Restore per-object motion blur graphical effect to PC

[nikkmann]

For some reason, the pc ports of the storm games have never had proper per-object motion blur like the console versions did. You can watch game play of Revolution on consoles vs pc and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Unfortunately, it looks like storm 4 on both pc and console removed proper motion blur in favor of a weird distortion effect that follows the characters movement. But all the prior games (on the ps3, not the ps4 ports because they updated all those to use the same weird distortion) still have them. Since they all use basically the same engine, I am 100% confident that if we can port the motion blur from Revolution on ps3 to PC (since it was the last game before storm 4), we can port it over from that version to storm 4.

I think that, on the ps3 game, the effect is stored in either eboot.bin or nuccPostEffect_ps3.nsh in the system folder, and for pc it is either stored in the .exe file or nuccPostEffect_win32.nsh (could be wrong though). I want to lean more towards saying they're in the exe for pc and eboot for ps3 (.eboot.bin is basically the ps3/ps4's version of an .exe) cause I put them in a hex editor and found the lines motion_blur several times, just not sure what to do from there, don't know much about coding, but motion blur itself is a post process effect, so those postprocess files I mentioned are suspect. Storm 4 has both nuccPostEffect_win32.nsh and nuccPostEffect_dx11.nsh files, and looks like it uses nuccPostEffect_dx11.nsh, since the game is built in dx11, and when I deleted the win32 version the game still ran fine. Revolution only has win32, and thats what it uses

Also, the type of motion blur most people hate is camera motion blur, where the whole screen is blurred anytime the camera moves. Per-object motion blur, like it sounds, only blurs objects based on their velocity, so it is a very accurate type of motion blur. It would also look ALOT better on PC than on console, since PC runs at 60 and consoles runs at 30. More fps = more data = smoother motion blur that really enhances the movement of the characters without removing detail from the scene.

[nikkmann]

Update on this. The effects are definitely housed in the .exe on pc and the eboot.bin on ps3. Figured this out because the updated HD remasters of storm 2 and 3 on pc use a slightly different (still not good) type of motion blur than storm 4. Tried moving their respective nuccPostEffect_win32.nsh and nuccPostEffect_dx11.nsh files over to Storm 4. Got some slight graphical glitches like shading on the characters and bloom being slightly off, but motion blur did not change at all. This would also mean, for the ps3 version, that the effect would not be in those postprocess files either since the game uses the same file structure on consoles and pc.

[nikkmann]

UPDATE 7/23/2020: I have learned that the ONLY difference between PC and console's motion blur for Storm 3 HD is that, on PC, the effect is limited to camera movement and not per-object like console. I tested this by comparing how the the motion blur looks on storm 3 HD on pc vs storm 3 on rpcs3 (ps3 emulator) when using cheat engine and setting each games speed down to 10%. They are EXACTLY the same in terms of how the effect looks, both in battle and in menus, its just PC isn't applying the effect per-object like console. So maybe there is a way to simply re-enable it to apply per-object on pc?