Many Thanks

[Tango]

First of all salute to all the pilots of this wonderful flight adventure.
I am a very late coming newbe having just seen and read 33Lima's reports regarding BOB2 this month on the Combatace portal.

My sincere thanks to the efforts of BDG and the A2A community for your sharing and the tremendous amount of work you have put into this classic historical flight adventure.

Especially BDG,PV,rogeroger,Boreas,and stickman.
And if I have left anyone out I apologize for that.

I'm running windows 7 on a home built desktop I did in 2013.
My video card is an Nvidia GTX 750 TI with 2G of memory.
I am running two SSD drives.
One for Windows and one for games and BOB2 is the only one installed.

I have installed BDG version 2.13 and rogerroger's update 3 and updates for rr3.

My first question is, at this point do I have the option of using one of three terrains such as
1. stock terrain and enhancements ?
2. Borreas terrains and enhancements ?
3. Martin's England ground textures and enhancements?

I'm not sure which one to try at this point.

My second question, is Sweet FX required to achieve the best graphics results ?

Also the first time I looked at the 2.13 manual I was amazed.
I have never seen a manual so complete and well done.

My hat is off to all of you.

Tango

[Mickvet]

Tango, welcome aboard and I share your gratitude for all the people who have created this extraordinary replica of historical reality.

I have Martin's Terrain, Slightly Darker, Greener installed, with Martin's Reshade Darker Greener.

[Tango]

Thank you Mickvet
I think I will start with your recommendation.
Tango

[Tango]

Hi Mickvet
Should you install Martin's regular terrains first before Martins Terrain slightly darker, greener?
Hope someone can help.
Thanks
Tango

[Mickvet]

I have just installed Martin's Terrain, Slightly Darker, Greener.

[Tango]

Thanks once more Mickvet.
Do you also know how to install the reshaders?
Some of the reshader downloads have 3-4 folders inside the main folder.

Does the entire reshade folder for slightly darker greener go into the main BOB2 directory?

Tango

[rogeroger]

Greetings Tango.

Place the reshade folder and 2 files d3d9.dll and Reshade.fx in your bob2 directory.

Untill recently I was using reshade FXAA to remove jagged edges on the cockpit frames, but I discovered that reshade was causing shimmering on distant aircraft and terrain, even if it was switched off, something to do with the d3d9.dll file I suspect.
I removed the files from the bob2 directory and tried the following.

found that 8x anti-aliasing plus 4x sparse grid supersampling in Nvidia Inspector kills the shimmering on distant terrain

I found this in a post by 33LIMA on the combatace forum and it removes aircraft jaggies, and distant terrain and aircraft shimmering.

You need to download and run Nvidia Inspector, create a profile for bob2, adjust your anti-aliasing settings as above.

You can still give reshade a try, it might work well on your system. It does have a lot of options you can tweak.

[Tango]

Thank you RR for your response and all the work and mods that you have done!!
I have used Nvidia Inspector before and will try your suggestion.
I found that after I did the 213 upgrade and your upgrades with objects and Martins slightly darker, greener terrain that the biggest thing that cut way down on the distant shimmering was in the GFX settings turning off desktop resolution. Not sure why that was.

If I try the reshade in the main directory as you said, do I have to config BDG to see the full path ?
Love this sim and thanks for your help.
Tango

[rogeroger]

It's a pleasure.

Just place 3 files in the bob2 main directory, nothing else is required.

scrlk key toggles reshade on or off, default setting is "on" when starting the sim.

If you are unfamiliar with Reshade hopefully the following will help.

To access shader settings open the reshade folder and open one of the config files(sweetfx.cfg) with notepad.You will see a list of shaders. Shaders are activated by "1" and deactivated by "0".
For example:

////-------//
///**HDR**///
//-------////
#define USE_HDR 1 //[HDR] //-HDR : Not actual HDR - It just tries to mimic an HDR look (relatively high performance cost)

//>HDR settings<\\
#define HDRPower 0.90 //[0.00:8.00] //-Strangely lowering this makes the image brighter
#define radius2 0.81 //[0.00:8.00] //-Raising this seems to make the effect stronger and also brighter
#define HDR_ToggleKey RFX_ToggleKey //[undef] //-

Hdr introduces dynamic lighting. "define USE_HDR 1" means HDR will be activated on game start, so scrolling thru the shaders you can tell which are activated.

Hdr is my favourite shader for bob2 because there is no brightness fine tuner in bob2 settings.

#define HDRPOWER CONTROLS BRIGHTNESS.


#define radius2 controls the exposure efect which causes clouds to be over exposed.


I usually set radius2 to 0.74 to nullify the over exposed effect, then adjust brightness with hdrpower. I'll then adjust radius2 to add a small amount of exposure if I want it.


Other usefull shaders are "curves and "levels" which can be used to add contrast, FXAA which adds fine anti-ailiasing, vibrance and lumasharpen are self explanetory.

In "customfx.cfg" you'll find "gaussian blur or sharpen" and "tiltshift" to add depth of field. Tiltshift is toggled ingame by the spacebar if it is activated in the config file.

[Tango]

Thanks again RR.
And especially taking the time to explain the Reshade and other very good to know items.
I have saved all your info so I won't lose it.
Best Regards
Tango