Final Fantasy XI - Wishlist

Hello anyone who's interested,

I am the author of the Final Fantasy XI HD Overhaul over on YouTube and wanted to ask a few questions here. I've been upgrading the textures and artwork in that game and have been utilizing ReShade to really make it pop. However, there are a few things that I'd really like to see work with regards to ReShade and FFXI. I just don't know if it's even possible.

1) Depth-of-Field. This doesn't seem to work at all. I don't know if this needs to be coded specifically for FFXI, the DX8to9 Crosire DLL isn't catching it, or if that data simply isn't reported by the game. I've also heard the Depth Buffer gets disabled on certain multiplayer games, so perhaps this is the case? Give the age of the game and exactly what I'd like to do with it, can that be enabled? I'd love to have someone smarter than myself look into it and see if it's even possible.

2) Water Shader. I don't know if this is outside the scope of ReShade or not, but here goes. The water in FFXI is defined by easily identifiable textures contained in each .DAT file. Many are labeled the same way. Would it be possible to use ReShade to intercept or recognize that call and overwrite it with a shader instead?

3) Environmental Shadows. Again, this may be outside the scope of ReShade. Can a shader be built that identifies which D3D primitives are being drawn to the screen and cast shadows from that? A specific list of game meshes may need to be defined per "zone", but I know how to identify those by extracting the game's environmental models. I'm definitely more of an artist than a coder, so again I need someone more knowledgeable than myself to tell me this is a dead end (from the perspective of ReShade, at least).

Thank you in advance, I look forward to what you have to say.

ReShade cannot do 2 and 3. It applies to the final 2D image, all information about the world is lost at that point, with the exception of screenspace depth. It does explicitly not modify the 3D rendering pipeline. The D3D9 depth buffer search algorithms haven't been worked on as much as D3D10+, so it just doesn't work as well there. Before you give up play with the depth settings via the DisplayDepth shader, to make sure there really is no depth buffer found, and it's isn't just converted incorrectly.

Hi Crosire, thanks for taking the time to reply. Yeah, I figured 2 and 3 were a bit out there. Luckily, the creator of Ashita for FFXI tells me his plugin framework could be used to create such a thing. Now I just need to find someone who's actually willing to code it! As for DoF, I've played with it extensively and unfortunately it's a no go. Playing with the DisplayDepth settings seems to have no effect at all - the screen is either completely black or completely white.