Prepar3D Tweak Assistant (PTA)

[vcarlo 529]

Thank you KNOSSOS for your excellent contribution to our community.  I followed your initial settings recommendation and everything looks great !

 

We are very blessed to have so many contributors such as yourself, Pe11e, and many many others in our community.  THANKS :wink:

[KNOSSOS 122]

I did start with a clean default SHADERS HLSL, so from an untweaked state. Do your sliders take shadow depth as far as RSP? it just seemed a lot less contrasty. I'll have another play later. I do like the additional water controls, and if you fix the adaption that would be great.

 

Yes, shadows depth could be the same. 

 

Some examples:

 

1.RSP settings Terrain brightness = High, Shadow Intensity = High make in GPUTerrain.fx shader following changes:

 

const float3 sunAmbient = cb_mLights[sUN_LIGHT].mAmbient.xyz * 0.8;  - modification for shadows depth

const float3 finalSunColor = (sunAmbient + (saturate(sunDiffuse * (sunContrib * 1.4 * shadowContrib)))); - modification for terrain brightness

 

And so did PTA with checked tweaks "General shadows intensity" = 0.80 and "Boost light on illuminated areas" = 1.41.

 

2.RSP settings Terrain brightness = Low, Shadow Intensity = High make in GPUTerrain.fx shader following changes:

 

const float3 sunAmbient = cb_mLights[sUN_LIGHT].mAmbient.xyz * 0.2;  - modification for shadows depth

const float3 finalSunColor = (sunAmbient + (saturate(sunDiffuse * (sunContrib * 1.4 * shadowContrib)))); - modification for terrain brightness

 

Respectively this can be done by PTA with checked tweaks "General shadows intensity" = 0.20 and "Boost light on illuminated areas" = 1.41.

 

And so on.

 

Also you can try lower value for "General shadows intensity and higher value for "Boost light on illuminated areas" if you want max.contrast.

Thank you KNOSSOS for your excellent contribution to our community.  I followed your initial settings recommendation and everything looks great !

 

We are very blessed to have so many contributors such as yourself, Pe11e, and many many others in our community.  THANKS :wink:

Thank you, Vincent!

[Novation 534]

 

 

Some examples:

 

Thank you for all that Yuri. I will experiment once more and see what I end up with.

 

:smile:

[ideoplastic 86]

Yuri

 

I have finally managed to get it to work and looks fantastic. Restored to default settings, deleted some shaders and used the settings you provided in your earlier post.

It has now changed the appearance of the sim for the better. Very impressive!  I should have thanked you earlier for your work and genereous donation to the comunity, unfortunately I was at work, and plainly forgot to do so. I will have to mess around with settings to try and learn how they affect the sim. In the meantime once again thank you and kind regards.

[KNOSSOS 122]

Yuri

 

I have finally managed to get it to work and looks fantastic. Restored to default settings, deleted some shaders and used the settings you provided in your earlier post.

It has now changed the appearance of the sim for the better. Very impressive!  I should have thanked you earlier for your work and genereous donation to the comunity, unfortunately I was at work, and plainly forgot to do so. I will have to mess around with settings to try and learn how they affect the sim. In the meantime once again thank you and kind regards.

Great! Thanks a lot, Joaquin!

[Richard Sennett 2,499]

Screenshots guys   :wink:

[Cruachan 705]

Hi,

 

Those of you who have had the foresight to backup your P3D default ShadersHLSL folder, have achieved a good result with the 'RealismShaderPack' tool and now wish to experiment with the new 'Prepar3D Tweak Assistant' utility might consider doing the following:

 

1. Rename the current ShadersHLSL folder to, say, 'ShadersHLSL_RSP'

2. Rename your Shaders folder to 'Shaders_RSP'

 

3. Restore a COPY of the default ShadersHLSL folder (always keep a backup).

4. Start tweaking with PTA

 

You should now be in a position to revert back quickly to the results achieved while using the RSP tool by simply deleting or renaming the PTA-tweaked 'ShadersHLSL' folder and its associated 'Shaders' folder. Then rename, you've guessed it, the 'ShadersHLSL_RSP' folder to 'ShadersHLSL' and 'Shaders_RSP' folder to 'Shaders'.

