3D Vision Fix by mike_ar69
Fixed:
- Haloing/FOG/Smoke/Fire
- Shadows
- Lighting (lights, reflections)
- Put cross hair at depth
Added:
- Presets for convergence ("0" key"). Helps to have low convergence when using the MAVI.
- Cross hair at depth
- Presets to toggle certain hud elements at depth (because they are linked to the cross-hair) ("9" key)
- Toggle to turn off the FOG while underwater as I was not able to fix it (works above water though) ("8" key)
- Preset to toggle the screen drips on and off ("7" key)
Known Issues:
- Fog does not get corrected properly underwater. The toggle key "8" can be used to turn it off during underwater sequences.
- Some HUD elements are coupled to the cross hair, and so get pushed to depth which looks wrong. The "9" key can disable the depth correction while looking at the map and in particulalrly when looking at the database.
- Bloom is at screen depth. This is only a minor annoyance. It is coupled to the same shader as the hud so can't be disabled, and can't be separated.
- Game writes installation directory to the shaders, so you need to use the installer provided (instructions below).
Summary
An underrated game in my opinion. I pikced it up for $0.49 and for that money it's a no brainer. It's back to $4.99 on team but even that is a bargain for this game. It reminds me of Tomb Raider 2013 actually, just set on a ship, with lots of water. Same 3rd person view, similar kind of character movement, with climbing etc. Even the shooting mode changes FOV like TR2013. Graphically the game is good in 2D, but I think it's fantastic in 3D, the water physics and effects are worth it in 3D just by themselves.
Out of the box the 3D is a disaster (try it). With the fix, I would rate the game "Excellent", with the caveats of having to use toggle keys as noted above.
Installation
Installation of this fix is a bit more involved than normal, since the game generates shaders with different crc's depending on where the game is installed. So I provide an "installer" to build the correct shaders and DX9Settings file on the fly. I have tested this and it has worked on several test installations, but the script is pretty basic with very little error handling - please ping me if you have problems.
I provide three batch scripts to make this relatively easy. The installation is in two steps:
1. Run the game once in debug mode to generate your version of the games shader dump.
2. Run main install script to generate your fixed shaders. When you start the game next it will be in release mode and should be fixed.
Steps:
1. Extract this zip file to the games exe directory. In my case this is D:\Steam\steamapps\common\Hydrophobia.
2. This will install into a subdirectory called "HelixModInstall_Mike_ar69_Hydrophobia_v2". Rename this to HelixModInstall".
3. In the directory HelixModInstall open up the following 3 files in notepad or whatever you use:
- CopyDebugFiles.bat
- RemoveDebugFiles.bat
- 3DFix.ini
4. You will see that these all reference files and directories in a Steam directory that has been installed on drive L:\SteamLibrary\SteamApps...etc.
5. EDIT AND CHANGE all these links to point to wherever your installation is. Then SAVE all three.
6. *** If your installation is the same as this default, then leave them as is.
7. Go back into the HelixModInstall subdirectory and double click the batch file "CopyDebugFiles.bat"
8. This will copy a debug dll and a basic DX9Settings.ini file to the games exe directory.
9. Start the game. You should see red text at the top (that's the debugger dll). Select New Game and get to the Home Screen, look at how bad it is.
10. Quit out of the game. Check that a subdirectory called "dumps" has been created.
11. Go back into the HelixModInstall subdirectory and double click the "Remove DebugFiles.bat" batch file, to remove the temporary debug files.
12. Now the main fix: double click the file "ShaderReplace.vbs". Wait about 20s until a file called "3DFix_LOG.txt" appears and a dialog box pops up. This file will summarise the shaders that were updated by showing the mapping from my CRCs to your CRCs.
13. If there were no errors, you should be able to start the game.
14. If you cant run the vbs file as you ahve it associated with notepad+ or whatever try running "cmd" in the Run Box and type assoc .vbs=VBSFile (thanks to Marcin Tehace for pointing that out).
If you have errors, post a note in the blog comments below, I have watch on this game and will pick it up quickly.