HiFi XI v0.54

One Ashita v4 plugin for a faster, better-looking Final Fantasy XI.

New since 0.53:

• Shadows by the light that was really there. The zone and the characters now tell the shading what each pixel was lit with: how much of it was the sun, and which way the surface faces. Shadows and ambient occlusion fall on their real shape instead of a guess from depth, so slopes, walls and edges seen at a grazing angle shade properly, and a crease in full sun stays lighter than one in the shade.
• Light from the sky. Ambient light comes from the sky above and bounces up from the ground, instead of being the same from every side. Stone with a normal map and the shiny parts of gear catch a soft highlight from the sun.
• Softer, longer shadows. Shadows are sharp where they touch and soften the further they fall from what casts them: a post's shadow crisp at its foot, a canopy's soft. A far cascade carries shadows out to 600 yalms, so mountains and cliffs shade the land at low sun.
• Everything casts. Swaying trees and opening doors cast their shadows as they move, and interiors' second areas cast as well. The nearest lamps cast shadows of the zone around them, from things off screen too.
• A softer Mog House. The room's lamp glows at a third of a street lamp's strength there: it lights the whole small room already, and at full strength it washed the room out.
• Faster first start. After an update, the shaders now compile on all your CPU cores at once instead of one after another (once per version; later starts load them from the cache).

Install:

1. Unzip hifixi-v0.54.zip into your Ashita folder.
2. Add /load hifixi to scripts\default.txt.
3. Your dgVoodoo output must be Direct3D 12 (OutputAPI = d3d12_fl11_0).
4. If ReShade's dxgi.dll is in your bootloader folder, move it out.
5. If you used hifps or drawcull, leave them out of your boot script: HiFi XI does their work and takes over their settings the first time it starts.
6. For FSR, set the background resolution to your screen's size (or lower) in your launcher.

What it does:

• Above 60 fps: game speed tied to real time, a frame cap, and speed-ups. Hidden characters are found from what's drawn instead of waiting on the GPU. It also skips Ashita's per-draw dispatch, uses SSE skinning on any CPU, batches text, and drops repeated device calls. They're on in every preset.
• Smooth edges and upscaling with AMD FSR 3.1, FSR 2 and FSR 1, and frame generation with AMD FSR 3.
• Longer view distance:
  • the world, characters and the zone's finer meshes drawn further;
  • the zone's visibility lists ignored, so far terrain doesn't pop in;
  • culling at the camera's own height of view;
  • square pixels.
• The zone and the characters drawn by HiFi XI, with per-pixel light, sky light, tone mapping, bloom and a colour grade.
• A richer world, drawn into the game's own frame:
  • grass that bends around characters, wears into paths and is cut by weapon skills;
  • ambient occlusion and surface relief;
  • sun and moon shadows from the zone's and the characters' own meshes, soft by distance, out to the mountains;
  • sun shafts and low fog;
  • water with reflections and ripples, out to the horizon;
  • snow that settles, with depth and footprints;
  • weather of its own, and wet ground;
  • a smooth sky with a sun, stars and a moon in the game's phase;
  • night lamps and glowing things lighting what's around them, the nearest lamps casting shadows.
• En-spell effects on your weapons while an en-spell is on you.
• Each zone's data made on your PC from your own game files, in the background, the first time you enter it. Or make every zone's at once from the menu.
• One menu: /hifi, with presets in a dropdown (Off, Balanced, High, Ultra, and your own) and a tooltip on every setting.

HiFi XI includes AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 1 and 2, and FSR 3.1's upscaler and frame generation from the AMD FidelityFX SDK (MIT licences; the licence texts are in docs\hifixi\).