Fixing one of DS2's visual weaknesses using DS2LightingEngine (Second Sin mod update)

Añadido: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]Hello, this is from Soft Thurf and uh we're back in my second sin preset slashmod that uh I've been working on for a little bit now. uh basically a full reboot of it. Uh since there is the rasterized version which is for the rasterized uh version of DS2 Lighting Engine and this version is created from the ground up except for textures cuz those carried over uh for the path tracing version of DS2 Lighting Engine.

[00:00:30]Uh, and I just released a new alpha to my patrons on Patreon, which for those uninitiated, the reason why I'm doing that is that well, I've obviously received a ton of criticism for releasing mods that had uh issues uh and uh generally buggy, right? over time as I develop it cuz that was my general idea or ideology of of modding was okay well most modders don't put out work uh every couple days and and and very work in progress stuff. Um, and I was like, "Okay, well, maybe I'll just that way people can always have, you know, what I'm working on." And well, it turns out that there's giant downsides to that. And so, a lot of the criticism I got uh has led me to this where now I keep it on my Patreon until I put it on Nexus Mods when I think it's ready and not terribly buggy and uh ready for prime time essentially. So, I think that makes a lot of sense. Um, I can get like people being upset about that, but honestly, it works out pretty well because it's to a very small audience on my Patreon. Uh, they get to play it.

[00:01:40]Check it out. Doesn't cover the whole game. Uh, this latest update adds Shaded Woods and I did more work on Huntsman's Cops and most of the areas quite honestly that have already been included. uh Harvest Valley. There's some work on Iron Keep.

[00:01:57]Vula, uh, as you see here, got a bit of an update, um, to the Danet Castle, uh, in the distance. Uh, I changed around the luminance of the overall like sun a little bit, the light shafts. Um, and then I added, uh, this mountain off in the distance, which actually blocked uh, the end of the skybox. Well, actually, you can see the skybox. There's there's actually a gap there um where something was covering it before, but um yeah, this looks a lot better. Um now, to be fair, you don't really see that mountain um much if you're in the the usual parts of Magula. Um but you can obviously see the visuals here are inspired by Scholar, but there's a little bit of vanilla DS2 in there as well. um as it's not as like in-your-face bright and of course the grass and uh the overall tone mapping. Like everything you'll see in this video is still work in progress. Um but I'm really happy with it. I think uh the other thing I've been focusing on is dialing in like a strong depth of field effect. uh which is not going to be for everyone, but luckily if anyone doesn't like the depth of field effect, you can literally just go into the camera lens setting here. Uh you can just turn that off if you want. Uh for me, I personally love I don't like that heavy of a depth of field. You can't see literally anything.

[00:03:21]But um and then you basically you want to choose far only. Uh the near just doesn't really work that well. Um I think the default like camera sensor setting is around 100. Um so you can obviously you saw if you go up to 200 you just can't really see anything. So uh but you can turn it to zero just turn off depth of field um if you just don't like it. I personally love it because I think it adds to the dream light quality. Uh and DS1 Prepare to die edition was really heavy on depth of field as well. Um, and then the DS2 like beta footage that we have is very heavy on depth of field. So, it's always been something that I've loved. Um, so I finally uh did things betw twixed or things betw twixed. Um, that was an area I kind of had skipped over cuz it has some peculiarities that I don't particularly love working uh on. Also, you can see it's incredibly dark.

[00:04:17]I'm still working on that admittedly.

[00:04:20]Uh, there you go. There's the door. Uh, so here is the interior of the Firekeeper Hut. Uh, it's a little darker than I remember it being.

[00:04:33]Interesting. I think I may have done some tone mapping stuff. Well, that's fine. People will make it through. I'll I'll tweak that as I go. Um, here I can usually just lift the exposure.

[00:04:45]Um, but the problem is there's actually three distinct uh atmosphere variations in things betw twix. There's basically the initial uh things betw twixed area, the normal uh and then when you enter the firekeeper hut, that is its own uh atmosphere. And then when you go out to the next portion of it, it's called the training grounds portion. So, they all have different uh atmospheres and you it you can't really make them all the same because it that that just doesn't really work. Um like for instance, if we up the exposure to where you can see more of the uh detail. Um the problem you'll run into is now when you go to exit here. Uh so let's open this door. Uh this will be way too bright uh initially. Now, is it a big deal? No, because you'll go out here and it adapts back to what it's supposed to look like uh to the normal things with Twix uh atmosphere. But once again, this is all uh Oh, yeah. I forgot I'm on plus.

