CEnshine

Shaders enhancement for Halo Custom Edition aiming to restore Xbox accurate rendering

 

This project is made with the goal of improving Halo Custom Edition shaders and align them with the shaders quality provided in the MCC/Xbox version of the game, just by the joy of doing it, all of this is the result of almost 2 weeks of hard work to bring a well deserved set of shaders to Halo Custom Edition as Gearbox left us with broken version of almost all the shaders.

CEnshine was made possible using primarily Lua and HLSL, take a look at the source files on this repository.

For a more deeper introduction to shader encryption see Composer a CLI set of programs made with C++ for decrypting, encrypting of shaders.

Install it with Mercury:

mercury install censhine

Or manually get it from the releases page.

Fixes so far

Some of the things we have fixed with these shaders so far are listed below, as well as unmarked all the things we plan to do to restore at some point as well.

• Shader Transparent Plasma - (Plasma based shaders will render properly, for example biped shields recharge)
• Environment Reflection - (Bumped surfaces now will tint correctly perpendicularly and horizontally, dynamic mirror seems to work properly now, needs testing)
• Environment Light Maps - (Light map direction will now apply correctly to other textures like bump maps)
• Transparent Glass Reflection Bumped - (Glass with bumped reflections)
• Transparent Water - (Water color and opacity)
• Environment Model - (Objects now draw behind fog, animations fade correctly, cube map alpha applies correctly)
• Environment Texture - (Restored normal, blended and blended base specular function types, self illumination works as expected)

NOTE: There are still pending some shaders and functions to fix, every feedback from what shaders are missing to fix or what they can be breaking even more is totally appreciated.

We are also trying to keep compatibility with dgVoodoo!

There are some plans to bring some removed shaders back like the "Shader Transparent Generic", but that will require something a little bit more complex, stay tuned to more updates.

Screenshots

Here are some 2K screenshots demonstrating changes between the broken shaders and the fixed ones, just to show a few, shaders include other fixes that require looking at them in game to appreciate:

BEFORE AFTER BEFORE AFTER BEFORE AFTER

Building

First of all I have to keep clear that I built CEnshine using Linux so a lot of the code assumes you are running in a Linux like environment, however I've been doing some efforts to be able to keep the code compatible with Windows, most likely you will have to at least run some scripts from here in Bash Windows in order to compile shaders.

Linux requirements

In Linux there are some minimal requirements to build the code, assuming you are in a Debian based distro like ubuntu this should be enough gather all the dependencies, you also need a working wine configuration:

apt install luajit
apt install wine
apt install winetricks
winetricks dxvk

Windows requirements

For Windows you will have to download a Lua interpreter from your place of preference, it needs to be a luajit interpreter obligatory, I usually download binaries from the luapower project.

Then make sure you have the latest version of DirectX9 runtime installed, this contains some libraries and binaries required to compile DirectX9 shaders.

Get it done

Not all the shaders from this repository are in a compilable state that fits well with Halo Custom Edition, keep in mind that we are building shaders in a way that the game can use straight, so some shaders need to be tweaked to fit what the game is expecting to find, in the future if we want to improve shaders we will need some kind of game modification to expand shaders functionality.

As we still need some original shader files in order to allow the game to run properly we first have to extract a set of working shaders for the game and then compile our shaders in top of those.

Run a command like this setting a path to your original shader files, it will create a build folder where we can start compiling our new shaders:

./extract.sh $HALO_CE_PATH/shaders/EffectCollection_ps_2_0.enc --decrypt --preparebuild

Now just run ./build.sh in the root folder of this project and that's it, a shaders file usually named EffectCollection_ps_2_0.enc will be dropped under the dist folder.

Thanks to

• MangoFizz - Composer tools creator, tools for decrypting and encrypting shaders.
• MrChromed - Halo CE Shaders veteran, providing support for validating shaders fixes
• MarkMcFuzz - Another Halo CE Shaders veteran, support and validation
• Mata - 3D expert, probably the igniter of this project, when Mata started to learn about HLSL we got inspired to try and attempt to fix CE shaders
• C20 - Provided a list of known shaders issues
• Halo MCC Mod Tools and 343i for finally fixing shaders with also building process for a base code

Disclaimer

CEnshine is not and will not be related to MCC, this project does not claim to own the fixes to all shaders presented here, most of them are based in the fixes provided by Halo Combat Evolved present in MCC, however the codebase presented here is specifically designed to work with Halo Custom Edition, is not meant to be aligned with shaders in MCC, further code changes will not be related to MCC in any way, this mod and it's code belongs to a gray area where it needs to be, if this does not work for you or you are not in agreement with this then this is not the project you should be looking at, see Master Chief Collection and Halo MCC Mod Tools instead.