Project Borfection

Borrie BoBaka

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For the past few years I've been working on mods that try to enhance the visual quality of Star Wars Galaxies while trying to maintain its "retro" art style. One of my major influences and inspirations have been the now defunct Project Perfection, and it's many displays of visual enhancement. As a joke, I started tagging mods that fit this intent as "Project Borfection," and aimed to achieve the various things that were shown off in Project Perfection, but never released.

There are a number of elements that I believe need to be enhanced or redone to bring up the visual quality of Star Wars Galaxies as a whole. I don't believe in revamping every asset in the game, but I do believe finding strategic points that increase the quality in ways that bring up the quality of the assets around it. For example, while this is not a mod I authored personally, I find that Rinzler's HD Eyes does so much to bring life to characters, even if their models or textures remain the same. Minor changes that almost seem invisible, but practically reinvent the quality of the game's visuals.

I wanted to write this post to bring attention to the mods I am making, planning to make, and want to make even if I don't know how to yet in order to bring to light this effort to enhance SWG, while also hoping to attract more who want to do the same. I want to highlight any mods made by others that I think accurately help enhance the game within the style of the game.
 

Borrie BoBaka

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Borrie's "Project Borfection" Mods

Check out the Project Borfection tag on MTG to get the absolute latest information about mods I release toward this effort.

Reinventive Mods

Borrie's Better Reflections
This mod is less of an upgrade and more of a bug fix, actually. This restores env-map based reflections to reflective materials across the entire game, making them look as though they're reflecting the environment around them based on pre-defined env-map cubes. While the reflections are not always 100% accurate, they allow shiny things to appear shiny, and even affect some of the most minute details that you might not have guessed anymore. I refer to this mod as one of my most "must haves" as it offers such a sweeping change, and restores SWG to how it is supposed to look.

Borrie's Swaying Trees
This is another simple mod that introduces one new shader to the leaves of trees that makes them sway in the wind. This simple change actually helps with the visual fidelity of the scene, making it feel more alive and animated despite doing nothing to change the visual quality of the trees themselves.

Borrie's Better Skies
This is a mod that is attempting to provide a Project Perfection promise. This mod changes up the cloud textures of planets with higher resolution textures and normal maps, while also providing a richer color palette for the sky gradient as the day goes on. The effort of this mod is to make skies feel bigger, wider, and more visually appealing and immersive.

Borrie's New Water Shader
This is a mod that is attempting to provide a Project Perfection promise. This mod is a new shader and texture to water to try and make it feel more visually attractive and better fit into the world around it. Originally in SWG, the water does not inherit the light of the world around it, making it the same color and light no matter what time of day it is, or what the weather is. This, paired with some new normal maps to make it feel as though it is flowing and producing waves helps make the water feel more natural, and connected with the scene.

Borrie's Better Fire
This is a mod that takes advantage of the particle system in SWG to create more visually stunning and lively fire, using assets only found within SWG itself to assure that it adheres to the game's visual style. By using the particle system better, we can rely more on particles moving and changing than a simple animation playing for fire. With more effects, such as embers flying out of a campfire, we can make the fire feel more visually stunning without making it feel out of place. One big goal with this mod is to make the fire more eye-popping, as a lot of lights in this game can feel murky or faded due to the alpha mixing.


Borrie's HQ Planet Shaders
This mod enhances the look of waypoint and travel terminal planet icons, using a combination of what textures were available from the skyboxes in JTL Space (which were higher resolution and detail) as well as outside sources.

Asset Replacement Mods

Borrie's Better Lightsabers (ft. Revan Dark)
One of my first mods, which aimed to improve the visual quality of Lightsabers, using a mixture of my own models and models provided by Jedi Academy's Revan Dark. This mod replaces each model to give them more weight and detail. It also changes the way lightsaber blades are rendered, making them thinner and higher resolution, as well as mildly animated.

WeaponsHD Pack by Rooxon for SWG
Graciously provided by the talented modeler Rooxon from Jedi Academy are a variety of models for weapons like the E-11 and Scout Blaster, among others. This pack was chosen to be added to SWG by myself because of its style. Jedi Academy's style and Star Wars Galaxies' style are not very similar, but when the two are enhanced they tend to become the same style overall. This was a natural choice to pick for the enhancements provided, as they fit within the style of the game nicely.

