Difference between revisions of "Lesson 1 - using HelixMod"

Revision as of 01:29, 15 August 2014

Summary

This lesson demonstrates how to use the HelixMod debugger to find shaders, and how to save shader ASM code.

Level of difficulty: Easy
Time required: 15 minutes

Objective

We'll run the HelixMod debugger and learn the commands to hunt shaders.
We'll create and learn about the dx9settings.ini file with good default settings.
We'll find a shader and save and look at the ASM file.

Quiz

Save and share an ASM shader file from the game.

Now that we have HelixMod installed with the red text, we are clearly running the debugger version. Let's see how to navigate the HelixMod UI.

• Shader hunting keys

We can see that hunting specific shaders can be fairly tedious, especially if there are a lot of them. Let's see how to create a dx9settings.ini file, to add some better defaults to HelixMod.

• Editing dx9settings.ini
  1. UseRenderedShaders

Now that we have set up to use UseRenderedShaders=true, let's see how that improves our shader hunting, to only cycle shaders in the current frame.

• Improved shader hunting

Let's choose any shader that you find interesting, and have HelixMod save the ASM text.

• Shader saving

If you sucessfully saved the ASM text file, then congratulations! You now know how to use the HelixMod debugger to hunt shaders.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please use the Discussion tab, and start a new topic.