Sweetfx

[freneticamnesic]

Some tables look great..........................

[lightpin]

I'll fire up one of yours with these things loaded up, hold up. Any preference?

[freneticamnesic]

No I just tried it, that's what I was saying - mine are way too dark because I make them super dark to begin with

[lightpin]

Oh I get it. See I had that issue too, because I primarily only run night mods. Had to finger those settings quite a while before they finally purred in the dark.

[lightpin]

The rear flashers cause the back wall to completely illuminate (at times almost to a solid shape). But otherwise...

 

Not bad!
 ^{- Gomez Addams}

[lightpin]

One more. Look at that BLOOM!

 

 

The playfield flashers' blooms just about match the photo glare of the real flashers. I can't even describe how happy that makes me.

[gStAv]

do you have any settings to share yet mr lightpin

Love to try, but I'm also a nightmod table guy, so I guess the default would be too dark for me too

[lightpin]

Sure, I'll try to remember to post when I get home tonight.

[mpad]

Sure, I'll try to remember to post when I get home tonight.

Cool. Glad you like it.

Personally I don't like too much bloom during play, but it's great for stills

Did you make per-table settings or one global setting?

[lightpin]

 Did you make per-table settings or one global setting?

 

I've got a "master" setting that looks great across the board, but am working on a few specific ones too. The master setting only really works because the vast majority of the tables I keep loaded have a pretty consistent "environment". Dark but not too dark. There's a few non dark-mod (I actually hate calling them that... more like "realistic-lighting mod". Playfields don't illuminate w/ perfect brightness in real life) tables that I've adjusted to fit that environment. LoadedWeapon's recent streak of mod releases really helped too, because he stays consistent with the lightning.

 

Anyway — I'll tell you what I'd REALLY like to do. Rather than have per-table settings, I want to figure out a way to make a MASTER switch that toggles between two / three settings. That setting would then affect all tables played after the selection.

 

The point of that would be to have a "day time" setting for playing in a sun-lit room. It would actually actually GAIN brightness to the darker tables and tone down the blooms. Then a "night time" setting designed to be played in a dark room, where the playfield gets much darker and the blooms *much* brighter, just as they would be experienced in RL.

 

Pretty good idea, ammiright? Naturally this is easy to do manually. But the ideal solution would be having some way to toggle it at the frontend (pinballx) level. Or even a systemic level. Imagine a toggle switch on your cab, likely wired to an Arduino that could then fire a script on the host machine, that flipped the configuration from day to night...

[lightpin]

Again — thank you for calling attention to this. SweetFX came up a few months back on VPF but nobody paid any attention. I'm so glad that I invested the bit of time to actually look into what you were talking about, because it's fucking incredible

[mpad]

Yeah, no prob. But credit goes to the guy who brought it up for tpa. I have used sweetfx before in other games, but I didn't see the potential, especially for the light/dark mods.

When I started with VP a year ago I was so let down by it's graphic capabilities and actually I was surprised that it was mostly 2D. Performance was mostly CPU dependent. But WOW have things changed (thanks to all the devs)!

When it became DX9 it just didn't strike me to use sweetfx until now.

Finally all the unnecessary graphics power most people have in their cab can be put to use.

And great Idea with the master day/night switch. I think scripting this would be pretty feasible, but there are also some 3rd party sweetfx GUI or control apps who it might be worth looking into.

The light sensor thing would be awesome though

[jupiter]

 

Anyway — I'll tell you what I'd REALLY like to do. Rather than have per-table settings, I want to figure out a way to make a MASTER switch that toggles between two / three settings. That setting would then affect all tables played after the selection.

 

I've got a "master" setting that looks great across the board, but am working on a few specific ones too. The master setting only really works because the vast majority of the tables I keep loaded have a pretty consistent "environment". Dark but not too dark. There's a few non dark-mod (I actually hate calling them that... more like "realistic-lighting mod". Playfields don't illuminate w/ perfect brightness in real life) tables that I've adjusted to fit that environment. LoadedWeapon's recent streak of mod releases really helped too, because he stays consistent with the lightning.

 

Anyway — I'll tell you what I'd REALLY like to do. Rather than have per-table settings, I want to figure out a way to make a MASTER switch that toggles between two / three settings. That setting would then affect all tables played after the selection.

 

The point of that would be to have a "day time" setting for playing in a sun-lit room. It would actually actually GAIN brightness to the darker tables and tone down the blooms. Then a "night time" setting designed to be played in a dark room, where the playfield gets much darker and the blooms *much* brighter, just as they would be experienced in RL.

 

Pretty good idea, ammiright? Naturally this is easy to do manually. But the ideal solution would be having some way to toggle it at the frontend (pinballx) level. Or even a systemic level. Imagine a toggle switch on your cab, likely wired to an Arduino that could then fire a script on the host machine, that flipped the configuration from day to night...

 

 

Did you read this thread?  That is effectively what my switcher script does as discussed earlier in this thread!  Hence the name Sweet-FX-Ini-Switcher.    I have one button cab button to cycle through configs.  It plays a wav file (one per ini) as you switch between them so you know which one you are on - you can record your own audio - eg: Dark mode, etc..  When you exit a table and launch the next table from PinballX, it uses the settings/config last selected.

