Friday, August 30, 2013

Overlord 2 - 3D Vision Fix


3D Vision Fix by mike_ar69




What's Fixed

1. Shadows.  This is a fix for the shadows making them 3D.  Works for all levels of shadow detail (in menu) and all convergence/separation settings.

2. Lights.  Lights have been fully fixed.

3. Water Reflections and Halos.  Off reflections and halos around objects near water, ice etc.

4. Rendering Magic Spells.  When the Dark Lord casts a spell, it was a double imaging, wrong depth mess.  Now fixed.

5. Specular Reflection.  Ice Caves and snowy areas now fixed.


Description

Not new, but a fun game where you control funny little minion monsters and destroy stuff.  Works well in 3D except for the two issues I address here.  Without my fix, the game cannot be played without turning off shadows, there are lots of them and its just too distracting.  There is a free demo on Steam, worth trying out in my opinion :-)

Special thanks to Helix for his DLL tools and making these kinds of fixes possible.


Video

A video is available here: Overlord 2 Video.

Update 1st September 2013

1. Eliminated residual shadow flickering.

Update 30th August 2013

1. Fixed lights problem.  Lights work at all distances from the light sources, instead of the previous fix that had disabled them to avoid double imaging.

Update 23rd April 2013

1. Fixed Specular Reflection Issues

I was able to fix the specular reflection problems, noticable in the Ice Caves and icy/snowy areas near the beginning of the game.

Update 22nd April 2013
1. Fixed rendering of magic spells

The new fix makes the rendering of the Overlords magic effects render correctly.  This required me to disable a shader, the effects of which I have not fully evaluated (but I believe it to be a lighting effect), but the improvement is massive - from a nasty double imaged, wrong depth mess, so a nice 3D lightning effect.

Update 4th April 2013
1. Fixed water Reflections
2. Fixed haloing around water, ice



Remaining Issues

None that I know of.  Please report whatever you find.


Installation

1. Extract this zip file to the same location as the games .exe file
2. IMPORTANT:

You must remove the Nvidia profile
- Use nvidia inspector to do this. 
- Open nvidia inspector. Click wrench/screwdriver icon. 
- Select Overlord 2 in drop down. 
- Remove Overlord2.exe. 
- Save. 
- Play.


NOTE

If anyone has issues with the game crashing on startup due to the SteamGameOverlay module, you just need to delete the two related files in the Steam installation folder (GameOverlayRenderer.dll and GameOverlayRenderer64.dll). Steam will replace them with every update though (Thanks to Zappologist for this top tip!)




10 comments:

  1. You're welcome :-) Please let me know of any issues, I haven't looked at this for quite some time.

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  2. it's very great, but it's normal the light work sometimes and sometimes they aren't ? it's like you say here ? i'm not english and i'm not sure i've completly understant what your saying here :
    :


    2. Local "Source" Lights. I have disabled these, not fixed them. The issue with the lights occurs with things like lamps, street lights and so on, and other forms of local lighting that induce local (ranged) illumination. The problem is that the lighting is "split" and does not render on the objects being illuminated, but is doubled up. Worse still, the lighting separation changes with your distance from the light source, and with both separation and convergence setting. If you get 'close enough' to the light source, the lighting turns back on and renders perfectly (even with this fix). So all in all its a quite acceptable effect removal.



    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Long_johnson,

      Thanks for the feedback. The lighting around lamps etc is coded in the game differently depending how far away you are from it. When you are close to a light source, one particular algorithm is used to show lighting, and that works fine in 3D, and I did not touch it. When you get past a certain distance away from a light source (beyond a certain 'sphere' around it), a different algorithm is used in the game code to generate lights and that *does not* render correctly in 3D. I disabled this second one.

      What this means when you play the game is that you will see a light/lamp in the distance and it seems not to be 'on'. As you get closer to it, it will suddenly turn on and light things up.

      I wish I could fix this, but honestly I tried for a long time and I just cannot work out how to do it. If you remove the helixmod fix and play the game, you can see how bad the lights are in the very first scene of the game as you walk up to lamps and so on. It gets worse later on in the game.

      I hope this explains it better - if I ever think of a way to fix this, trust me I will :-)

      Delete
  3. Ok now i understand ! so it's normal.

    The fix is great, it's not a real problem !

    Thanx again

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  4. I found that adding overload2.exe to the Trene 2 profile helped a lot with fps on 3Dsurround. Great mod though Thanx

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    Replies
    1. Hi - that's good to know. I just checked and the fix still works on that profile. Some profiles specifically affect some of the features I fixed like the water and lights, but the Trine 2 one does not. For whatever reason, the default Overlord2 profile does not allow the game to be fixed, hence the need to use something else, or to remove it.

      Delete
  5. Thanks for the Fix...great work.

    But with the new NVidia Drivers the game wont start with the fix.
    If i remove the d3d9.dll file from the gamedirectory the game start, but without your fix.

    Any suggestions to that?

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  6. Hey Mike, many thanks for the fix!
    I only got to play it now, but the game is a blast in 3D.
    If anyone has issues with the game crashing on startup due to the SteamGameOverlay module, you just need to delete the two related files in the Steam installation folder (GameOverlayRenderer.dll and GameOverlayRenderer64.dll). Steam will replace them with every update though.

    Thanks again Mike!

    ReplyDelete
  7. Awesome fix ! No halos around objects, everthing in the right place. Very clean 3D. Thanks for that!

    ReplyDelete