 

Strictly speaking, step 2 is not necessary as the Shaders folder can be safely deleted and Prepar3D will rebuild a fresh shader cache the next time the sim is started. The content of this shader cache will be determined by the active settings in the ShadersHLSL folder.

 

Hopefully, this will reduce the chances of future self-induced heartache if things don't work out

 

Mike

[ankh21 17]

Mh,

 

i am confused

 

The info boxes tell us, that lower numbers in the shadow settings mean darker shadows...but in the example above, shadow HIGH is shadow intensity 0.2 OR 0.8?! To me it seams, that general shadow intensity is for the brightness of terrain and not for the shadow itself?

 

Please brighten my brain

 

Matthias

[edpatino 1,964]

Hi,

 

Those of you who have had the foresight to backup your P3D default ShadersHLSL folder, have achieved a good result with the 'RealismShaderPack' tool and now wish to experiment with the new 'Prepar3D Tweak Assistant' utility might consider doing the following:

 

1. Rename the current ShadersHLSL folder to, say, 'ShadersHLSL_RSP'

2. Rename your Shaders folder to 'Shaders_RSP'

 

3. Restore a COPY of the default ShadersHLSL folder (always keep a backup).

4. Start tweaking with PTA

 

You should now be in a position to revert back quickly to the results achieved while using the RSP tool by simply deleting or renaming the PTA-tweaked 'ShadersHLSL' folder and its associated 'Shaders' folder. Then rename, you've guessed it, the 'ShadersHLSL_RSP' folder to 'ShadersHLSL' and 'Shaders_RSP' folder to 'Shaders'.

 

Strictly speaking, step 2 is not necessary as the Shaders folder can be safely deleted and Prepar3D will rebuild a fresh shader cache the next time the sim is started. The content of this shader cache will be determined by the active settings in the ShadersHLSL folder.

 

Hopefully, this will reduce the chances of future self-induced heartache if things don't work out

 

Mike

 

Good post. Thanks for remembering!

Cheers, Ed

[reecemj 146]

Thanks Mike! A very wise action to take.

[SolRayz 392]

This is a pretty awesome utility! Thanks!

[KNOSSOS 122]

Screenshots guys   :wink:

 

warm evening above Pelloponesse  :smile: 

 

 

 

 

[nooon 21]

edit : thanks knossos !

Pls upload the peloponese preset (there's sepia in it right ?) !!

[Novation 534]

One very annoying this with this, is if you untick sections, the shaders are overwritten by default values. I wanted to keeps my own cloud.fx shader, so unticked all the related section, but it was still changed.

 

It would be nice for unselected items to have no effect at all, so it can be combined with other custom values.

 

 

 

i am confused

 

This is where I went wrong too

[KNOSSOS 122]

edit : thanks knossos !

Pls upload the peloponese preset (there's sepia in it right ?) !!

No sepia actually. Navid's Hashemi sky textures (http://navidh.se/misc_navids_skyset_2016_v3.html) make fantastic warm tint at down/dusk an look pretty good. 

There are some water, shadows, hdr tweaks:

 https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=39306A3D995B2A25!148671&authkey=!ALN_Tp3KvFPPzq4&ithint=file%2cini

One very annoying this with this, is if you untick sections, the shaders are overwritten by default values. I wanted to keeps my own cloud.fx shader, so unticked all the related section, but it was still changed.

 

It would be nice for unselected items to have no effect at all, so it can be combined with other custom values.

 

 

 

 

This is where I went wrong too

Yes, but when someone will decide later apply PTA tweak to already manually edited shader, it may cause unpredictable results: no information what was changed before. I think it's quite dangerous for ordinary users.

Edit: However, it's great idea to make in next release separate management for applying core shaders, custom shaders and *.cfg file. But tweaking core shaders already edited manually is dangerous I think.