Do you mind sharing your chosen plugin and calibrations?
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It’s the crt-easymode shader, which can be found here https://github.com/libretro/common-shaders (not crt-easymode-halation; the basic one in the common-shaders-master\crt\shaders\ folder) with the following parameters:
Shader Parameters
SHARPNESS_H = “0.5”
SHARPNESS_V = “1.0”
MASK_STRENGTH = “0.0”
MASK_DOT_WIDTH = “1.0”
MASK_DOT_HEIGHT = “1.0”
MASK_STAGGER = “0.0”
MASK_SIZE = “1.0”
SCANLINE_STRENGTH = “0.9”
SCANLINE_BEAM_WIDTH_MIN = “1.5”
SCANLINE_BEAM_WIDTH_MAX = “1.5”
SCANLINE_BRIGHT_MIN = “0.35”
SCANLINE_BRIGHT_MAX = “0.65”
SCANLINE_CUTOFF = “400.00”
GAMMA_INPUT = “2.00”
GAMMA_OUTPUT = “1.80”
BRIGHT_BOOST = “1.05”
DILATION = “1.0”
I suggest lowering scanline strength if you find the effect too exaggerated. If you don’t get the desired results it may be because my files are old so something in the shader could have changed, and in that case I’ll just upload mine if you want.
Oh, and in the emulator video settings: internal resolution and dithering to 1x (anything else is barbaric), crop overscan on (pretty sure setting it to “off” messes up the aspect ratio in Retroarch, it behaves differently on Mednafen standalone), integer scale on (important for scanlines but makes the screen a bit smaller), bilinear filtering off.
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I adore the way people got the playstation to cope with relatively complex scenes by just rendering them at a really low resolution
underrated
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I think no one minds much given how fucking good Vagrant Story looks.
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Holy shit that rim lighting!
How did they do that?
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Isn’t that just at its native resolution?
I do keep surprising myself with how many 3D rendering techniques have been present from the beginning, just dropping in and out of fashion because they scale with resolution and become less favored.
Shadows! on early hardware isn’t necessarily crazy when you’re working within the resolution as designed.
rim lighting
I wouldn’t put it past them to have a texture swap or custom lightmap texture layer on the character just for this scene
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yeah my guess would have been that they baked in the lighting.
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Oh, the way the rim lighting is done in VS is awesomely simple and retro: render the same model twice or more, with light color versions rendered behind the shadow color version and offset a bit in the rim direction. It looks very convincing given how simple it is. The trick’s especially noticeable if you run it on emulator in a higher resolution and/or look at models with pointy bits.
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Reminds me of MGS2’s reflections – just a flipped copy of the models with a dim color tint rendered under the floor. Once I learned this I started to see it in a bunch of other early 3D games.
Panzer Dragoon 1 does it even better – the reflections are x-crossed sprites of the model (like the way vegetation used to be work), set up so it looks like it’s refracting through the water:
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Oh cool, I thought it was something like that. Pointy bits example, on the dude’s head:
The profiles here look wider than they should be because of it too:
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yeah, it’s a clever trick that works great at the original target resolution on a crt televsion. vs is full of clever tricks, still one of my favorite games visually for this reason. i can’t think of many other games where they did so much with such little overhead (and made it look that good). in fact aside from a bit of upscaling i would never want to see a version of vagrant story with “modern” graphics. even texture filtering would ruin the look for me. it was made at precisely the right time.
I still love how there are a couple tile textures that are taken directly from FFT which are simultaneously higher resolution and appear even blockier than they originally were because they’re viewed from much closer
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The clever usage of what they had just shows part of what really helps VS stand out both when it was made (even to PC folk like myself who had been playing pretty things like Unreal years prior to VS release) and all these years later is the sheer damn effort they put in.
The most obvious example of course being the character textures. I remember seeing the commercials and get a taste of the animated mouths when talking, but then you play the game and see how much further they take it. From simple but very effective eye movements like glancing to the side to more than faces, like the scene in the beginning where Ashley shoots Sydney, they could have just had the bolt clipping through his chest but they made a texture that shows the wound. And then when he pulls it out they have a texture with the blood splattered all over his chest. That’s the kind of dedication to a form of visual verisimilitude that I’m not sure has been seen since and is precisely my jam.
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I was thinking of making a separate thread for when I finally replay xenogears and meticulously screencap all of it’s beautiful towns. we can just make it a ps1 crt shader thread
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should i try and play vs for the third or fourth time? aesthetically it’s Extremely My Shit and i generally love matsuno but it has never ‘clicked’ and always felt a bit too arcane for me??? (and i’ve finished a romancing saga 2 final emperor skip playthrough, so)
I couldn’t have played it without a faq really
I tried to play VS a couple times and didn’t click for me either, but it remain one of my favorite looking PS1 games. Thanks for sharing screenshots of the parts I never got to see!