Offering some help with the "marketing" and tuning of the mod :D

[eXWoLL]

Hi there! Dude, I abandoned DayZ after they removed the post processing effects that made the game stand out from the rest of the games by giving it a more "cinematic" feeling that really eased in the way to play it as a survival simulator.

Was just randomly talking with someone on reddit about that, and they told me about this mod! You've done an amazing job at what you did there, and I was really excited to try it out in one of the servers I used to play; however, after showing the mod to the admins, literally everyone was like "Naah, that looks like too much, it kills the realism with weird FX, it will make everyone sick, etc". No one listened to me saying that its all tunable and can be tuned and switched off both client and server side!....

I have no idea which servers have this thing installed (tried looking around but found nothing on google), so I'm offering you any help that I could provide to polish up the mod to make it more appealing for the player's base and make it clear that its something that will tweak their experience in the game, and not change it completely, plus brings a lot of visual cinematics perks for content creation that many servers with streamers and youtubers would benefit from in terms of the quality they will be getting from the ingame footage.

I'm an image editor and graphic designer and have quite some experience with photography and filmography in general, as well as some scripting/modding experience (did some clothing and new textures DayzUnderground a handful times), and I believe I can help improving the overlays realism and the FX balancing in general:

• enhance the visor overlays (from the provided videos they look quite oversaturated and I would personally tune them down and adjust from real examples, because people drive motorcycles and know they dont look as crowded with imperfections even in the worst cases
• enhance state fx realism (the vignetting and blood fx are too intense in the examples for example)
• tune the parameters for visual fx on sunglasses, etc.

Plus can help with the page formatting and info presented there:

I get that the examples provided here were done with the little available time you had during development, and it was just to show at a general glance the capabilities of the mod. Sadly most people are really "limited" in their capability of judging a mod and its potential, so I believe that we could improve some things on that front:

• a more in depth description making it absolutely clear that all settings are adjustable on a micro level (plus provide a guide for this),
• extra examples (before/after, different FX levels, etc),
• video showing setting adjustments (both server and client side),
• some "template" settings for different levels of FX applications for admins (most prefer to have different fx off by default [like head-bob and motion blur] but available to individual players, others might want some completely unavailable, etc).

Let me know if you're interested in this! Might be the thing that brings me back to the game after so many years :)

[simonvic]

Heyo :)

I'll preface saying that I really appreciate any help on this subject as it really is my weakest point; although I must tell you that, at the moment, I'm mainly focused on other projects and I'd consider sVisual to be in "maintainance mode".
But this doesn't mean I'm turning down your help offer (maybe this is the time for sVisual 3.0? :D)

everyone was like "Naah, that looks like too much, it kills the realism with weird FX, it will make everyone sick, etc"

understandable, I agree that some of the effects may be overwhelming, even with adjusted intensity option.

I have to say that sVisual's initial goal was to fix a fundemental issue with DayZ vanilla post-processing effect system; the solution then shifted over to sFramework (which I'd like to consider a success, since DayZ vanilla reimplemented a very similar system to the point where, with very few changes, I adapted mine to work with it)

Anyway, at that point sVisual became a simple "showcase" of sFramework capabilities, but I didn't intend to push it further than that

I have no idea which servers have this thing installed (tried looking around but found nothing on google)

fwiw, you can search servers with sVisual on battlemetrics.com

and I believe I can help improving the overlays realism and the FX balancing in general:

I'd gladly accept more assets, especially overlays, since the current ones are (badly) made by me. But I don't know when I'll be able to implement them.
About the effects (I assume you mean post-processing effects scripts), I'm open to suggestions :)

• a more in depth description making it absolutely clear that all settings are adjustable on a micro level (plus provide a guide for this),
• extra examples (before/after, different FX levels, etc),
• video showing setting adjustments (both server and client side),

yep, a picture (or even better a GIF) speaks a thousand words; most of the time people (myself included) skips over long text.
Yeah adding some GIFs showing the settings changing in real time (e.g. the effect intensity option changing the intensity of the blood loss effect/overlay) sounds good.
A refactor of the steam workshop page was something I've always wanted to do, but never found the time to do so.

About the guide, I already have many tutorials (let me know if we can improve them).
Maybe we can make them stand out more in the descrption, like this one for constraining settings. There also are this one for modding effects and this one for overlays, but I guess they target more modders than server owners

some "template" settings for different levels of FX applications for admins (most prefer to have different fx off by default [like head-bob and motion blur] but available to individual players, others might want some completely unavailable, etc)

For the settings, there are the server-side constraints, which allow server owners to define the allowed values for the clients the use. For most float values, you can also set a min and max value; if you want to constrain it to a specific value, you can set min == max.

I've also made this web tool for configuring the constraints; maybe we could add a GIF showing its usage?

For the actual effects and overlays: allowing admins to tweak them is a bit tricky.
As of now, effects and overlays are defined at compile time (or at build time with config.cpp).
Making them "configurable" would be a tough task requiring a massive rework that I can't (nor I have the will) to do at the moment :D

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TL;DR
I do agree with the critiques, and I'd like to start with a refactor of the workshop page description and image/gif previews; later we could see about overlays and effects, but as I mentioned before, I'm not very keen to big refactors since I'm currently busy with other projects.

Thanks :)

[simonvic]

some "template" settings for different levels of FX applications for admins

Making them "configurable" would be a tough task requiring a massive rework that I can't (nor I have the will) to do at the moment :D

To expand on that, another possible solution would be to make a bunch of patch mods that implement those "template".
For example:

• sVisual_preset_light (a patch that decreases/tweaks effects and overlays to make them less intrusive)
• sVisual_preset_hardcore (a patch that makes/adds more intense effects and overlays)

Proceeding this way would allow us to make changes and move forward faster since, you could make and publish the mods (I'll happily help you in that) without having to rely on me.
Obviously we would have to advertise such "presets/template" on the workshop page

Server owners, will then have to load sVisual as usual + the patches they want (we could eventually allow them to repack such patches)
Pretty much of what I do to with sGunplay compatibility patches