[00:05:54]Also, I just realized I'm recording this with a sun that is kind of hitting my monitor, so it actually looks darker than it it is uh for me. But you'll see I added grass here. Oh yeah, we got the fal. Oh, we got the ball sack brigade.

[00:06:12]Nice.

[00:06:14]Actually, I prefer the one hand movement for this weapon specifically.

[00:06:20]Oh, I don't really want to kill you bird. That's my bad.

[00:06:29]Oh, wow. They just totally fall. I forgot about that. Um, and one of the biggest changes I made, uh, I'll show on screen, actually, uh, is the before and after of this.

[00:06:41]Let's go kill this arrow guy first.

[00:06:45]Where are you hiding? There he goes. Um, so this area has a fairly notorious ground uh surface. Well, for modders at least. Um, so basically this ground surface here. um you'll see it's got all this really cool granular detail and uh it's cool. Uh well in the unmoded game or how DS2 lighting also how DS2 lighting engine comes by default um with the default preset um you'll notice that there's no normal map on this surface.

[00:07:18]I'll show you in the thing that pops up on screen now uh the before and after.

[00:07:21]Basically, I used lighting engine uh to do the thing I showed in a prior video, which is you basically Let's go take some twix. Uh and so what we can do here is this ground mesh. Actually, yeah, screw that. I won't even show you on screen. What I'll do is show you what it originally looks like.

[00:07:46]Uh which let's lower it one more. Okay, so this is what the ground looks like by default, which is completely flat and there's no normal map. It's because it's only an albo texture. There's simply just one texture, no specular map, no normal map.

[00:08:06]And you can apply roughness map to it to get like a little bit of, you know, from the the outside sun coming through the crag. But it it path tracing struggles with surfaces that do not have a normal map because it's begging for more information. It just doesn't have any.

[00:08:22]And so it it shades it like this, right?

[00:08:25]Um but by creating a model out of this entire flat ground surface um which only had an albo in lighting engine uh I you know basically you create the identical mesh and you place it in exactly the same spot.

[00:08:42]Um let me lower it just a little bit.

[00:08:45]4.79.

[00:08:47]Okay. 78 77 76 75 Okay. 76 is the one that needs to be. Okay, so that's the right height.

[00:08:58]That's actually a good fix. I needed to do that anyway. And now you can see, look at the ground now. And there's all the detail that uh it was actually a normal map I I created from the albdo texture. And what's really weird is that even up there, there's already a normal map that exists for this specific texture that gets used here. For whatever reason, they just didn't have it using a normal map. So, it ends up looking really not great. Uh, in the rasterized version of DS2 Lighting Engine, it is fine. Like, it still doesn't look great, but it blends in because it doesn't suffer from the path tracing issue of wanting that more info.

[00:09:38]Um, but it's absolutely worth replacing it. Now, the beauty of replacing it in this way, uh, is that DS2 still has no idea that that happened. Um, so online play is still uh a thing because this is all being done without TS2 having any idea uh that any of these changes are happening. Um, but yeah, so this is how my Thingsmith Wix looks. It's it's very contrasty. Uh, it is dark. Um, you can see I don't have the player lantern turned on because in DS2 lighting engine, you can actually go here uh and you can change your player lantern. Now, unfortunately, the player lantern in the path tracing version of DS2 lighting engine uh doesn't really work terribly well. It's even at 10 out of 10, it's not really that bright. You have to get very close to things for it to really appear. Um so, it's not it's not ideal.

[00:10:33]Also, I added that point light that adds a little bit of a blue hue to the side of the big tree here. But let's go back in here and meet with our our big dogs, our homies. Uh I also upgraded the light here. There's a point light that is placed for this fire.

[00:10:52]Uh and I believe it's under this one.

[00:10:56]Yeah. Uh, and so you can see this is there's actually a light that's connected to that firearm and I upgraded it to the uh let's see if I turn that off.

