"Note to self: Pasty-skinned programmers ought not stand in the Mojave desert for multiple hours."
- John Carmack
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API overriding tools
Tuesday, July 5, 2005 | Permalink

Today I'm adding two API overriding tools to the Cool stuff section, one for OpenGL and one for Direct3D. The main purpose of these is to solve the problem with alpha-tested textures in games, which look very aliased with multisample antialiasing. With these tools you can force alpha-test into alpha-to-coverage, which looks a whole lot better.

Caution: Be careful with online games using PunkBuster or other anti-cheat measures. They don't neccesarily like overriding the API and may think you're cheating, so if you're going to try, I wouldn't try on my favourite server first.

If there are any other features you'd like to see added to these tools, please let me know.

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sqrt[-1]
Tuesday, July 5, 2005

Not that I am complaining, but no source?

Also, the formatting of your web page side bar looks a little broken in Firefox - links are pushed off the bottom.

eXile
Wednesday, July 6, 2005

No Source

Btw, your website is pretty slow at the moment (maybe only caused by my internet provider).

eXile
Wednesday, July 6, 2005

Downloadspeed 309 Bytes/s!?

But not on any other website...

fellix_bg
Wednesday, July 6, 2005

Won't work for me in HL2 - the alpha textures are opaque filled, no matter the settings applied.
6600GT with FW v77.30.

Humus
Wednesday, July 6, 2005

I guess I could release the source of the GL version, but I'm afraid the DX version contains some non-public information.

fellix_bg, as stated in the readme, the alpha-to-coverage override only works on ATI cards.

NeARAZ
Thursday, July 7, 2005

Couldn't ATI publicly say what's the way to enable alpha-to-coverage in DX (like it did with instancing and whatnot)?

That would surely be good for the developers... Like, nvidia did say what's needed to turn on transparency AA on geforce7

Gl
Friday, July 8, 2005

Great tool Humus, and additional thanks for DX version.
One question - can put more info (as comment) into opengl32.ini for dummies in 3D graphics? At least, limit values for each parameter - for example, "ForceMSAAMode values is [2, 4, 6]".
As for me, I'm little bit confused about "ForcePixelFormat" parameter - there only 2 possible values (0/1) for it, or something else?
Thanx in advance.

Humus
Friday, July 8, 2005

NeARAZ, we provide this information to developers on a need-to-know basis. Any form of extended undocumented functionality is always going to be sensitive. It's a fine line between desiring to get your features out there and trying to keep a good business relationship with Microsoft. Instancing is a perfect example of when things did not turn out very well, and I was personally involved in it in ways I regret, so I'm very cautious about making any fuss about things like this again.

GI, the ForcePixelFormat value is a pixel format id. So it's any value from 1 up to the highest supported pixel format. You can list the supported pixel formats with tools like glview.

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