I did some work on Thursday and Friday. Thursday namely was getting the HUD worked out, and I managed to get an autodepth crosshair and 3D in-world interaction icons working, and then I started looking at reflections and specular highlights on metallic surfaces while still inside the Normandy, which brought a disappointing discovery. Unfortunately, this Remaster is feeling very much like a simple texture upgrade, because speculars and reflections are baked right into the textures themselves, rather than being calculated separately by individual shaders. Basically, this game is still using old rendering techniques, which is as disappointing to discover as it is limiting. Fortunately, it is still possible to adjust those reflections and speculars, but unfortunately they may as well not be as they are proving to be conflicting with one another, that fixing reflections causes speculars to be floating off a surface rather being "inside" the surface, and vice versa. Still investigating whether this can be accounted for and handled separately from one another. If not, then at the very least, by default, both reflections and speculars are at surface depth, and although that's not realistic looking, it's less visually displeasing and probably better than having some things look perfect and others be broken.
On Friday I went out on Eden Prime, saw the first body of water, which have screenspace reflections on the surface. These seem to be fairly similar in code to the previously mentioned reflections/speculars, but unlike the others, these are very broken looking by default and will require fixes. I've managed to find some "good enough" solutions here, but I'm still investigating to find the best solution for both here, and hopefully elsewhere, but I'm a bit worried that this might not be something I can do via regex for various reasons, which will definitely slow down progress on the final release of the fix.
That's where my work ended, as it was a Canadian long weekend and I was preoccupied with having my (understanding and patient) girlfriend over the whole weekend (whom sat and watched me work on my Ryse fix most of the previous weekend, and probably would have castrated me if I did the same thing this weekend
). I decided I wasn't willing to put up a WIP until I can get something to my satisfaction worked out with those reflections.Today I've been trying to get back into the working groove, but I've been home all day and still have yet to fire up the game. To be honest, I'm feeling a bit demotivated and disappointed that this game is literally just a fresh coat of paint thrown on, and not quite as impressive of a remaster as they were making this out to be. I really wish they could have updated the game to use some more advanced lighting and rendering techniques. So far the game looks flat to me... and knowing that I've got that mess with reflections to contend with on my return doesn't help excite me either. I think maybe I should just try playing for a bit tonight (and ignoring the reflections for now) just to get myself a little more invested into it and hopefully have my opinion changed, and then come back and try fixing the issue tomorrow.
tl;dr: Did some work last week, got stuck on fixing reflections, took the long weekend off, and procrastinating today because first game impressions are a bit disappointing.
3D Vision Surround user since 2010 
