Has anyone here ever tried to make WOFF work with Reshade (even older versions of WOFF/OFF)? I know that some people here got sweetFX 2 to work in older versions of WOFF, but I'm specifically trying to get Reshade to work so that I can play with some shaders that would enable displaying WOFF in VR (using a shader for stereo 3D together with one for barrel distortion).
So far my efforts to run either version 2 or 3 of Reshade always end up with CTDs and reports of exception in the logs.

Depends on the error,but maybe you need to disable AA in the shaders,ini. needed for Sweetfx

I did try that but it didn't help - I tried both keeping AnKor shaders and disabling AA there or replacing his shaders with a d3d8to9 d3d8.dll and disabling AA in my nvidia profiles, but in both case I get a hard crash as soon as WOFF launches cfs3 with both Reshade 2 and 3. It's possible that Reshade is not compatible with cfs3 - I've only read about people using sweetFX, not sweetFX 2/Reshade or Reshade 3, so I'm curious to see whether anyone here might have had the same failures as me.

In terms of error, with Reshade 3 when I check the logs I get an exception thrown, so that's not very specific unfortunately, and with Reshade 2 I think I had a slightly more specific error - I'd have to redo it to check what it was exactly though.

OK yeah no idea on Reshade being compatible, maybe worth checking in their forum too?

Reshade works fine for me.

Post pics! Let us see what it looks like if you have the time.

That's awesome news, hopefully I'll get Reshade working at some point then. Would you care to share your OS and whether you're on a nvidia or AMD GPU teh_pwnisher ? Anything else you had to do to make it work?

Meanwhile I'll also give a go at Tridef 3D, apparently someone here on SimHQ once managed to make WOFF UE work with it, and if I can load it with the old Rift plugin then I can have it ready to display on the Vive using Virtual Desktop or BigScreen.

Update: I've got Tridef 3D working. The 3D has got a few artefacts but it's not too bad and was already quite spectacular when loaded on a giant virtual screen in VR using BigScreen. Now I need to see whether I can fine tune this with Virtual Desktop to get the 3D displaying directly to VR (ie so that it wraps around my field of vision as a native VR game would) and hopefully I can get the framerate right too (because with that solution there is no reliance on asynchronous timewarp, the head tracking works at the same framerate as the game is rendering, so ideally I need 90 fps...)

Ideally I'll get Reshade working though, as it is easier to customise since I have access to the shaders code, and it's also free.

Good news FlyingMonkey you are getting somewhere. I'm interested in getting a headset at some point when funds allow .

It might be expensive but it's really a revolution - for me it's really a childhood dream come true (I grew up with Atari 2600 and Intellivision so VR was really just science fiction then). It's got to a stage where I'm now able to use to fly airliners in XP11 and FSX, and in terms of combat flight sims I'm really happy with IL2 BOS and its current implementation. Some people dislike the feeling of loosing a bit of clarity and ability to see small objects far away but for me the feeling of being in the cockpit and seeing it at its true scale is just amazing (some people also dislike having to scan and check their six physically but I love that, it really helps with immersion).

I'm pretty confident that WOFF should be able to work well with VR at some point. What I'm doing now is really just quick tinkering, but if later on I could implement something that connects with the openVR API then it would allow me not to turn all settings down and use asynchronous timewarp to have WOFF render at something like 45fps while openVR deals with the head tracking and inferring the rest of the frames to get to 90fps. Anyway, today I'm planning to try the whole openTrack + Tridef + Virtual Desktop system and hopefully that will work well enough for now.

I think I got it to work for me. The game looks darker as shown in the screenshot below, but no other indication that I can tell if it's working other than the shadows and glossiness are not on the reshade screenshot. Also, the distances from the parked aircraft to the hangers appear further on the reshade shot.

I don't have a standard keyboard and tried reassigning the keys to toggle on/off, and couldn't get the toggle function to work. So, I did one screenshot with the effect, then deleted the files and took a vanilla shot.

I used reshade framework 1.1.0 from this link (which is a repository and has all the versions of reshade): https://www.mediafire.com/folder/8ar1jhh1809cl/ReShade_Repository#9ckrmgp4813fy

I copied all the reshade files to the root WOFF directory and renamed ReShade64.dll to d3d8.dll. Then copied that inside the scenery/shaders folder.

OS: Win 10x64. Nvidia GPU. Intel CPU.

NO Reshade: AnKor's enhanced shaders are enabled


WITH Reshade (overrides AnKor's dll, so doesn't matter what I choose in workshop)


For Reference, here is Default Shaders selected in workshop (disabled AnKor's enhanced shaders)...ground is darker than reshade.

Thanks Old Hat. I think that's an older version of Reshade. I've got the 3D shaders for either reshade 2 or 3, but maybe it's not too hard to port them back to an older version.

Right now my main issue is that Virtual Desktop is not very efficient at capturing the desktop at a high framerate, so while I got WOFF in 3D and displayed properly in VR (ie wrapped around with the correct distortion), it's a bit choppy and not extra smooth (but it doesn't feel far from it though). That's using Tridef, but when I'm just using that I still get something really smooth, the killer is Virtual Desktop. BigScreen seems more efficient, but it doesn't allow to wrap the view around properly, it only lets one creat a big virtual screen, which is neat but not anywhere near as immersive as a proper VR view.

The one thing I notice that I am not pleased with is the omission of the shadowing that Ankor's version gives!

