All I can think of when looking at this guy is wrestler-turned-’actor’ Tor Johnson in Ed Wood’s Night Of The Ghouls. Amid all the furore over the dev build of Dead Island going out as retail – one moment while I chuckle to myself – plenty of videos turned up on YouTube ripping into the game’s ‘abandoned thirdperson mode’. These people clearly have no idea what a world model is. What they will have an idea of, though, is how blasted hard it is to get any kind of thirdperson shot from the game that doesn’t resemble the ring entrance of Luke and Butch, The Bushwhackers. (Note the callback to the opening wrestling reference there. No half measures on this site, thanks.) Tools and tricks: free-camera; modified bloom, saturation, fog; 2160p rendering; custom FOV; antialiasing (2xMSAA + injected FXAA w/ texture pre-sharpening); timestop.

Tools and tricks: free-camera; modified bloom, saturation, fog; 2160p rendering; custom FOV; antialiasing (2xMSAA + injected FXAA w/ texture pre-sharpening); timestop.

Tools and tricks: free-camera; modified bloom, saturation, fog; 2160p rendering; custom FOV; antialiasing (2xMSAA + injected FXAA w/ texture pre-sharpening); timestop.

A great man reminded me the other day that a bad workman blames his tools. Is Techland’s Chrome Engine bad? ‘Picture says no. Is Dead Island really oddly configured? Four hours of tweaking says I’m just about ready for bed, where I will dream about killer bikini zombies and Notepad. Luckily, just about all the obvious features of Chrome’s renderer are exposed through various scripts. So, I’ve had to tweak bloom, (de)saturation, specular, fogging and a few other things I’ve forgotten already. Then, in a fit of frustration over the game’s draw distance and LODs, I ran my finger along the F-keys and discovered that F8 (in the original dev build, at least) uncaps the former and sets the latter to maximum for the entire scene. That leaves a combination of driver level multisampling, aggressive FXAA, texture pre-sharpening and sharp Lanczos downsampling to fix the game’s grungy image quality. I like it when they play hard to get.