(BRAINSTORM) How might we be able to mod true HDR into VaM?

[Audiophage]

Disclaimer: my knowledge of coding is rudimentary at best, so everything I say is conjecture. If I say something incorrect, please let me know.

So I've been thinking about how the one thing holding VaM back from being truly realistic is the tonemapping. Apparently, it runs on a version of Unity that only supports non-linear, low range color spaces. But I had an idea for how we might be able to circumvent that limit.

My understanding of Unity's rendering engine is as follows:


-the mesh is calculated and sent to the GPU along with textures, lights and shader data. (hair and some physics calculations are done on the GPU)

<------​

-the GPU renders to a framebuffer using an 8 bit per channel color space with no dynamic range

|
What if we intercept the data here and run it through our own custom rendering engine? -------​

The pros:
-VaM (in its vanilla form) only utilizes a few different shaders, meaning that rewriting a rendering engine for VaM wouldn't require a comprehensive reconstruction of the ENTIRE engine.
-As I understand it, Unity is far easier to mod than other game engines.

The cons:
-Even with the low variety of shaders present in the vanilla game, I imagine writing an efficient HDR renderer from the ground up would still be a pretty monumental task.
-Modding at this level may require decompilation of vital game files, making it extremely difficult for normal users to install.
-I imagine that loading any custom shaders would result in VaM just instantly crashing.

I know it's been said, but VaM 2.0 is also currently in development. For how long, I have no idea. But if the first full release is less than ~2 years away, I imagine it just won't be worth it to write a new renderer for VaM 1.

 

[hazmhox]

"my knowledge of coding is rudimentary at best", "... but here's how we can do it"
Sorry, this is way to funny to not make fun of it : ']

The best possible example is: have you ever seen someone hack into a game engine and completely rewrite the render pipeline afterwards? I don't think I have seen that (often?). The closest example is reshade which does injection.

And all this, only to handle HDR? Which is estimated to have at best, 10/15% market share. Which on VAM's hub represents what? A handful of people?

So that's (very very) high effort for just a couple of people.
On the other hand, dedicating time to bring new plugins and features to the game will give people way more things to play with and reach pretty much anybody on the hub.

Unless you have way too much time on your hands AND you would be up to wasting that time on a feature like that... which concerns pretty much no one. This is something I wouldn't even think about.

Just like any game: I would rather see meaningful development mades, than "stupid" features that only exists for brands to sell new monitors. Don't get me wrong: HDR is cool... but all and all? No one cares.

On the other hand: better perfs, more environment, more assets, more plugins ... everyone will be happy with that until VAM 2 releases. : )

 

[Audiophage]

"my knowledge of coding is rudimentary at best", "... but here's how we can do it"
Sorry, this is way to funny to not make fun of it : ']

The best possible example is: have you ever seen someone hack into a game engine and completely rewrite the render pipeline afterwards? I don't think I have seen that (often?). The closest example is reshade which does injection.

And all this, only to handle HDR? Which is estimated to have at best, 10/15% market share. Which on VAM's hub represents what? A handful of people?

So that's (very very) high effort for just a couple of people.
On the other hand, dedicating time to bring new plugins and features to the game will give people way more things to play with and reach pretty much anybody on the hub.

Unless you have way too much time on your hands AND you would be up to wasting that time on a feature like that... which concerns pretty much no one. This is something I wouldn't even think about.

Just like any game: I would rather see meaningful development mades, than "stupid" features that only exists for brands to sell new monitors. Don't get me wrong: HDR is cool... but all and all? No one cares.

On the other hand: better perfs, more environment, more assets, more plugins ... everyone will be happy with that until VAM 2 releases. : )

I didn't mean HDR for HDR monitors, I meant a true linear color space with enough dynamic range to fix ugly looking overbrights.

 

[hazmhox]

If we're not talking about hardware HDR, then I don't really see the point either (I mean, even less than HDR for monitors).

If you have over-exposed values in your scene, there can be several reasons:

• Intentional artistic direction
• Bad lighting
• Bad post process configuration

Now, let's assume we're in a proper situation where it's a scene properly calibrated and art directed. You will never be able to fix the fact that pretty much no one knows how to calibrate a monitor properly and there's a very big chance that most people have a bad setup on their monitors/TVs.

Even "stock settings" are pretty bad, and most people run on them if they even open the settings menu once.

Now, the discussion, technically speaking is interesting... the advantages on the other hand are quite abysmal. I don't think anyone is gonna waste time on a detail that can be solved with proper lighting and art direction : )
(even tho it can be ruined by a bad monitor setup, but that's the user's fault, not the creator/dev).