Very good news if I can get Reshade 2 to work, thanks for the info OldHat. I did try Reshade 2 but using a slightly different method which relies on an installer to copy the files, and I've tried using it in d3d8 and d3d9 (in which case I used either a generic d3d8to9 dll or AnKor's one) but it always crashed. Perhaps it will work better if I use your method of installing.

If you've got spare time to lose (or if you happen to have SBS 3D monitor or 3DTV), there is something you could test even without a VR headset: if you've got Reshade 2 working, would you mind trying to use the Depth3D shaders with that, and possibly that and the barrel distortion ones. Very conveniently I discovered this morning that the maker of Depth3D has posted this youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLQ4vb5rr9o to explain the process and his shaders are here: https://github.com/BlueSkyDefender/Depth3D

If all goes well you should load CFS3 from WOFF and get it to display in that side-by-side 3D format, and if you apply barrel distortion on the top of that the image will look a bit like it's been filmed with a fisheye.

My current progress with that system is still stuck a bit with the last stage of displaying the resulting 3D image in the headset with ideally 90fps and no lag. It's interesting to see that other people have been trying to do the same though, so hopefully someone (aka someone without a 1 month old baby) from the VR community comes up with a nice way to do that.

If anyone is interested in the process, either to use with a 3D screen or in VR, here is an overview of the current process (I'll post this as a guide in its own thread later on):

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Step 1: get WOFF to display in side-by-side 3D

Option 1: free: use Reshade and the Depth3D shaders: https://github.com/BlueSkyDefender/Depth3D
For SBS 3D on monitor or TV, just use the superdepth3d shader; for VR on a virtual screen, same, for proper VR, ie scene wrapped around your view and looking like you're in the cockpit, also use the barrel distortion shader

Option 2: payware: use Tridef3D. WOFF works if you add it using the "generic" profile, but that profile does induce a few artefacts (glitchy look for some struts, some objects seem to be transparent). For SBS 3D on a monitor or TV, or to use with a virtual bigscreen in VR (in which case I recommend BigScreen, it's free), that's all you need. If you want to try a proper VR view, the only option is to use Virtual Desktop (payware, on Steam) and use the "Direct SBS with distortion" option - beware though, Virtual Desktop captures the monitor screen, which means that unless your monitor is set for more than 60hz, you'll have a stuttery 60fps image, and that's if you're lucky and virtual desktop does manage to capture at that rate (not the case in my experience).

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Step 2: play WOFF in VR

In all cases: use openTrack so that your VR hmd head tracking is used to emulate trackIR: https://github.com/opentrack/opentrack
This works brilliantly given how accurate the VR headsets tracking is

Option 1: play it on a virtual big screen. This is probably not what you were hoping as it's not the full on VR experience, but you still get to play WOFF on a big virtual screen which is in 3D - it's a bit like looking a window beyond which the WOFF world is in 3D, so it's still fun, and if like me you've now got all your VR cockpit hardware set away from a monitor, that might be your only option for play WOFF without unplugging everything to bring it to your desktop (another room in my case).
What to use: BigScreen beta is free and available on Steam. Use one of the light environments (the ones with a leaf icon) to obtain optimal performance. A nice large curved screen works great. You can also use Virtual Desktop, payware available on Steam, but it seems to often perform less well.

Option 2: proper VR where we send a 3D image to the headset so that it fills the whole view and put you in the cockpit. As far as I know there are 2 available options. I've tried one and it doesn't perform great so far, and the 2nd option is something that gave me a lot of grief in the past, so I'm not hopeful about it but will try when I can. Ideally we'd need a tool that grabs our 3D SBS footage and connects to a proper VR API, e.g. openVR/steamVR. This is the sort of thing I wanted to implement in the 1st place, but parenting has put this project on a hold before it even got started properly...

Sub option (a): Use Virtual Desktop. For this you'll have to take your SBS footage and choose either the option to do "direct SBS" (F10) if you have the barrel distortion applied (eg using Reshade and Depth 3D) or "direct SBS + distortion" (F11) which you'll need if using Tridef 3D. The issue with this system is that Virtual Desktop grabs the picture drawn on the monitor, so this will be at a maximum fps reflecting your current monitor settings (most likely 60 fps unless you're using a 3D monitor) - this will most likely be too slow to appear smooth in VR and the headtracking will feel slightly stuttering. This is likely to be made worse by the fact that Virtual Desktop might fail to capture at your monitor refresh rate and instead do it a lower rate. I haven't got a solution for that and stuttering is really not something we want in this case.

Sub option (b): Use the non direct mode in SteamVR. This applies to Vive owners only (I think the non direct mode doesn't work for Rift). Apparently if you get WOFF in SBS 3D and with a barrel distortion, if you set steamVR to the non direct mode (in Steam VR settings, under developper's settings, untick direct mode) you can send your WOFF window to display on the Vive. I haven't tried this method - in the past everytime I've tried that, I had bugs where steamVR did sync at weird fps, typically a fraction of my monitor, and that made things unplayable. Expect these issues if you have a 3D or high Hz monitor, while standard ones seem to fare better usually. If you managed to have IL2 BOS work in its old non direct mode VR implementation from last year, then you have a good chance to have this work for WOFF.

That's all for now but I'll keep exploring all options - just bear with me, I might progress very slowly depending on how things go with baby