals, it was really entertaining to me. It was one of the rare games that made me play it back to back twice.

I would share some gorgeous photos but my PC only creates ginormous 30Mb .pns files (and I don’t think you can even post photos here on MTBS).

Thank you all again for this wonderful 3D community!

Although not 100% perfect, I got it to run on the Star Wars Battlefront II (2017) profile in 3D Vision with no adjustments at all.
I tried numerous profiles and this is the best one I could find. “Shadows turned off” as you mentioned is needed but for the rest have been playing the game for hours today and yesterday and very beautiful and playable this way in 3D.

Hope this helps although I realize a 100% “real fix” is always a better solution.

[Zappologist]

The game was working fine with default profile. Apart from turning off shadows I did not have to do anything in particular.
Did anyone try the new game? I think that one might be DX12 only so our dinosaur adventures end with the first one.

Anyway, for what it's worth, I played, finished and 100%ed this game around the time I wrote this post. Then, I discovered Planet Zoo, and played it for hundreds of hours in 3D (same thing, shadows off). I did not post a write-up for Planet Zoo (I guess I was too busy playing it) but if I had, it would have been even more superlative than this one. There is simply nothing like it, and it's difficult to conceive that there ever will be, unless it's Planet Zoo 2, but it will probably be DX12 as well.

[a31632]

The game was working fine with default profile. Apart from turning off shadows I did not have to do anything in particular.
Did anyone try the new game? I think that one might be DX12 only so our dinosaur adventures end with the first one.

Anyway, for what it's worth, I played, finished and 100%ed this game around the time I wrote this post. Then, I discovered Planet Zoo, and played it for hundreds of hours in 3D (same thing, shadows off). I did not post a write-up for Planet Zoo (I guess I was too busy playing it) but if I had, it would have been even more superlative than this one. There is simply nothing like it, and it's difficult to conceive that there ever will be, unless it's Planet Zoo 2, but it will probably be DX12 as well.

You are correct, it was working in 3D with the default profile but it was really looking much better under the profile I mentioned. Maybe I’m too much of a perfectionist.

I tried JWE2 and it needs newer drivers, tried with 452.22 and crashes, works with the newest ones but no 3D as a result. Amazing graphics in the new game so if we somehow can bypass the graphics driver check in the game we might be able to try…..

[3DNovice]

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