First, you should be seeing ReShade load in the top bar at the game intro when it first opens, and it likely took a little time to actually load the first time. The "Home" key on your keyboard is the default key for ReShade's menu to show up.
Do you see a "Reshade" bar at the top when you first start the game and see the Intro screen? If so, it should be installed correctly. You might have "Scroll Lock" on the same key that reads "Home". It might be you have "FN" key activated which causes that key to use its alternate late. You can press and hold FN while clicking on Home to activate it, in that case, or you can find out for your keyboard / computer how to toggle / change the FN default state (so it clicks Home instead of the alternative without holding down FN).
If you need to change the key, you can edit ReShade.ini and find "KeyOverlay". You can change it to, for example, backslash \ with "KeyOverlay=220,0,0,0" (without quotes). For more keys you can look here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.windows.forms.keys?view=windowsdesktop-6.0
You just change the first number, 220, if your keyboard doesn't have a Home key, or if you don't want to mess with an FN toggle.
Ok, must have done something wrong. I'm not seeing a "Reshade" bar at the top when I start the game. This is the path to the shaders in my HL2\bin folder. Is there something additional I need to do for it to use it? D:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Half-Life 2\hl2\bin\reshade-shaders
That's my bad for the instructions since I did say "HL2" folder but I guess I meant the Half-Life 2 folder itself. Glad it's working for you, hopefully this helps others if having issues!
Triple Chocolate is now complete. I am now making different settings files for it. While the others get a normal and lite version, Triple Choco gets very low, low, medium, high, and very high because it uses more effects than the others and is cutting edge as far as what is currently possible with ReShade. Each flavor will also get a "super" and "ultra" version. There of course will also be no_anti-aliasing versions too. Triple Choco also has a version(Raven_fix) that helps the weird color-banded fog bug introduced in the 20th Anniversary edition(in Ravenholm the fog does not look good, has nothing to do with my ReShade). There will also be a non-paid-shaders version of Triple Chocolate too.
Trying to get it out this week! It should be final. Triple Chocolate can handle basically any brightness settings you use (I recommend 2.3 darkness setting), and it can fully handle both Episode 1 and 2 and I'm pretty sure both Portal games without needing to change any settings.
Currently working on 1.2c, which has versions slightly different for Episode 2. I also adjusted the darkness adaptation to be a little less sensitive to account for an area in Episode 2 where it didn't look quite right. It's all a balance, so that change affects everything else, ideally toward true balance.
I'm trying to finalize a huge update. It's hard because every time I think I'm done I go back to tweak it a little more. I'm going through HL2 to find specifically different lighting situations, save a game, and then go back to check each scene when I make a change. Change one thing, change everything, when regarding ReShades. Like a Rubik's cube, I keep changing and tweaking until I can look at it and can't find anything I want to change. It can be difficult because what looks good in one scene maybe is bad in others. For example I was going to upload 1.2 until I found in the second visit to the lab in HL2 that the scene looked too dark. Fixed that, then I found out the text was overly-blooming in the dark background of the opening cutscene to EP1, so I changed the order of shaders to fix it. I have to be careful doing that, because it could drastically change how the final result looks.
I'm not even sure if this update will look better than 1.1. I'm just making the versions and seeing how it is when I take the photos and compare the versions. 1.2 Vanilla is mostly untouched, I only added very slight bloom to bright lights so the horizons shine a little, and I took back some of the over-tuning of the color curve I did to mid-tones which unfortunately made some pixels in some lighting conditions such as the front plaza in the beginning have a slightly pinkish hue instead of yellow. It's nearly-white pixels so it's easy to flip it to a different color and have it go unnoticed.
I'm also going for FOUR versions: Vanilla, Vanilla Bean, Chocolate, Double Choco. Vanilla Bean is mostly untouched Vanilla with RayTracing added, but it's designed to be the most balanced. Chocolate and Double Choco are made to have stronger contrast, darker low-lit scenes, stronger bloom. Vanilla Bean and Double Choco look very similar in some lighting situations, but in some settings the difference is huge. Making four versions and keeping them inline with the goal of this project has made the development of 1.2 take far longer than 1.0 and 1.1 combined.
will you update this when u finish ep 1 and 2 and if you plan to how long would it take, i plan to play the game with mods that make it look better and i'm down to wait for a full version of what u plan to upgrade to
I'm working on an "intense" version with stronger contrast and light spread. I wouldn't say it's going to be a 1.1 version, but it's a different direction, as I find 1.0 to be complete as a neutral "vanilla" shader.
