Hi, I'm the FH2 artist who wrote these effects. Thanks for the compliments in this thread
Moreover, thanks to the smart devs at PR for coming up with the idea of the near-death effect by using a soldier damage state + tear gas emitter...brilliant! When we saw how you did that, I had to try something similar. So, clever work there PR coders
Anyhow, the effects in FH2 are DX9 shaders, written in HLSL (High Level Shading Language.) HLSL is very close to C-style syntax, but it has some of it's own unique elements (special vector datatypes like float4, for holding RGBA value; variable semantics and some other things.) If you understand C++ coding, you can pick up some basic stuff in HLSL very easily.
If you have FH2 installed, look in mods/fh2/shaders_client.zip . The stuff you want to see is in PostProduction_nv3x.fx (.fx files are for HLSL code, just like .cpp files.) Look for the function psDx9_Tinnitus . This is the pixel shader for the BF2 tinnitus effect. I re-wrote it to use a more powerful box-filter blur, plus it now desaturates the corners of the screen. You can also look up the function ps_WaveDistortion . This is the pixel shader for the tear gas effect, which we both use for a near-death effect. Again, I re-wrote this, this time changing it to mildly blur the screen, desaturate most of the screen, and tint the corners red. Even if you don't know HLSL, if you have a good working knowledge of a C-style language I'm sure you can get a feel for what I'm doing in it.
If you want to learn more about learning HLSL coding, I recommend you download
ATi Rendermonkey, which is a useful API for programming and prototyping shaders. I also recommend
Shaders for Game Programmers and Artists, by Sebastian St-Laurent. It has a lot of errors in the text, but it is otherwise very useful and a great introduction to the language.
FH2 gets custom shaders to work by using a shell application. The FH2 shortcut doesn't launch BF2.exe, but rather, FH2.exe . FH2.exe mucks around a bit, by renaming C:\Documents and Settings\*******\My Documents\Battlefield 2\mods\bf2 to bf2.tmp . This is where BF2 caches its permutated, or compiled, shaders. It also renames mods\bf2
shaders_client.zip, and temporarily moves mods2\fh2\shaders_client.zip there in it's place. Thus, BF2 is forced to re-permutate (compile) it's shaders, and it does so by using mods\bf2\shaders_client.zip (which has been temporarily replaced by the FH2 zip.) Thus, you get custom shaders (like the sepia menu, suppression, and near-death effect, plus sharper texture filtering on staticmeshes) when you run FH2. After FH2.exe closes (which is after the termination of BF2.exe,) it moves everything back to it's rightful place, and renames C:\Documents and Settings\*******\My Documents\Battlefield 2\mods\bf2 (i.e. the temporary FH2 shader cache) to
FH2. If PR were to code a similar shell application, you could have custom shaders too (and potentially you could get your mod tracked by XFire, as I am lobbying for FH2 at the moment
)
If you want to play PR with FH2 shaders, you should be able to by running FH2.exe once, and then going to C:\Documents and Settings\*******\My Documents\Battlefield 2\mods\ , backing up \BF2 , and renaming \FH2 to \BF2. This may cause issues with Punkbuster, so bear that in mind if you run into problems. Use at your own risk (but it should be easily fixable by just restoring the backup \BF2 folder in that directory.)
If PR devs would like to talk to me about this more, just PM me.
Great work on your mod, and good luck in the MotY this year! Maybe this year we can get 3 BF2 mods in the top 3!