[00:11:09]Yeah. Uh, and then auto. So, this is what it normally looks like with a normal point light. Uh, which is pretty decent because there's already shadow casting from it automatically because it's uh path tracing, right? Um, and it it looks decent. uh and totally viable.

[00:11:28]But what you can do is enable the light NE. I don't actually remember what the NE stands for, but essentially you give it it's a higher quality point light.

[00:11:39]It's essentially like a fully path trace light or whatever it basically you'll just see the shadows look better. Uh, but they can be used seldomly because if you use too many of these, it it they call them, which is smart because they're they're more expensive than the standard one you're seeing here. Um, so basically, you switch it over to sphere, which then you'll see completely makes the light disappear. Uh, and then you hit light and E. Now, you'll notice, well, that looks weird. Uh, that's because if you snap the game camera, it'll come back.

[00:12:11]And so now you can see it's a much more realistic light. And I think there's a better material response. There's better uh normal the normal map uh on the surfaces in the parallax. You can see it it gets more contrasty uh and it's just a better quality light. And you can see it really impact everything in the scene uh in a much more granular and noticeable way. Um and so that's why those lights are really cool to use uh seldomly where you can. you you basically just don't want to use them where there's too many lights uh where because then you'd only be able to use one of them or two of them and they're they cost more performance. But here uh it was a really good reason to to use them. That's how you get these really sharp shadows or sharper I should say uh than the usual path trace shadows which are realistic but uh are are very uh sort of not as easy to see. They're not very not as sharp. uh which would be less realistic.

[00:13:13]Um so anyway, that's things betw twixed.

[00:13:15]Um beyond that, let's see what else did I do.

[00:13:22]I guess a good one is shaded woods cuz I did do some work on this which actually involves the initial spot in Aldia's Keep because it actually uses the shaded woods uh atmosphere. Um, so let's run back this way. My shaded woods is uh very has a a teal/green hue to it. Uh, heavy depth of field. Uh, we have the volutric fog, but it is a little I tried to control it. And then I wanted to make sure you could see Dragonite Castle off in the distance. You have bloom from the light shafts. Uh, it's it's obviously contrasty. Uh there's a lot of grass added uh over like the default preset.

[00:14:12]I added uh quite a bit of that. Uh but I tried to do it in a tasteful way.

[00:14:18]I always found this area very barren looking, which to a degree I think was intentional. Um but there's a part of it that I don't think was that it was lacking contrast and shadow detail. It it it is almost like everything was lit. Uh, and so my goal was definitely to add a lot of trees uh to the because it's the woods, right?

[00:14:42]It's shaded woods. So I always felt like it should have a little bit more. Oh my, this happens in DS2 very randomly where my controller just says, "What if we don't work anymore?

[00:14:55]What if we decide you can't? I need you to unplug it, plug it back in."

[00:15:00]And so yeah. Uh, and then I hid some distant geometry that I thought was really low quality and replaced them with uh even some mountains up there.

[00:15:08]Uh, but they're off in the distance. I don't think anyone would terribly notice. Um, I added some rocks.

[00:15:14]Uh, and so essentially, I just wanted to make it a lot more atmospheric um than than prior.

[00:15:22]And let's run this way cuz yeah, that goes back to the initial one. Of course, in every area that I work on, I go through these surfaces and I basically have to decouple the initial height map I made for uh the surfaces and move it off to its own texture. Uh which is inside baseball type of stuff, but uh I have to do that and then craft an AO map in Adobe Substance uh editor. Uh and then you put that in the normal map. So, that's kind of the laborious portion.

[00:15:57]Um, but also fixing any sort of mesh that doesn't have a normal map. Um, but yeah, I'm definitely I can I can see my shaded woods not being everyone's cup of tea, but I actually think that's pretty much intentional at this point because I think if you make if you make your areas for everyone, like the most basic uh type of look that would be generally agreeable to everyone, I think you tend to lose something. Uh, I definitely prefer uh putting a little bit more of a creative spin on them. Uh, but I hope you can tell, of course, I'm I'm greatly inspired by how DS2 looked originally.

[00:16:42]It's it's like thematically and the colors and the depth of field and like bloom and light shafts. Um, and then I try to separate out what I think could have been technical limitations from the downgrade, right? Like that's kind of my methodology at least. Um, so let's see what else did I touch. Sometimes I forget. I didn't do any DLCs yet. Those those are all untouched. The gutter has not been touched. I'm pretty sure I don't think I did grave saints.