I did check out EP2, and it looks good there, the additional shading from the game helps. Episode One, however, has way brighter lights as they changed the style a bit. I suggest turning the darkness up or brightness down in the game settings, but even with the lowest brightness and without my ReShade on, the game has a ton of pure white glow in a lot of scenes at the beginning. The HDR in the game adapts to it, sure, but it's a slow adaptation and I haven't looked into increasing the adaptation speed in-game.
Anyway, the ReShade words good on all 3, albeit I think brightness settings will be a subjective choice for EP1.
I am also looking to add a "raytrace" reshade version for each(neutral and intense versions), from Pascal's. I normally don't use his paid shaders anymore because I know most people who go on here don't have it, so I wanted to make a ReShade that can compete with that, and frankly I think it will only make a small difference to add it.
i will keep an eye out on what u intend to cook with reshade, looking forward for it and good luck man. i appreciate the advice on what to do with the brightness in ep 1
Well, I did decide to go back and work on it more. I am optimizing them by getting rid of a couple of extra SSAO shaders that only do a small bit and replacing them with another with more settings that lets me make it look how I want (I think so far, will have to see how stairs underwater look because I don't want it to look off anywhere).
And I will be making a "super" version of each that maxes out the settings and is made to give you the absolute best at the cost of all of your FPS.
19 comments
The "Home" key on your keyboard is the default key for ReShade's menu to show up.
Do you see a "Reshade" bar at the top when you first start the game and see the Intro screen? If so, it should be installed correctly.
You might have "Scroll Lock" on the same key that reads "Home". It might be you have "FN" key activated which causes that key to use its alternate late. You can press and hold FN while clicking on Home to activate it, in that case, or you can find out for your keyboard / computer how to toggle / change the FN default state (so it clicks Home instead of the alternative without holding down FN).
If you need to change the key, you can edit ReShade.ini and find "KeyOverlay". You can change it to, for example, backslash \ with "KeyOverlay=220,0,0,0" (without quotes). For more keys you can look here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.windows.forms.keys?view=windowsdesktop-6.0
You just change the first number, 220, if your keyboard doesn't have a Home key, or if you don't want to mess with an FN toggle.
Trying to get it out this week! It should be final. Triple Chocolate can handle basically any brightness settings you use (I recommend 2.3 darkness setting), and it can fully handle both Episode 1 and 2 and I'm pretty sure both Portal games without needing to change any settings.
I'm not even sure if this update will look better than 1.1. I'm just making the versions and seeing how it is when I take the photos and compare the versions. 1.2 Vanilla is mostly untouched, I only added very slight bloom to bright lights so the horizons shine a little, and I took back some of the over-tuning of the color curve I did to mid-tones which unfortunately made some pixels in some lighting conditions such as the front plaza in the beginning have a slightly pinkish hue instead of yellow. It's nearly-white pixels so it's easy to flip it to a different color and have it go unnoticed.
I'm also going for FOUR versions:
Vanilla, Vanilla Bean, Chocolate, Double Choco. Vanilla Bean is mostly untouched Vanilla with RayTracing added, but it's designed to be the most balanced. Chocolate and Double Choco are made to have stronger contrast, darker low-lit scenes, stronger bloom. Vanilla Bean and Double Choco look very similar in some lighting situations, but in some settings the difference is huge. Making four versions and keeping them inline with the goal of this project has made the development of 1.2 take far longer than 1.0 and 1.1 combined.
I did check out EP2, and it looks good there, the additional shading from the game helps.
Episode One, however, has way brighter lights as they changed the style a bit. I suggest turning the darkness up or brightness down in the game settings, but even with the lowest brightness and without my ReShade on, the game has a ton of pure white glow in a lot of scenes at the beginning. The HDR in the game adapts to it, sure, but it's a slow adaptation and I haven't looked into increasing the adaptation speed in-game.
Anyway, the ReShade words good on all 3, albeit I think brightness settings will be a subjective choice for EP1.
I am also looking to add a "raytrace" reshade version for each(neutral and intense versions), from Pascal's. I normally don't use his paid shaders anymore because I know most people who go on here don't have it, so I wanted to make a ReShade that can compete with that, and frankly I think it will only make a small difference to add it.
And I will be making a "super" version of each that maxes out the settings and is made to give you the absolute best at the cost of all of your FPS.
screenshot