discussion HD Long Road Home - Denoiser Mod [v1.0.0] [SomeGuyWithNoImagination]

[Fallen Angel Productions]

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Overview:
Denoises and sharpens the game, improving the quality of the renders.
This is not a perfect technology. Many scenes may continue to have noise.
Compatible with F4iunyl3x's video mod. You may use both together without conflicts.​

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Features:

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- Implements a shader to denoise and sharpen the images. Attempts to minimize render noise and may reduce compression artifacts.

Installation:

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1. Extract the contents of the zip to the game folder.
2. You should have a folder structure of LongRoadHome-[version]/game/denoising_shader

Change-Log:

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v1.0.0
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- Initial release

Note to Modders and Game Developers:

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Please note that the shaders used are not my own and have their own licenses attached (

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and

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).

Modders, feel free to tinker with and port this mod to other games. I have left in plenty of fully functional but disabled or unused code that I created and used throughout development. This includes a configuration screen, detailed comments and documentation, and fully implemented standalone copies of the shaders used (as well as other shaders previously used).

I encourage you to focus on porting to abandoned or completed games where further support from the developer is unlikely.

Game developers, please do not under any circumstances ever include this in your own games. There are many issues with implementing denoising this way. These include but are not limited to:

1. Device compatibility: GL2 is required, which may not be available on some platforms.
2. Performance issues: These shaders have the potential to massively impact performance on both low and high end hardware, especially with more aggressive denoising.
3. Misconfiguration mangling images: Denoising can very easily destroy fine details from any texture. Some examples includes skin, clothing, hair, and walls. This is especially prevalent with more aggressive denoising. This mod's configuration is tuned for this specific game and this one only. It is extremely unlikely to be the best settings for any other game.

Instead, please consider doing the following instead:

1. Increasing the number of iterations your render for,
2. Using a denoiser on the base images themselves (See: ),
3. Asking others for advice regarding the noise.

If you are a game developer and choose to use this in your game, I will publicly shame you.

This mod is configured to reduce noise while attempting to retain fine detail in skin and other materials to the best of its ability.
As such, noise will still continue to appear in many scenes, but in reduced amounts.
Please see the comparison images below.

Spoiler: Comparison Images

For all images, the left half is without the mod applied and the right is with it.
Many images have been resized for clarity.

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The render quality in later chapters of the game is significantly better than in earlier.
I do not believe this mod is needed for content added in v0.9.0 or later, but content from before then will still benefit from this mod.

If you do not plan on playing earlier parts of the game, I do not consider this mod to be necessary, or even recommended.
If installed while playing later content, it will continue to denoise those images, which could cause fine details (such as on skin or fabric) to be subdued.

If you uninstall the mod and load a save made with it installed, you may see an error.
It can be safely ignored. Simply roll forward or backward and keep ignoring the errors until they stop.
(It should only take a couple frames.)

Download: ​