Head Start First Impressions
Ancarion
Member Posts: 155
I transferred over my current module-in-progress (with its 3+ gigs of custom content) from the Diamond Edition to the EE and played/tested it for a while, and figured I'd post my initial impressions here. Now, in these early stages, I wasn't expecting all that much of a change to the core system, but it was still good to see that overall it was a smooth process with no unexpected issues. All my haks, override, and custom tlk worked fine. As to the new features we have so far:
1. First, I was glad to see that an issue I was having with invisible cloaks and robes after the latest NVidia driver update has been fixed for my gtx980ti card
2. It seems that skinmeshes are correctly receiving lighting now, so they no longer look darker than trimeshes
3. In general, graphical fidelity looks to be much improved at 1900x1080 resolution, though I'd like to be able to upscale the GUI (the only option I see in settings is to set it at 1)
4. The new font is a nice improvement IMO
5. I'm not that big a fan of the contrast or vibrancy effects, but that might just be because I'm so used to the "traditional" look of the game. Depth of field is nice to have, though. I'm looking forward to seeing what can be done with other shader effects as well
6. Overall, I think you guys are doing a hell of a job, and I'm excited to see what is yet to come...
So clearly, this is a somewhat sparse post, but I just wanted to make sure you were aware of how much appreciated your efforts are
1. First, I was glad to see that an issue I was having with invisible cloaks and robes after the latest NVidia driver update has been fixed for my gtx980ti card
2. It seems that skinmeshes are correctly receiving lighting now, so they no longer look darker than trimeshes
3. In general, graphical fidelity looks to be much improved at 1900x1080 resolution, though I'd like to be able to upscale the GUI (the only option I see in settings is to set it at 1)
4. The new font is a nice improvement IMO
5. I'm not that big a fan of the contrast or vibrancy effects, but that might just be because I'm so used to the "traditional" look of the game. Depth of field is nice to have, though. I'm looking forward to seeing what can be done with other shader effects as well
6. Overall, I think you guys are doing a hell of a job, and I'm excited to see what is yet to come...
So clearly, this is a somewhat sparse post, but I just wanted to make sure you were aware of how much appreciated your efforts are
20
Comments
Is this an early alpha stage that we're seeing? I expected, at least, some of the basics that DB had the sense to add to the other EE games, such as the advanced loot tool, always highlight option, and updating the OCs to current patch levels. I was disappointed.
I've also had to turn off all of Advanced Frame-Buffer Effects selections on a modern computer. Because of this, I'm not really seeing any benefits of having the EE version over the GOG version. Maybe someone else can tell me how single players will benefit having the EE version?
What you are seeing is Early Access/Head Start/Beta/whateveryouwanttocallit, and thus not the final release. We're actively taking bug reports and feature requests. It's done when it's done.
Single players will benefit from EE changes through what module authors will do with the new features we put in (in addition to hardware compatibility, performance improvements, platform support, and so on ..) There are no changes to the original campaigns planned yet.
Widescreen resolutions did not work for me on the GoG version, on my present computer nor on my past two computers. They do on my Head Start Beamdog version. That alone is worth my money. I'll be playing part of Chapter One today to see if I hit any glitches. So far, the only one is what I mentioned that UI scaling doesn't seem to be working yet. Sometimes I see some double-letter blurring in some of the movie captions and in the load screens.
You might be able to edit the INI to force scaling, though the notes say that it will be discarded if the UI won't fit for the target resolution (so it may just go back to 1 anyway).
The team will look at eventually adding 2x scaling to 1080p (no promises right now).
@Futabot I reported this issue on Redmine, please, for future bugs, report them according to the instructions here - https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/66998/how-to-report-bugs-you-find-in-nwn-ee#latest
My first impression is that I immediately noticed the huge difference in color saturation. It had to display on my big screen HDTV for me to see it. That is, it's not noticeable in any of the online videos or streaming I've seen, but in 1080 resolution on my HDTV the difference is striking.
One criticism I've heard over and over is that people can't see the improvements in video quality, (mostly from people who have not bought it and can only look at the streaming videos I think), but I could instantly see it, and I was blown away by how much more beautiful it looks.
You have to get into playing the game to see how the video clarity and color saturation have improved, which I guess is somewhat unfortunate, since I understand why people who maybe don't love this game as much as I do are hesitating to buy it.
I can say that in the small amount I've played today, I've seen no signs of any instability or glitching in the game, other than some very slight blurriness in some of the movie captioning, which I think has to do with HD font scaling, and is not a big deal.
Now I'm trying to decide whether to keep playing or to wait for more features to be added, as I do have some other games competing for my attention right now.
I think I'll wait until the GUI improves and then I'll try something other than the original campaign.
High contrast is a boon, though. A little tone-mapping goes a long way.
No luck getting the AO shader to function to any visible degree, I'll have another poke later on today.
If you find the vibrance settings a bit much just tone them down, the settings are located in the fsFBVIB.shd file in the /ovr folder of the games instal directory.
change the line
uniform vec3 RGBBalance = vec3 (1.0, 1.0, 1.0);
to
uniform vec3 RGBBalance = vec3 (0.3, 0.3, 0.3);
and you'll get a much less in-your-face pop to the colours. Tweak those values if you want more saturation.
Trying to figure out how to do a normal shader, somewhat limited by my utter lack of experiance with shaders.
there's some tweaking i've made (ingame shaders disabled) : https://imgur.com/a/k3ZlG