Overview
The Devil Daggers Lighting “Mod” that nobody asked for. (tl;dr: it’s ReShade)This of all games really doesn’t need a visual overhaul and extra shaders… so I added them anyway!Here’s how to set it up to enjoy a “cinematic” lighting experience.
What and Why
I love Devil Daggers’ minimalism and old timey graphics, so i first did this for a cheap lol to see how it would look. It instantly surprised me with how cool it looked in motion and how little it messes with the game, manifesting only where appropriate in moments of intensity.
Because of DD’s amazing visual design, only certain things relevant to the action come above a certain brightness level, making it perfect to trigger contextual lighting effects. A regular scene of DD with this kinda-mod looks as usual, if a bit more glowy, but when you let those daggers fly into a crowd of skulls, grab gems, level up, or slam one of the larger enemies, you’ll really notice it and (i hope) enjoy it a lot.
I also appreciate the juxtaposition of seeing flashes of godrays while killing demons, and the later flashing shuddering manic intensity crowded moments of the game can take on a weirdly transcendental feel…. a unique one that goes blam blam blam blam blam forever
“Cinematic” lighting “mod” for DD adds:
- bloom (extra baleful glow on everything bright, which isnt much in DD)
- radial flares / godrays (blasty orange ones coming at you from centre screen)
- anamorphic flares (the wide blue ones that remind you of sci fi movies)
And it looks like this:
Things that catch the bloom, rays & flares include:
- most importantly, hits on enemies
- the highlight in gems
- the glow of picking up gems
- powered-up hand
- alt-fire daggers
- the pale leviathan
- moments of ridiculous intensity
- the intro screen and scene, to a ridiculous degree that can’t be avoided 🙁
things this doesn’t mess with:
- brown
- red
- black
- your face
we’re going with a spoiler-free post here so no screen shots of anything too advanced. Rest assured DD longplayers (well, kinda-long) your ridiculously bright battles still work with extra lighting.
It’s also crazy hard to get good screenshots of these lighting effects that look as good as the effect in motion, even using the replays of DD’s mightiest warriors!
How to install
This kinda-mod uses reshade, which can do crazy lighting stuff to many games.
In this case, we’re using just the bloom & lighting part of it.
- Go download it from [link]
- When you load it it should find your steam folder
- Point it at dd.exe in the devil daggers folder
- tick only Bloom and Lens Flares, choose OpenGL
- let it install. It will add some stuff to the folder.
- still in the devil daggers steam folder, open the dd.ini file in notepad / whatever. If there isn’t one, create it.
- delete the contents if any, paste the following and save it, then run Devil Daggers from Steam
How will you know if it’s worked? Well, you’ll see some extra stuff in the top left corner of the screen when DD launches, and the title screen will look like absolute crap!
This can’t be avoided, as the title and opening scenes of DD use a lot more whiteness than the main game, ironically making them the only sections that look overmodded.
To turn reshade on or off, you can use the Home key to open the control panel.
To remove Reshade, see its own instructions. There’s nothing more to this non-mod than ReShade and some config.
FAQ
why?
– i like tinkering with things, and the mod scene’s proclivity for putting loads of lighting FX on things that really don’t need it is strong, so this started as kind of a joke mod that decided to git gud.
why not just distribute this as a packaged mod?
– why bother when you can install reshade like a grownup yourself and paste some config?
you just made this because you’re not very good at DD, right?
– you got me.
This isn’t really a mod!
– that’s not really a question! i added quotes, isn’t that good enough for you?
Why “cinematic” mod?
– hollywood seems to loooove anamorphic flares, haven’t you noticed?
– it’s also a shout out to the infamous Half-Life 2 Cinematic Mod, except in my mod there’s no questionable insertion of porn or borked weapon balance 😀
Why is the title screen / get the dagger intro sequence so over-bright / borked?
– it uses WAY more white than the main game, and there’s no reasonable way i’m going to programatically change reshade settings for different scenes for a quick throwaway mini-mod idea. Wish I could only have it turned on in-game, but meh.
can i mess with the reshade settings?
-sure, hit shift-f2 ingame to hit its control pane, or just go through the install reshade process again but don’t paste my config bits if you want to add other shaders and go crazy with it. Consult reshade guides for more.