[00:17:15]I think Brightstone Cove Salora. I want to say I I I briefly touched the initial landing zone. Uh, and I was messing with the overall contrast and brightness and yeah, that is not correct yet. Okay, do not expect Brightstone Cove Stor.

[00:17:40]Uh, actually, while we're here, one thing I do is I do end up blocking this bushel of grass that's right over the bonfire. I don't like that.

[00:17:52]Um, so let's open our game map object.

[00:17:57]And this will be in the next update. I don't like this grass placed here. Uh, this was placed here by FromSoft, but I I just I don't like it cuz it's right over the bonfire. Uh, it would just burn all of that grass. Not that you need like realism, but I've always found that one to be a little not not great. I don't I don't think that placement makes uh a ton of sense.

[00:18:18]And so we got that. Yeah. Don't don't expect bright Bright Zone Cop Soldor.

[00:18:24]That's uh Let's just check.

[00:18:28]Have I shown Forest of the Fallen Giants since the last time? Believe I've done small things to it. I still have more work to do overall, but I'm pretty happy with with how it looks. Um turn this way.

[00:18:46]Yeah, we got some nice brightness and light shafts. Uh, I definitely got to do more work right here where my helm is.

[00:18:53]That surface I need to hide a little bit with some trees and grass because it's basically the sun hitting a surface that does not have a normal map. So once again, the path tracing just struggles to make that not look abnormal. It's basically just an issue that the rasterized version doesn't have, which I don't really mean that in a negative way.

[00:19:16]I totally understand why the path tracing uh would want more info. It's it's obviously doing something way more complex.

[00:19:25]Uh and it doesn't abide by the same rules of rasterization, which is basically just faking uh all of it.

[00:19:34]But yeah, okay. I'm I'm pretty happy with uh Force of the Fall Giants generally.

[00:19:40]Now, you can see my player lantern actually function in here decently well.

[00:19:45]Um, yeah, these people have all been dead for a long time. Uh, cuz I think if I look, I actually have Oh, yeah. I'm like 8 million is my soul memory. So, uh, uh, yeah, I've killed a lot of people and things have started to despawn massively.

[00:20:07]Uh, I still got to blend in the skybox to some of the geometry better to kind of blend it together, but um, that's a work in progress.

[00:20:17]Um, let's see. Knight's Tower. I don't think I really did anything on.

[00:20:23]Um, Harvest Valley, I think I did small tweaks again to kind of tone mapping.

[00:20:29]Uh, I added a bunch a bunch of uh added geometry to the the environment because it it as I was talking about in the last video, I was not a huge fan of how the general like where my head is here, you can see that's the general mesh that is used throughout a lot of Earth and Peak and Harvest Valley. Well, Harvest Valley specifically. Um, and so I used basically the harvest valley rock model and you can scale it and rotate it and essentially just add a a level of ge geometric complexity that uh was obviously not there. Uh, obviously uh all work in progress, but that guy is still here. I have not killed him 12 times yet.

[00:21:20]Okay, big dog. We're going to go this way. Um, I still have more work to do on the earth and peak like tone mapping and and color grading, but it's it's in a decent spot. Uh, what I need to do is have more work done on the uh the actual Earth and Peak uh building itself and making sure those textures have the correct height maps and AO maps and whatnot. But I think right now I'm I'm pretty happy with the detail, the way it looks, the light shafts, the depth of field.

[00:21:55]Um, there's definitely some extra geometric detail for some of this stuff here. I could I could add a little bit.

[00:22:03]Okay, but I'm pretty happy with like the surface quality. I think the normal map, uh, AO map, and like this right here, I think is is fantastic surface quality.

[00:22:17]Oh my god, there's three of you guys.

[00:22:19]That's crazy.

[00:22:21]Okay. Wow.

[00:22:25]Get swung away.

[00:22:28]Oh, the one guy was poisoned. Yeah. I think these guys look really good, too.

[00:22:32]I I Ooh.

[00:22:35]Oh my god. Oh my god. They have like the dark sign on their back.

