Watch Dogs

[sersoft]

and this happens on the day after I decided to downgrade from 2GB to 1GB of Vram

[Jack_Freeman]

Wait… why would you downgrade?

[Maxey]

He got bought by Ubisoft.

[Kairouseki]

Not sure if it’s working for me. I just tried it. Performance did seem to improve a bit though. I don’t really get framerate drops while driving anymore and the framerate seems stabler.

[Deathmonkey7]

Saw videos of the mod. It looks great all except the dof. Still though, there’s a shit storm brewing from all the buyer’s being pissed at Ubisoft.

[sersoft]

@Kairouseki

Not sure if it’s working for me. I just tried it. Performance did seem to improve a bit though. I don’t really get framerate drops while driving anymore and the framerate seems stabler.

Even though I’m playing on the lowest settings in eyefinity, it did add lens flare, shadows casted from car headlights and the rain drops are individually illuminated just like the readme says.

The reason I downgraded from 2GB to 1GB of VRAM is because I couldn’t get eyefinity to work with the newer GPU, so I switched them back.

I have a secondary GPU installed now (fanless low profile geforce GT 210 1GB DDR3) and even though there’s nothing plugged into it, somehow it seems to get rid of a lot of the stuttering on my HD6850, I think it has something to do with the “overlap unused pci memory over total physical memory” setting I enabled in the BIOS.

[Kairouseki]

What do you mean rain drops are individually illuminated? Like in headlights and streetlights? I did see that headlights now cast shadows so I suppose it is working. Daytime still looks pretty bland though, though I suppose there’s no really fixing that without redoing art assets and other things. Seems to have did a bit of a graphics jump but not too much. Performance (namely stuttering) is better though. Getting about 40 fps average maxed out with temporal smaa on my 670.

[Diabolical]

https://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2014/06/19/ubisoft-comments-on-e3-2012-files-present-in-pc-watch-dogs.aspx?utm_content=buffer21e8c&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

[Bolteh]

Can anyone tell me what exactly the big deal is here?

I still have he original HL packaging (the huge orange box) and it shows screenshots with water that looked a lot better and a primitive form of dynamic shadows, but neither could be found in the actual game, but were still accessible through hidden config commands.

What’s the difference with that and Watch Dogs now?

Mind you: I don’t care about Watch Dogs, it strikes me as a very dull and stale game.

[sersoft]

Well it just seems like a lot of amazing modelling, texture work and coding went to waste because even after enabling all the right config entries, in some places textures and effects are too down-scaled even on Ultra and objects like those hanging lights at the entrance to the club that previously had an amazing level of detail are now flat as a brick.

[danielsangeo]

And here I am with my GT 640.

[TheeGoatPig]

@Bolteh

Can anyone tell me what exactly the big deal is here?

I still have he original HL packaging (the huge orange box) and it shows screenshots with water that looked a lot better and a primitive form of dynamic shadows, but neither could be found in the actual game, but were still accessible through hidden config commands.

What’s the difference with that and Watch Dogs now?

Mind you: I don’t care about Watch Dogs, it strikes me as a very dull and stale game.

Way too many people think that Watch Dogs was way too overhyped, and that they have a moral obligation to knock it down a few pegs, so they take every opportunity to attack the game, instead of having some fun playing it, or moving on and playing something else worth their time.

[k3nny1550]

Plus, the game sold 4 million copies in a week, so their arguments are invalid…

[Maxey]

The HL1 downgrade wasn’t as obvious as Watch_Dogs’ neither was it as hyped.

Still, I agree it’s ridiculous.

[k3nny1550]

Ubisoft’s reaction to the E3 shaders hack was rather silly though. Ubisoft PR has gotten really good at saying a ton of words that mean very little.

[Kairouseki]

@TheeGoatPig

Way too many people think that Watch Dogs was way too overhyped, and that they have a moral obligation to knock it down a few pegs, so they take every opportunity to attack the game, instead of having some fun playing it, or moving on and playing something else worth their time.

Yeah it’s totally because people hate the game and not that Ubisoft is yet again being retarded and gimping the PC version. See also: Far Cry 4.

[BendyBread]

Now now boys, I’m sure we can all agree to like/dislike things mutually without being passive-aggressive diva sass.

[MSKyuuni]

@Bolteh

water that looked a lot better and a primitive form of dynamic shadows, but neither could be found in the actual game, but were still accessible through hidden config commands.

What were those commands, if you happen to know? Various Google searches didn’t help.

[Bolteh]

They were only available for D3D and have been patched out since the WON-Steam switch (I believe), but I do remember at least the shadow command in all it’s extremely buggy glory.

Edit, found it. It’s not a direct command, just a call you need to enable in a dll:

You can still use shadows in HL1, just add this code to StudioModelRender.cpp in the client DLL.

Add after CStudioModelRenderer::Init

Code:

void (*GL_StudioDrawShadow)(void);

__declspec(naked) void ShadowHack(void)
{
_asm
{
push ecx;
jmp [GL_StudioDrawShadow];
}
}

Then replace IEngineStudio.GL_StudioDrawShadow(); in CStudioModelRenderer::StudioRenderFinal_Hardware with

Code:

GL_StudioDrawShadow = (void(*)(void))(((unsigned int)IEngineStudio.GL_StudioDrawShadow)+32);

if (IEngineStudio.GetCurrentEntity() != gEngfuncs.GetViewModel())
ShadowHack();

https://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1238089&p=39192527&viewfull=1#post39192527

[Jack_Freeman]

Well, it makes sense they removed it if it’s buggy. Valve released Half-Life in a good state, it was one of the best looking games of its time, even if they removed a few things here and there, it still looked amazing.

Ubisoft doesn’t have any proper excuse for removing so much stuff. It’s not more buggy than the actual game, and its much much more than Valve removed from Half-Life. Besides, Valve didn’t really say “We didn’t remove anything” after the release of Half-Life, one of the devs of Ubisoft tweeted that regarding Watch Dogs.