Simpler Mods

Illuminated Protocol Droid Eyes
This mod simply adds an emissive light to the eyes of Protocol Droids. You'll find more mods concerning droids from me in the future. This is a simple mod that fixes something that should've been originally in the base game's visuals.

Seeker Droid Texture Fix
Another extremely simple mod that swaps the texture on the Seeker Droid mesh with one that is accurate to itself, albeit lower quality. This is actually a bug fix of a sorts, as the wrong texture was being applied to the seeker droid this entire time.
 
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Borrie BoBaka

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"Project Borfection" Mod Spotlights and Re-releases

SWGEmu Species Revamp & HD Eyes
By Kayliaah and Rinzler

While this mod is mostly just bringing NGE visual enhancements to character models of the humanoid phenotype, it is the very definition of enhancement by SOE itself. These new textures and shaders are the epitome of enhancing the visuals of SWG without changing the style. Rinzler's HD Eye mod covers every species with human-like eyes, and brings an extraordinary amount of life to each species that has them with such a simple little change.
 

Borrie BoBaka

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Project Borfection Wish-List

Disclaimer: This list is not a roadmap, or a list of things coming soon. Some of the things on this list might not even be possible. However, it is a guide to show what would be great to have in the pursuit of perfecting SWG.
  • Utinni Graphics Plugin
    • Post Processing Effects
      • Depth of Field
      • SSAO
      • Fake HDR
      • Color Grading
      • Gamma/Contrast Settings in Windowed Mode
    • High Definition Water Effects
    • Weather-sensitive Tree Sway
    • More Point Light Support
    • Real Shadows
  • Per-Pixel Lighting Shaders
  • Blurred Env-Map Reflections
  • More Realistic Sky Rendering
  • Better Rain Particle Effect
  • Better Species Shaders
    • Trandoshans
    • Bothans
    • Sullustans
    • Ithorians
    • Rodians
    • Etc
  • Better Ambient Birds
  • Near/Far Clip Bug Fix
  • Better Static Windows
  • Better Fountains and Waterfalls
  • Better Distant Trees
  • Better Blaster/Combat Effects
  • Eye Darting
 
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Borrie BoBaka

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Exploring how to create visually enhancing mods

This section left as a place for notes as I continuously think on ways to enhance the game's visuals.

Shaders
By far one of the biggest ways of enhancing this game is through making new and more complex shaders. Through shaders, we can take advantage of the fact that some of the lowest level GPUs of 2022 outpace some of the highest GPUs in 2003. We can push SWG up to Pixel Shader 3, up from the game's original max of 2, however while doing so greatly increases our capabilities, due to bad support on AMD's part, it makes any shaders compiled with PS3 to not function on Radeon Graphics Cards. While I will strive to be as inclusive with mods as possible, for some more advanced work, AMD support won't be possible.

All SWG Shaders use HLSL (High-Level Shader Language) to render shaders. If you can understand HLSL, you can begin to understand SWG's shaders. Shaders can also be written in Assembly, if you feel bold enough.

AI Upscaling

While AI Upscaling textures can be very enticing, it offers more problems than its worth. More often than not, the change is too minimal to notice at a glance, the result looks too out of place, or the resolution is so high that it looks speckled. As a result, I avoid AI Upscaling as much as possible. Cleaning up textures is a valuable effort, but should be done carefully, considerately, and only in certain places.
 
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ronin2k78

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Is it possible that a mod is coming that finally makes it possible to enjoy SWG in 4K, currently it is so unplayable, despite various icons larger and font zooming, I am interested in the complete GUI.
 

Borrie BoBaka

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Is it possible that a mod is coming that finally makes it possible to enjoy SWG in 4K, currently it is so unplayable, despite various icons larger and font zooming, I am interested in the complete GUI.
I am not immediately aware of any UI mods that do take into account 4K resolutions. The ShadowFox CleanUI from EQ Sanctum may have 4K options, but I do not personally know to confirm. This may be the best option if it does support this.

Personally I am not too knowledgeable in SWG's User Interface, so I am not able to provide solutions for this at this time.
 
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