Gloomy effect from "Silent Hill: Home Coming"

[alapshin]

I was playing "Silent Hill: Home Coming" for a couple of days and was interested in effect (filter) that is applied to final image to make it dark and noisy. I have done a surgical operation for the game to understand how the effect works and finally got it and implemented a sample program using OpenGL that demonstrates it.

The sample program as well as shaders code is under GPL, so they can be freely used in games/engines or wherever you want.

Before the effect:


After the effect:


To be honest, static images above cannot show this pretty random, noisy effect in a good way, so if you want to look at it better you can check binaries below.

Links
Investigation & Explanation
Linux binaries
Windows binaries
Sources

[TheAncientGoat]

If it doesn't come across well in images, why not upload a video Or, heavens forbid, an animated GIF

[alapshin]

Sorry, I forgot that current technologies are far beyond static images Though I think that any video codec will produce much more noise than effect itself I will try to prepare more useful preview..

[qubodup]

I recorded a video from the linux binaries: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-cWVRE-yyc

[TheAncientGoat]

Oh qubodup, we don't deserve you

Looks pretty cool, although I did think the scene was 3d at first (didn't cross my mind how alapshin would get hold of Silent Hill assets though XD)

[alapshin]

TheAncientGoat, you are right that effect is applied to 2d static image and that seems to be ok since this is just a post-rendering effect that can be applied to any image. It could be nice to see this in a gloomy game as well, but I was not able to make whole game as a sample program

qubodup, thanks a lot for the video!