Over 30,000 lines of code, 500 pull requests, 9 months of work, and dozens upon dozens of fixes. All core components of Community Shaders have been rebuilt and optimised, deeply integrating with the vanilla rendering systems and extensively tested by testers on our Discord server.
There is no better time than now to be involved in Community Shaders development. There are many tasks available for any type of programmer, and we need all the testers we can get.
All Features have been reworked to maximise performance, using completely new systems. Performance should be much higher and more consistent across different hardware. The framework hooks deep into the engine and can now support much more advanced rendering additions whilst sustaining high performance, which is heavily used in upcoming Features.
Many additional Features will be released soon following a rolling release schedule.
Changelog:
- Upgraded the renderer to D3D11.1. A compatible GPU is now required.
- Added official AMD and Intel GPU support.
- Added official GOG support.
- Reworked the Light Limit Fix with extremely higher performance which either matches or surpasses vanilla lighting performance. It now covers all lights in the game including shadows, however the limit is still currently set to 4 shadows.
- Completely new user interface with custom theme support and a new font, styled after the vanilla menus..
- Added PBR support for new modern rendering and easier asset creation.
- Deferred rendering for global illumination, reflections, and subsurface scattering.
- Support for recompiling almost all game shaders. Shaders are replaced only when needed.
- Support for DLAA and Native FSR 3.1 AA.
- Fixed objects glowing in the dark if using the back lighting, rim lighting, or soft lighting flags. This is better than the Fixed Effect Lighting mod, and it’s automatic.
- Fixed double-sided object shading. Things like the banners in Dragonsreach will now be shaded correctly.
- Improved shadow rendering performance whilst significantly improving quality.
- Fixed weird lines with parabolic (omnidirectional) shadow maps.
- Reduced blurriness of shadow cascades.
- New state-of-the-art screen space shadows which run 2-3x faster whilst being extremely high quality.
- Subsurface scattering has been optimised and no longer runs on the first-person model. It also now does not affect specular highlights. On non-opaque geometry as well as the first-person model, the Soft Lighting flag is re-enabled to apply the vanilla SSS method.
- Increased Subsurface scattering thickness to be more accurate.
- New optimised parallax, with new optimised, high-quality shadows.
- Directional parallax shadows can now be extended past the parallax distance.
- New height-based terrain blending when using terrain parallax or PBR.
- Unified tree LOD and grass lighting model with standard Lighting shaders.
- Fixed grass shadows being broken in some interiors.
- Improved grass shading model which has less harsh lighting.
- Linear composited reflections for water which look much more realistic.
- Optimised water parallax.
- Directional shadows support for water.
- Directional shadows support for all transparent objects such as eyes and glass.
- Significantly optimised Dynamic Cubemaps, up to 16x faster.
- Optimised Water Caustics, now applies only to sunlight.
- Improved grass SSS and SSS on foliage, glaciers etc.
- Removed LLF particle light INIs which could have false-positives.
- Removed LLF particle light flicker support which was never used.
- Support for po3’s Light Placer, particle lights are now considered deprecated.
- Significantly improved particle light scalability by restricting contact and parallax shadows.
- New contact shadows algorithm.
- Disabled blurry SSR being applied to random objects.
- Removed eye occlusion code because it caused issues.
- Unlocked internal game HDR rendering.
- Ability to disable Features in-game.
- Automatic shader recompilation when using the Dynamic Cubemap editor or Light Limit Fix visualisation options.
- Fixed crash with the Dynamic Cubemap editor if the folder was missing.
- Volumetric lighting and screen space reflections added to VR. These were originally missing from the VR version but they have been reimplemented from scratch.
- Force disabled the “improved” snow shader.
- Force disabled the IBLF shader.
- Grass now supports features without Grass Lighting installed.
- Merged all water features into one Feature.
- Water Blending is now part of Community Shaders as a bug fix.
- Water blending has been reworked to prevent invisible water and improve performance.
- Fixed adaptation shader making the screen go permanently black due to a NaN.
- Included the Sky Reflection Fix mod.
- Removed Dynamic Cubemaps - Metals in favour of PBR.
- Removed Tree LOD Lighting in favour of the new unified shading model.
- Fixed water refraction to prevent weird edges on underwater objects.
- VR support added and improved for every feature.
- VR parity with all reverse-engineered shaders (compilable source code).
- Integrated FidelityFX and Streamline SDKs.
- Fixed grass point light shading, added support for shadows.
- Particle lights now correctly respect particle radius.
- Fixed distant water colours not matching water close to the player.
- Completely new SSR shader.
- Fixed SSR having a massive fps impact even when doing nothing
- Fixed SSR looking broken when looking downwards.
- Fixed SSR artefacts.
- Massively increased SSR visibility and range.
- Redone wetness and puddle build-up which is now consistent across saves.
- Removed Chaotic Ripples from the wetness feature, no visual impact.
- Raindrops are now slightly visible on wet surfaces that do not have puddles.
- VR-specific optimisations for Features.
- Removed the fake specular from water which looked very strange.
- Improved water performance by removing unneeded depth samples.
- Fixed grass distance fade in VR so that it matches vanilla.
- Reduced lighting intensity on particles like smoke, because they are not directional.
- Directional shadows support for effect shaders using the UniformScale flag.
- Fixed dynamic cubemaps not applying to water on VR.
- Fixed water partially using a reflection colour instead of the real reflection.
- Fixed instances of mismatched features between eyes.
- Fixed caustics not applying to grass.
- Reduced SSAO intensity.
- Fixed normal map blending on characters.
- Fixed motion vectors on the sky which caused TAA/DLAA/FSR artifacts.
- Improved logging.
- Improved shader error messages.
- Significantly cleaned up and refactored shader code.
- Fixed wetness raindrops moving with characters.
- Renamed Complex Parallax Materials to Extended Materials.
- Included Extended Materials and Dynamic Cubemaps in the core archive.
Some features were implemented but removed due to performance or quality reasons. They will not come back:
- Variable Rate Shading
- Normal Mapping Shadows
Upcoming features (in no specific order):
- Skylighting
- Screen Space Global Illumination (SSGI)
- Terrain Shadows
- Cloud Shadows
- HDR
- Frame Generation
- Terrain Blending
- Water/SSR Compositing
- Capsule Shadows/AO
- Sharper textures when using AA
- New weather/post-processing presets system
30 comments
on another note, truly game changing stuff right here
Is that required until SSGI is included in community shaders by default?
I'm so thrilled to be able to use CS for my next big modlist, finally solving so many problems with all the incredible features this mod and its add-ons have developed. Still kind of amazed that you folks were even able to break through the seemingly untouchable '4 lights limit', now it's a thing of the past... Crazy good work.
VR player here, just came back from a test run through a misty forrest during sunset, actually gave me chills. With this update my game now runs smoother and looks better than ever before. Lack of full ENB support - although Boris did his best until he had to give up on it - has always been one of the major drawbacks for me in VR, CS is a total game-changer now. Over 3 years after leaving "Flatrim" behind, and many many iterations of mods and trying out different stuff, I am finally happy with the way it looks and feels. Hell, I might even start to actually play the game now...
Great update, thank you so much guys, you are amazing. Looking forward to all the stuff still left to come!