[00:22:41]On their back on like the left shoulder.

[00:22:44]God damn it.

[00:22:47]You guys got me so good on that one.

[00:22:52]I like that they're a little sweaty.

[00:22:53]That's That's how I I had this regular map set up cuz I wanted them to be a little sweaty cuz this area just seems like it would be very humid.

[00:23:05]You know what's really a a sad thing though is that their weapon doesn't drop as far as I'm aware.

[00:23:13]Um, yeah, let's do a little slow rotation of this surface quality because I think you get really nice normal map detail, parallax, and a map to work within the existing like framework of these these textures.

[00:23:30]Uh, because this is still the existing albo texture uh admittedly upscaled uh the existing normal map. Uh there are new normal maps I I create for certain surfaces, but it's on a very case by case basis. Most of them are actually perfectly fine. Um now this is an area where I have been meaning to, but I just haven't done it yet. Is I have a brush here for adding shrubs.

[00:23:57]And these fit in Harvest Valley incredibly well. Uh and so I try to add them to like little crevices.

[00:24:06]And so you get a little bit of extra dynamism uh to the scene uh because they sway in the wind a little bit. That placement's not great. Let's delete that.

[00:24:18]Of course, the placement's never perfect. I I just try to in my mind think, oh well, you know what? I think they I think they work. Not there. I think they work decently here or and it's uh it's never perfect. I think I end up thinking about the placement of things a little bit too much sometimes because in the end I don't think most people will care or notice. But uh which I don't even mean as a dig. I think that's just realistic. Yeah, I just hadn't added shrubs here. Um, yeah, but there's some other uh clutter and and stuff I want to add to areas to make sure they have enough like coverage uh to just give them a little bit of minimism, you know, and uh yeah, I think I think that's good. I think that's a good amount to show. We're at like 25 minutes. A lot of it has been yapping. Um, but I definitely reckon you can download this and uh on my Patreon admittedly for now.

[00:25:20]Yeah, if you use the code May25, uh you will get 25% off your first month of my Patreon, which it's only $5 anyway, but you know, I felt like it was a good idea to give First Time members a little discount. It lasts until the 31st of May. Uh, I realized just now that I goofed and I actually called it May 25 because I guess at that point when I made the code like a week ago, I did a brain fart and I thought it was 2025.

[00:25:50]So, I should have called it May 26 as the code, but it's it's May 25. So, deal with it. I'll put it up on screen and you can uh basically experience the areas that are covered in this mod and you can of course play the other areas. They're just going to have the default preset uh by default, which of course what the default preset means uh duh. Uh but anyway, thank you for watching. Uh and let me know what you think it looks like. Uh I know it's not going to be for everyone, but I'm pretty happy with how the areas are kind of shaken out.

[00:26:28]Um, and I'm excited to keep working on it.

[00:26:32]Now I'm getting like to working on the gutter.

[00:26:36]The black gulch I got to work on. And we're getting closer to the end game or the end of the base game. And I'm contemplating, do I put it on Nexus Mods when I have the base game done or do I just do the DLCs and make sure when I do an initial release on Nexus Mods that you have the whole game to play? Probably that's the smart call. because it it does seem like that would suck to be like, "Oh, well, it's only the base game." And then people would get the DLC and be like, "Oh, well, okay. I guess I'll just play with the default preset at that point." Um, but uh yeah, link in the description.

[00:27:12]There'll be a link in the pinned comment to the Patreon as well. Uh, and you can go download it right now. It's a pretty fat download. It's like 18 gigabytes mostly. It's it's obviously the textures. Uh, that's the majority of it.

[00:27:25]Uh, and thankfully it's on Google Drive, so it's pretty quick download. That's the reason why uh I use Google Drive. And when you subscribe to my Patreon, you also get uh the ad free videos like the one you're watching now. Probably should have said that at the beginning of the video, but such is life.

[00:27:48]And you also get Google Drives to all of my mods, not just the one that you're seeing here that is not released yet. But I I like the idea of working on mods and then putting it out to a very small number of dedicated people that are paying me uh because obviously without their support, I wouldn't I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing. So it it does feel like it's more fair to the patrons.

[00:28:18]But it's also a win-win in that it protects me from like overwhelming like shitty comments that luckily I don't read anyway.

