Fixing Gears of War Lens Flare

[bomabomaboma]

Every Gears of War title has the same problem in Xenia:
Bright light sources are rendered by the camera, regardless of whatever geometry is in the way. It can be incredibly distracting.

I've solved the issue by identified the variable that needs to be changed in the game's data files, but a patch would be so preferable.

GearGame\Config\Xbox360-GearEngine.ini
[SystemSettings]
LensFlare:False

Basically, LensFlare needs to be disabled. Barely affects image quality, solves the issue completely for all of the GOW games.

I've tried using Ghidra, but I don't know what I'm doing. Here's hoping @illusion0001 or @emoose does.

[emoose]

IIRC changing the query_occlusion_fake_sample_count setting in xenia.config.toml helps with lensflare problems in some other games, maybe worth testing it with GoW too? (I think changing to -1 or 0 usually helped)

Besides that I guess you could see if the LensFlare default could be patched in the XEX, or find whatever code is checking it.

[bomabomaboma]

@FlintEastwood Your base version of Gears 2 and Gears 3 are the same as my NTSC-U version for which my (and Illusion's) patches were based off of. -- Try appending the patch files with your hash and see if the patches are cross-compatible, because they often are region-agnostic, provided the base version is the same.

As for using title updates: Many Unreal Engine 3 games on the 360 can't be updated using the xextool method because the TU container files contain not only delta patches for the .xex but also delta patches for engine files. You'll probably end up getting a dirty disc error. It's worth a shot though. Some games will not be able to be patched until proper TU support is reintegrated into Canary.

And thank you for reporting back on the Gears 2 lens flare issue. I'll make a patch for it.

[FlintEastwood]

@bomabomaboma : You were right. The patches are working when I change the module hashes. Thank you. :)

A bit offtopic:
For Gears 2 I wanted to modify the coalesced_int.bin as I did for Gears 3 before, and the new md5 hash is correctly written to the XBox360TOC.txt, but Xenia-Canary complains about a "Disc read error". Maybe the md5 hashes are still saved somewhere else?

[bomabomaboma]

@FlintEastwood The base version of Gears 3, for whatever reason, was the only Gears game on 360 that didn't generate SHA tables and run a hash check at startup. Later TUs would amend that. The other games require a bit of an involved process to change the Coalesced files.

Decrypt and decompress default.xex using xextool, then open it in a hex editor.

You'll need to enter in the SHA-1 of your newly edited file in hex. Bear in mind that this will change your hash, and you'll need to update the patch file on line 2.

This is not really a conversation related to Xenia patch making. If you have any further questions about it, please befriend me on Discord.

[FlintEastwood]

@bomabomaboma :👍 Thank you for explaining. Sorry, I didn't want to spam here about modifing Gears games.
The deep sun in Gears 2 Landown tunnel is really LensFlare related. I just wanted to check this, as it looks a bit different as the Gears3 Lensflare stuff.

[bomabomaboma]

@FlintEastwood I made a patch for it last night.
https://github.com/xenia-canary/game-patches/blob/main/patches/4D53082D%20-%20Gears%20of%20War%202.patch