Hello. Could Special K be used to force better AA into these games? They barely have graphical options and sometimes suffer from bad framepacing. I’ve seen some mods for some of the games, but nothing comperehensive. They all work off of the same tech and its DX 11, i think
Releases · VitaSmith/gust_tools · GitHub I’ve seen mod tools, but nothing to improve the presentation. thanks
Downsampling when it’s not locking to 1920x1080 or ReShade and SMAA perhaps, Koie Tecmo GUST PC port fixes could have some useful resources too depending on what the game is doing.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B7VXEPnaNC1qLU4xVnoyRHhtVjg
There’s something with Koei and their PC port efforts, Nioh seemed like it would turn it around but even Atelier Ryza had problems so I’m curious how Ryza 2 and Nioh 2 when these hit PC will turn out and I suppose Omega Force and their “Warriors” games by extent.
(Though this is Gust’s A and B studio and Atelier game engine, Omega and their Dynasty Warriors engine and then whatever Nioh is on.)
Wrapping it through DXVK could be a thing too but maybe more so for Atelier Sophie and Knights of Azure 1 which were for whatever reason run through a 32-bit D3D9 compilation process whereas the rest were 64-bit D3D11 with various issues and problems unfortunately.
Anti aliasing wise at least if the game supports 3840x2160 there’s a potential to downsample up to this through AMD VSR which I think is now mostly fixed in the newer drivers or NVIDIA DSR.
Or ReShade with SMAA and FXAA but the later games while not visual power houses in terms of shaders and effects still see diminishing returns over what a simpler post-process AA solution can remedy.
(Specular/shiny surfaces and shader effects introduce additional more noticeable aliasing problems and then there’s shadows, textures, transparencies and other effects over just the more basic geometry aliasing too.)
Bit of a lengthy post, I like the games (mostly) but this is the toughest PC port publisher to deal with short of well those who outright skip or mostly avoid porting to PC at all like Atlus Japan used to do.
Oh yeah… Koei. Wow, there are no words that adequately express how weird their ports are 
Frankly, it’s a miracle that Special K’s mod tools can even see any of the resources in those games to modify them. That took a lot of work, texture mods are supported, but barely due to uninitialized memory in their engine.
For forcing AA, you want something like ReShade. I’ve never bothered with post-processing AA because I hate the stuff and ReShade already offers SMAA 
You will not be able to force MSAA, their engine is deferred shading.
Also, I just remembered… Koei’s engine stutters because it sleeps on the Window thread and misses events. I can definitely fix-up frame pacing for you if you turn on my limiter and under the Advanced tab select “Sleepless Window Thread.”
Oh that’s right there were some early fixes for Blue Reflection way back as part of GUST’s games outside of their usual Atelier series (Fairly Tale as a more recent but it seems somewhat average game.) though SpecialK has changed a lot since then.
What was that plugin doing again, think it was smaller tweaks to the shadow clipping errors and some stuff of that nature?
I don’t think the D3D tools worked too well for the newer game engine either trying to remember how that worked.
Would be nice to see some of the earlier games ported if that’s even remotely feasible but yeah Koei Tecmo has some dice rolling rules for how their PC ports are handled because it’s utterly random what to expect and how well it’s supported.
Less common discounts too and all-in on extreme amounts of DLC and these content passes often where it passes the cost of the game itself which is thankfully generally rare outside of simulator games with a lot of content additions.
Oh and I almost forgot that when going with ReShade one of the SpecialK sleepless options might cause a crash on startup unless disabled, I think it’s the window thread and the render one can be enabled but I’ll have to check how it’s set.
EDIT: Render to false and Window to true so the opposite of what I said.
Thus the recommendation on enabling sleepless window thread should be compatible.