[00:28:29]Um like even when I would post my stuff on Nexus Mods, I was obviously pretty bad about reading the comments because a lot of it would just be crap or repeated stuff and so I just wouldn't read it uh anymore. And so I assume my haters are out there. I just don't hear of them very often. Uh so this way just means it's going to be more polished when it actually gets to the wider player base.

[00:28:56]But I also understand if someone's going to see that and be like, "Oh my god, he he sold out for the money." And I'm like, "Well, no. I mean, it's not like I'm making a ton of money anyway." Um, but it is helping me grow my Patreon, which is the only way that I'll continue to be able to mock and live. So, it only seems fair that I would I would give any sort of perk to my patrons because they're the only reason I'm still modding. Uh, also, fun fact, if you tilt the camera down, you can actually see that these little wooden pillars or whatever don't don't reach the ground.

[00:29:35]They actually stop short. Uh but because of the perspective, uh it's it's not a terribly noticed thing. It's it's fine, but once you see it, you kind of can't unsee it. Um but anyway, thank you for watching. We've now reached 30 minutes, which seems like a good amount of time for an episode of From Softer TV or experience or whatever the hell I want to call it. Um, but yeah, I'll see you next time, which hopefully should be relatively shortly.

[00:30:06]I like to update the mod on my Patreon maybe every 3 to 4 days because I can get feedback and it just rewards the patrons for supporting me, right? Uh, and I work on it every day for uh, multiple hours. And uh, I'm making good progress though. like I'm kind of I'm in the flow state now. I had that burnout that happened and now I feel like I'm kind of I'm in a good state. Uh I also have the incentive to get this to like a decent 1.0 status or something. Uh because DS3 lighting engine be path traced uh which has been upgraded to path tracing. Uh these three lightnings of course was never like officially released beyond a light version which just added DLSS and like AO but it wasn't ray tracing or it wasn't path tracing or anything. And that was on a like on Kofi. You could you could pay for that. Um but the official DS3 lighting engine never really like made the light of day uh because DS2 got more work and DS2 is basically for Rage Vitamins. It's a good test bed because it's a simpler rendering setup and it's lower geo density. Um, but there's a shared code base obviously between DS2 Lighting Engine, DS3 Lighting Engine. So everything that's been done on DS2 Lighting Engine is benefiting DS3 Lighting Engine. So, I have an incentive to get this to a stable state and released on Nexus mods for everyone to use if they want. And then I can go heavy into upgrading my existing Shadows of the First Flame DS3 mod and basically just starting from scratch. Uh, which is fine. I've done it all the time. uh and creating a essentially what I did with second send for DS2. I will make a preset/mod for DS3 lighting engine path racing which is going to be texture upscaling parallax exclusion mapping uh so the height maps, the roughness maps, uh configuring all the locations to look exactly the way I want, which for DS3 I find the areas blend together a little bit too much. Um, I understand why they did that. It's thematic or whatever. Um, my goal with my preset for DS3, and that's what I've done in Shadows of the First Flame, is try to pick out a distinct color profile for each area. And I like each area to look very distinct. Um, because I think that's more fun for exploration and going from area to area if they look very different. And I think DS3 does or DS2 does a really good job of that by default or the area is very different with different enemies and different mechanics and just looks very different.

[00:33:00]Uh the vibe is different and so I'd like to inject that into DS 3 a bit cuz I think even Bloodborne does a much better job of the areas being different looking sometimes. There's certain ones that blend together a little bit, but that's definitely the goal for like the DS3 Lighting Engine preset that I'll I'll start working on. U but that's the incentive is I I I really don't want DS3 lighting engine to come to a point where I can start making a mod for it and I'm still like balls deep in in DS2 development and then I'd like split my time, which if I have to, I absolutely will. Uh because that actually wouldn't be terrible in the sense that it'd be using the same mod tools, right? Like I'm using the same it's all this. It's it's the DS Lighting Engine uh framework, which is phenomenal. And so I actually could work on both. Um but I'd be splitting my focus and that's obviously not ideal.

[00:34:00]And uh wow, I yapped for another five minutes. Well, anyway, thanks for watching. Hopefully this was some sort of Dark Souls ASMR for you and uh I'll see you on the next video.