Bloom Fix

Some more description and a rant

So, ever since the 2021 patch developed by QLOC, the bloom effect has become a shimmery seizure-inducing mess at higher resolutions. Somehow, someone at QLOC, at some point in the development of the patch, thought that this was acceptable to ship. Well, whoever that person is, I despise them for making that decision. Basically, they made the bloom scale up with the resolution (you can read this in the 2021 patch changelog).

This also ended up breaking FAR's native bloom option, leaving us with an inferior buggy effect.

Anyway, after a week of trying to fix this, I discovered that disabling levels 2 and 4 of the bloom buffer removes the shimmery outer layer completely, so yay!, an improvement. The first version of this mod attempted to scale all bloom levels down to the 2017 version levels, and it’s definitely a big improvement, but some shimmer still remained, and the bloom distance was a tad low (trade-offs). I'm sure it's possible to find the perfect combination of scaling for the bloom levels that would result in the best visuals, but I won’t be taking on that task. 3Dmigoto was used to debug the bloom, so anyone is free to use it and write up a potentially superior shader that fixes the issue. Or if someone skilled enough knows how to port the 2017 shader to the latest version, then we’d have a perfect looking bloom.

How to install

1. First download the December version of SpecialK here: https://github.com/SpecialKO/SpecialK/releases/tag/SK_25_12_2_5 (click on SpecialK. 7z)

2. Extract it or open the archive

3. Copy and paste the SpecialK64.dll to your game folder with the .exe

4. Rename SpecialK64.dll to dinput8.dll

5. Extract or open the BloomFix. 7z archive and copy everything inside it to your game folder. (where the .exe resides).

6. Launch the game and press Ctrl + ⇧ Shift + ← Backspace to bring up the SpecialK menu.

7. Disable the "Remove 60 FPS Cap" option located under the Framerate tab.

8. Scroll down to the Plugins tab and click on Add Plug-In > Game Folder > select 3dmigoto.dll > ok, and click on Load DLL.

Now restart the game, and you will see a notification in bottom left informing you if the plugin was loaded.

If you also want to use Bande Desinée, then simply download it from here: Bande Desinée (2021), extract or open the archive, and copy the ShaderFixes folder to your game directory.

I also highly recommend usi