s-ilent / SMSM-PSO2

A messy shader modification for Phantasy Star Online 2.

A messy shader modification for Phantasy Star Online 2.

Features

1. To reduce banding artifacts ingame, colour dithering has been implemented.
   Note that because many textures in PSO2 are stored in low quality and weren't changed with the engine upgrade, the surfaces of objects and skyboxes will still have visible banding.
2. Added a patch to the shader used for Mags to reimplement their emission.
3. The emissive strength of some weapon shaders has been increased, allowing them to cast bloom lighting.
4. Added a scattering pattern to motion blur to make it look less stepped.

Usage

This relies on 3DMigoto to do the hard work.

1. Download and install 3DMigoto from https://github.com/bo3b/3Dmigoto/releases.
2. 3DMigoto comes with 3 folders. Extract the contents of the x64 folder next to pso2.exe, so the folder contents including DLLs are next to pso2.exe.

3DMigoto is a shader patching tool. By default, it is configured to let you hunt for shaders.
If you are not planning on doing modding yourself, disable the features in the included d3dx.ini.

1. Disable hunting, calls, and input by setting them to 0.
2. Enable cache_shaders by setting to 1.

Finally, place the ShaderFixes folder from this repo next to pso2.exe, overwriting the folder created by 3DMigoto.

Details

You can use 3DMigoto to modify shaders yourself and adjust the output on your own. However, the compiled shader output is difficult to read.

Most materials will start with a similar piece of code to do dithering when the camera is too close. This is also used for some types of transparency on items.

To make things slightly easier, I've roughly identified the output buffers used by the main rendering shaders. The buffer layout opaque shaders write to seems to be like this.

• o0.xyz : Albedo
• o0.w : Scene-dependant ambient power
• o1.x : Metallic or specular intensity
• o1.y : Roughness
• o1.z : If >0.5, the material is specular. Otherwise, it is metallic. Note that non-metallic objects have a specular colour of white.
• o1.w : Occlusion
• o2.xyz : Normals
• o2.w : Unused
• o3.xyz : Emission
• o3.w : Unused
• o4.xy: Screen-space blur factor (i.e. velocity for motion blur)
• o4.zw : Unused

In the weapon shader provided, 69a6bb12b5eee518, the adjustment is applied with a single line that multiplies the output emission by 7. If you find other items that have emission that's too dull, you can try something similar on your own.

Notes

Changes to the rendering engine in the future that affect shaders will cause the affected shaders to have new hashes, which will result in the new versions not being patched. In that scenario, the patches will need to be redone.

As PSO2 was only just upgraded to the new renderer, I'm hoping Sega will fix some of the bugs themselves.

Transparent objects rendered after the normal deferred passes will fail to dump shaders. I think it's because the result is too big, as transparent objects have really really big shaders that try to calculate all the lighting for them. It seems kind of excessive, but for non-emissive objects it makes sense. At the same time, I think it might be a bottleneck for old GPUs...

A number of passes, such as FXAA and TAA, are rendered after the final output is composited to sRGB space.

License

The unique code in this repository is under the MIT license.

Some code in this repository is decompiled shader code. Please note that it is used under fair use.