¶ Overview
This Community Shaders addon which removes limits on the number of lights, adds particle lights, contact shadows, and more.
This project is the result of months of work on Community Shaders and doodlum's own personal journey into learning more advanced C++, DirectX 11 and HLSL programming, and collaboration via GitHub. This release would only have been possible with the help of alandtse who went above and beyond to support not just VR, but to improve Community Shaders in so many ways. Nukem was a major contributor by documenting major parts of the renderer and offering additional support. Jonahex provided the base for Community Shaders. powerofthree reversed the particles which means particle lights were only possible without their major contributions to CommonLibSSE.
¶ Features
Please note that the shadow limit is not yet unlocked
- Custom clustered shading implementation for high-performance, scalable lighting. Starfield uses this too!
- Unlimited light sources such as torches and magic lights.
- Limited support for "ENB light" particle lights.
- High-performance lighting for grass.
¶ Clustered Shading
Clustered shading is the magic which makes this project possible. This is what lets us have completely bug-free, scalable lights, to achieve a true light limit fix and optimized particle lights. In the Particle Lights section, the benefits of this system will become more apparent. If you would like to learn about the benefits of clustered shading, you can read an intuitive article here: A Primer On Efficient Rendering Algorithms & Clustered Shading
Here is a visualization of lights handled by clustered shading when using ELFX Shadows. The red squares indicate where the light limit was reached. None of these lights now contribute to the light limit, they are unlimited.
Clustered shading was implemented based on advice from mwilsnd / Ultra, the GitHub projects pezcode/Cluster and mateeeeeee/Adria-DX11, and the presentation Practical Clustered Shading.
¶ Unlimited Dynamic Lights
Expect all torches, projectiles, hazards and exterior lights to have no restriction. A lot of lights in interiors are still not fixed, but will now no longer conflict with any dynamically placed lights.
¶ Unlimited Magic Lights
The limit of only 4 magic lights has been increased to 2,147,483,647. Now, every actor in the game can cast a light without any restriction. In this example, Luminous Atronachs is used.
¶ Particle Lights
Note that ENB particle lights are not supported between CS versions 1.4 and 1.7. ENB lights have limited support in versions 1.8 onward.
Particle lights are supported for backwards compatibility purposes only. It is recommended to use alternative systems instead, such as Light Placer.
Particle lights are designed backwards-compatible with "ENB light" meshes by using reversed information about the renderer to reconstruct the light colour on the CPU to create true light sources which can be used in the clustered shading system, and detected by NPCs.
This means that most mods which offer "ENB light" is compatible with the Light Limit Fix, such as the mods ENB Light, ENB Lights For Effect Shaders, and the Rudy102 "ENB Light" series.
Due to how these lights were designed, they have numerous benefits over the ones provided by "ENB":
- Uses clustered shading over deferred shading to be much more scalable.
- True specular lighting so that metallic surfaces are lit correctly, as well as hair.
- Supports parallax shadows.
- Transparent objects such as glass and Blended Roads can receive lighting from particle lights.
- First-person meshes can emit light.
- Disables rendering particle light meshes to completely eliminate overdraw, massively increasing performance.
- No FOV issues or distortion.
- No false-positive lights, e.g. white flickering torches.
- No restriction on radius, lights can be of any size.
Particle lights were implemented based on the documentation A Guide to Skyrim Particle Systems and ENB Complex Lights and information provided by Rudy102 and fadingsignal.
¶ Light Limit Visualization
To enable visualizations you must add the shader define LLFDEBUG in the advanced settings menu.
This is a DEBUG feature for developers, it is not intended to be used in gameplay.
3 different options for visualizing lights are offered:
- Visualize the light limit; Red when the "strict" light limit is reached (portal-strict lights).
- Visualize the number of strict lights.
- Visualize the number of clustered lights.
¶ Contributors
- doodlum: Responsible for the original implementation of all listed features outside of VR.
- alandtse: VR support, refactoring, bug fixes, miscellaneous improvements.
- Nukem: Documenting the renderer, additional support.
- jonahex: Original RE of lighting and grass shaders, portal strict lighting support.
- powerofthree: RE of particles, contributions to CommonLibSSE.
- rudy102, fadingsignal, and mindflux: Information about particle lights.
- mwilsnd / Ultra: Suggestions and feedback about clustered shading.
- ProfJack
- sicsix for ISL support
¶ Additional Media
Disclaimer: Some images may depict contact shadows which was removed in recent versions of CS