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/7wt0vf94a8fo0zw/SweetFXIniSwitcherVP.zip?dl=0

 

Excerpt from ini:

This program will launch Visual Pinball, and give you a key you can press to cycle through a list

of different SweetFX config files.

 

This program looks for all config files in your game folder that contains the normal SweetFX config file.

When you press the key the program simply copies the next config file to the 'live' SweetFX_settings.txt file and

then it sends a keystroke to SweetFX to tell it to reload the new config.  This allows you to instantly switch between config

files with one keypress.

 

For example If you have say 7 config files, the next one will be loaded after each keypress.  On pressing the key you will hear a beep

to acknowledge the change, wait about 2 seconds and you will here a second beep to confirm the change.  On the 8th press the SweetFX

is turned off (you hear beeps with a different pitch), and on the subsequent keypress the first config is loaded again.

This allows you to cycle through all config files, and when you get to the last one SwwetFX is turned off so you can

see the games default settings.  The next keypress will go back to the first file.

 

 

The script contains the AHK source code - feel feel to hack/change/re-distribute if needed.

[mpad]

^ ah yeah Jupiter already got that covered

(have to find some cab-time to try this all out myself)

[lightpin]

Whaaaaaaaaaat?! Man I must have very targeted brain damage or something. How I could have gotten this far without even noticing that is... frightening.

 

I likely won't be able to try it tonight (gonna be a late night at the agency) but I will ASAP. If that works you're gonna have to get your Author cred somehow just so I can Beer You    hehe

[mpad]

just some tips for messing with the SweetFX_settings.txt

 

- generally enable/disable shader effects here, tweak in dedicated setting below...

   /*-----------------------------------------------------------.
  /                      Choose effects                         /
  '-----------------------------------------------------------*/

 

- default is only 3 effects for color, brightness and bloom (Gaussian Blur, Lift Gamma Gain, Tonemap), but feel free to try anything. more fx, more money spent for grafix card, but usually for VP there should be some reserves.

- you can set anti aliasing in sfx, but I stll recommend doing this directly in your nvidi/amd driver settings (they usually know their hardware).

- the bloom around lights is more subtle if you control it with the "Gaussian Blur" instead of "BLOOM", which is more krass if you like it.

- if you run VP in a window and you edit your settings file you can just save it,click on VP so it is active and hit the reload key you assigned in sfx (def: end). so you see the changes on the fly.

 

- for anyone who wants to adjust brightness for day / night settings or who finds the default to dark adjust here (higher is brighter)

 

   /*-----------------------------------------------------------.
  /                  Lift Gamma Gain settings                   /
  '-----------------------------------------------------------*/

#define RGB_Gamma float3(0.700, 0.700, 0.700)  //[0.000 to 2.000] Adjust midtones for Red, Green and Blue

   /*-----------------------------------------------------------.
  /                  Tonemap settings                           /
  '-----------------------------------------------------------*/

#define Exposure 0.7                     //[-1.000 to 1.000] Adjust exposure

 

 

 

 

 

...sweet tweaking

[mpad]

some sample settings more brighter more bloom, followed by more pics of recent contributions OFF / ON

Hmmm, like the old ones better I think.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/svruod5ocklzrp8/SweetFX_settings.txt?dl=0

[ViriiGuy]

Well.. I am beating my brains out on this one.

I finally got it so I can Launch Physmod5 after dropping this into my folder, which I am not sure what made it work... But anyway....

Now I can launch physmod 5 and load a table. But as soon as I launch it, it crashes.

 

The log mentions Shaders and to try putting them in Visual Pinball\Tables\ So I copied all the shaders from Sweetfx to there.. no change.

What am I missing?

[mpad]

Hm... tables is def. the wrong folder. Has to be in the main folder where vp.exe is.

Are you launching with jupiters ahk script? Maybe just try launching the standard way first by clicking your vp.exe, nothing else. When it works you can adjust your settings for the launcher.

My second guess is directx9 and grafix driver. You have the latest version?

Last thing is nvidia geforce experience! It is known to cause problems. Try uninstalling it, it is not really needed. Maybe do that first!

[unclewilly]

Can someone post some master ini files for us to use as a starting point

[lightpin]

Damn it I forgot again last night. I'll try to remember tonight!!

[mpad]

Can someone post some master ini files for us to use as a starting point

 

Hey, there are already 3 sample settings included in the download package (the default was used on the indy and JP screenshots).

 

I repacked everything so you get all in one zip (sfx+jupiters ahk settings switcher).and wrote a little starters guide in the first post.

[unclewilly]

Cool thanks

[ViriiGuy]

I should have been a bit more clear, but frustration and typing don't mix well for me

I have been launching only by the vp.exe file. I haven't even tried from inside pinX yet.

I am going to clean all the sweetfx files out, make sure it still works... Then start from scratch again.

[maxfx4u]

Still playin around, but I'm really liking this.