SweetFX deemed against the rules...

I don't Have graphic FPS issues but being able to see under my Mossy/lib would be great. It's another handicap I have to add to the list. Either increase FOV or allow this injector

http://imageshack.us/content_round.php?page=done&l=img90/820/mossyfov.jpg

Current FOV without Sweet FX

Um, I do agree that it's an issue and not a small one, just like render distance, etc, but to them it isn't priority.

It's probably easier to implement more options than to allow some sort of an injector. I mean *cough* if you allow and injector it isn't hard to modify it even further to give yourself a huge advantage over others if you know what you're doing. Like getting rid of fog, smoke or w/e or even adding markers over players that can be seen through all objects, etc. Basically...hacking. As he said, to check, control and implement it fairly would be a heck of work.

Not sure what you mean by: "they implemented these features during beta knowingly." You think it has something to do with Nvidia partnership or bleh like that? If that's the case then someone in Nvidia has to be a bit...meh. Instead of promoting FXAA or Nvidia tech, if anything it makes me hate FXAA and Nvidia in general.

They need to put SweetFX in the code if it as good as everyone who tried it said. I didn´t but damn if I can play at steady 30 FPS at big bases and battles it will be so cool.

Today the game was playable for me at 30 to 50 FPS and even more flying (not bad for a dual core 3.0Ghz, 4GB 667 RAM and a GTX560TiOC (bottlenecking my CPU) but the problems comes at big bases with tons of people in the area...like 10-15FPS and worst.

It will be a miracle if SweetFX can give me the extra power since I can´t buy the parts that I need to make a better PC just yet. (I bought a 850W PSU, GTX560TiOC, Case Cooler Master HAF 932 Advanced, 1TB HDD and some more stuff till my pockets were empty a while ago, so I need CPU, Mobo and RAM more than anything)

Still my problems are the problems for people with way better PC´s than mine...if we all can play better we all can be happy. (I paid for Alpha Squad to support this great game)

ahhh its an NVIDIA issue, I was wondering in the dark what all these threads were about. So you guys are saying you have no way to turn off a driver level feature (FXAA) in your driver configuration software, and are relegated to use a tweak tool (SweetFX) which unfortunately is not allowed because it can also make other changes that can give you an advantage? If so, I hope you also take this directly to NVIDIA, start a discussion maybe around the idea that its a sleazy way to fake higher frame rates.

Maybe we should do a quick survey of which shaders people actually use out of SweetFX, maybe then the team could look into adding similar shaders or options to the game.

The only one I played with is LumaSharpen, which basically undid the FXAA and sharpened textures a bit.

Why would you want to add another filter on top of FXAA to undo FXAA instead of removing it completely?

FXAA may have been invented by nvidia it's still an engine Feature. You too have this "feature"

The toggle in the driver control panel is for adding an extra FXAA step to any game, or to turn it off if the game is requesting the driver to do that extra FXAA step. SOE did neither, they wrote their own shader and put it into their post processing chain so there's no way for the driver to disable it.

If there was a way to remove it I wouldn't.

Do you think we should also ban player with 27" screens, euefinity, good headphones, a non calibrated display and performance mouses? Because that gives them an out of game unfair advantages... Jesus some people

So making the game playable with decent FPS by ourself with SweetFX is an advantage now? Oh wow...
That's like "You got 30+ FPS with SweetFX? Well, **** you! You are not allowed to have 30+ FPS because it's an advantage to players who have to struggle with 10+ FPS"

Apparently I missed the framerate improvement thread, how did you get more fps by adding more post-processing steps to the renderer? Which settings did you use?

SweetFX disables FXAA and replaces it with SMAA - a very much cleaner AA version. It also removes some other post-processing effects. Somehow my poor GPU can handle SweetFX better than standard FX in PS2.

Well this post is certainly head to desk material. SweetFX can be potentially modified to give other advantages. Its not about FPS.
FF

God, I'm so happy I were able to buy a new PC just before this game went live. Playing with everything on high and 30-60fps. I hope you guys get your stuff. Everyone should be able to play this. It's mindblowing with max settings and decent fps.

Can't they just authorize the unmodified version of sweetfx and do a checksum of the sweetfx file on gamestart?

I really hate how PS2 looks without it now. The way I modified the graphics it actually was more of a disadvantage due to the much darker nights I had.

I don't have any issues running the game without it, but I also want it to look good and now that I had sweetfx, I don't want to go back to how it looked before, all blurry and bloomy

I'm certain that's not how it works. I don't want to sound like a dick, but there's no way you're getting a better framerate by using SweetFX. If you are then something else must be responsible for it.

What SweetFX does is take the finished, rendered frame from the game and apply some extra post processing stuff on top of it. Think of it like taking a picture with a camera then doing touch ups in Photoshop. You can't change the camera's zoom or aperture settings in Photoshop because obviously the picture has already been taken, but you can add a sharpening filter to make the image a little less blurry. That's what SweetFX is doing. If you tell it to add SMAA it's really adding that on top of the FXAA that the game already does.

No matter which settings you use you're adding more work for the GPU, so the only affect it can have on your framerate is to lower it. But realistically it probably won't change it at all, because if you have a decent machine you'll only notice bad framerate when the game is CPU bound in a big fight, and at that point a little extra work for the GPU will make no difference.

I hope that clears things up a bit. I won't say I'm an expert in these things because I've never programmed a game engine, but I do program OpenGL/WebGL for a living so I have some idea of how these things work.

damn I was just about to try this

They haven't banned SweetFX as such, or at least SweetFX wasn't the target, what they've done is implemented client side integrity checks to help stop and ban people hacking and using aim bots and such, ie people using hacks and exploits to cheat.

The problem is such checks can be triggered by perfectly reasonable third party programs, so they are warning people that this might be the case and that people should avoid using them until they give them the OK so they don't get banned for trying to improve the game themselves.

Take my Flawless Widescreen plugin, it's only purpose is to allow people on multi-monitor systems to be able to play with the correct FoV. The problem is in order to do that I had to modify 3 bytes of program code to remove the FoV limit they added that was causing the problem. This modification to the program code got detected when they implemented the integrity check and it banned people. Now Twist has come on and apologised to the people who got banned and said they will try to sort their issues, but because of the way the fix worked they can't allow us to use it, which is fair enough. He also said they would try and fix the issues with multi-monitor support which is good news too.

The problem is it's hard to protect the code from people trying to cheat without collateral damage, because there no way to reasonably tell if the program is trying to cheat or not. The main reason for this is if they didn't protect all the code, a hacker could just write a jump command in an unprotected bit of code and insert their hack there.

I totally agree with you. In the sense that I think it works like this, but at the same time it is an injector. It should have access to buffers which means that it can work with frames that aren't yet "ready" (if you get what I mean). That's why I said that a lot more can be done with it if you know what you're doing. You basically have total control over the buffers, shaders, everything, really. If necessary you can tell it not render specific models for example or make it not show some textures, etc.

So, if SweetFX digs deep then it can indeed disable FXAA and many other things (if necessary) thus it may very well improve performance.

Here is a tweet where the official planetside 2 twitter account shared an image gallery with SweetFX installed: https://twitter.com/planetside2/status/272534243689758720

If they advertise it to their players and then start banning people for using it, that's not so cool.

Unfortunately, I don't see how they will be able to officially condone using SweetFX, no matter how much people want it. It would be trivial for a hacker to use the same methods of SweetFX in a malicious way, such as making walls transparent or doing stuff like making enemies glow to make it much easier to see them.

The best they can do is to roll in all of the benefits of SweetFX into the actual game and provide the same settings natively in the game's graphic options.