Can any/all HDRenderPipelineAsset values be changed at runtime?

I'd just test this out, but I'm having trouble figuring out how to go about accessing some of the sections of the HDRenderPipelineAsset. I'm curious whether these settings are designed to be changed at runtime, such as via options exposed to the player? For example, is it reasonable to allow the player to choose how much Shadow resolution they want, via a dropdown, letting them adjust the settings to their computer's capabilities?

If so, does anyone have an example of the proper way to access and change these values? I'm also not sure whether changes to these files at runtime would persist the next time the player starts up the game.

Thanks.

 

I dug a bit more into this, and it seems straightforward (HDRP 4.10 as I write this). In the simplest case, you could create a public property of type 'HDRenderPipelineAsset' on some script, assign your pipeline settings asset it, and then modify the values of the HDRenderPipelineAsset at runtime. That will immediately trigger the graphics changes, just like it does in the editor.

The downside is that the asset is a scriptable object, so runtime changes "stick" (at least in the Editor) when exiting play mode, which you might not want. So, one approach would be to copy the asset first. For example, the following code makes a copy of the existing settings, modifies a value, and reassigns the settings:

Code (CSharp):

1. var pipelineAsset = Instantiate(GraphicsSettings.renderPipelineAsset) as HDRenderPipelineAsset;
2. pipelineAsset.renderPipelineSettings.hdShadowInitParams.maxShadowRequests = pipelineAsset.renderPipelineSettings.hdShadowInitParams.maxShadowRequests == 128 ? 1 : 128;
3. GraphicsSettings.renderPipelineAsset = pipelineAsset;

This will cause the shadow count to change at runtime, but the change will be transient; it won't be reflected in your original HD Render Pipeline asset.

Anyone please correct me if this isn't a good approach to changing graphics settings at runtime.

 

Ah, interesting. So far I've wired up a handful of HDRP settings to my graphics options, which I'm setting at runtime, and it's seemed to work so far. But I'll hopefully have some idea of what's going on if this all breaks at some point.

 

Bumping this. It's something I feel is quite important to us too. While it's great to be able to turn features off completely, per camera, we have a varied user base on the PC who like to be able to tweak every setting they can. At a minimum we'd need to provide "good, medium, low" setting groups.

 

Perfect! It's quite hard to know the current state of things. I find posts that are a couple of months old that say things are coming - I'm not sure whether they're done, whether they've been abandoned etc.

It'd be useful to have a list of things that are done, being worked on, are coming, to sync everyone on where everything is currently.

 

Besides the upcoming quality setting thing, this was merged to master at the end of April: https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/ScriptableRenderPipeline/pull/3473:

"The variant stripper was stripping shaders based only on the HDRP asset assigned in the graphic settings.
If the user had code to switch to other HDRP assets that were either references in the scenes/prefabs or loaded from Resources folders, it would ignore them, and thus, not compile needed shaders.

Now instead the stripper will search for :

• The HDRP asset assigned in the graphic settings
• Any HDRP asset detected as dependency of the scenes added and enabled in the build settings.
• Any HDRP asset in Resource folders."

So it appears that you can get away with multiple HDRP assets on the recent or at least upcoming versions now.

And as for the quality settings, this is the PR for it (just got merged to master): https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/ScriptableRenderPipeline/pull/3841

 

@fredericv Has there been any progress on allowing runtime changes to quality settings? A great example is UniversalRenderPipelineAsset.renderScale. That option does not make much sense as a hardcoded value per quality level. We would like to expose it to our players as a slider in game settings.

How can we do that?

 

I'm also interested

 

Bump

 

This is the top google hit for this subject - any movement?

 

Need something.

 

Bump.Bump.Bump Please give us runtime options.

 

You can't typically change SRP asset settings directly at runtime but you can swap between SRP assets. But the idea is that you just use SRP asset to set the features you want to be included in the build and toggle the feats off somewhere else.

With HDRP that means you toggle things on/off from either camera, volume or frame settings and can also swap the whole HDRP asset to another either by changing the main SRP asset when there's no quality level overrides for SRP assets... or by changing quality levels if SRP asset overrides have been made for Quality levels.

I also wrote a bit about some of these earlier here: https://forum.unity.com/threads/making-a-graphics-options-screen-with-hdrp.1153124/#post-7398344

 

Thanks a lot for that link. But as garry said "While it's great to be able to turn features off completely, per camera, we have a varied user base on the PC who like to be able to tweak every setting they can"
Its great we can at-least swap out the asset for different assets settings now, however fine-tuning the options would be best. I'm working on a racing game and having as many graphics options on runtime as possible would, probably, be the best way to go.

 

Like already mentioned on my previous reply, you can toggle most effects already at runtime, just not from HDRP asset (it's not designed for this purpose).

Also please do check the link I put there, there are literally examples there how to do this.

 

Wow. Still nothing. I think it's so cool that we need to feel pain making quality settings menu for PC players.

 

Refer to rz_0lento's posts they are helpful

 

I sure would like to know how you got your graphics settings in rust to work... At this point I'd pay you, seeing as how unity won't help us lol.

 

Finally some sweet sweet prog.
So it took me forever to figure this out, because there's no f-----ing documentation explaining this stuff.
But if you want something like custom LOD biases you need to also change the LOD bias mode to overwrite
It may sound straight forward, but with no one explaining this it was confusing as heck.
So for example if we want the LOD bias to = 2.2f

It will look something like the attached file:

 

I have found a way to adjust the private field m_renderPipelineSettings from the Unity API. The only setting that I cannot change at runtime is raytracing, so in order to do so, I have two hdrp assets that copy each others fields at runtime, except the only difference is one asset has raytracing enabled. I have two scripts to manage this. Here is my code to accomplish all of this.

 

heres a tutorial at the request of someone who asked, covers more settings that unity has refused to document like shadow quality and camera render distance

 

Still nothing? It will be really useful guys.

 

Bumping this too, any news on that?

 

watch my tutorial, im talking to unity right now. Very frustrated. They consider my code standards to not be up to snuff while they can't even document their own product.

 

Unity seems to think the best solution is to ignore game developers and hope that targeting Hollywood directors will somehow give them less problems. (Ironic because I come from the film industry and its only 100x more dramatic)
I would give up the ghost on hoping that Unity will EVER document this and just watch my tutorials, they simply don't care about developers using HDRP. Its for Hollywood, not us.
The fact a extremely successful developer was complaining about this 4 years ago and they still have done NOTHING can give one the assumption that they wont any time soon.
Here was part 1 btw:

 

I switched to unreal engine, i suggest all of you do the same.
This company is looney toons stupid.

 

I see why gary switched already LOL

 

also when you, inevitably, switch to unreal engine.... Just buy a main menu asset, yah you heard me, main menu asset, now your graphics settings are done for every single game you make ever.
No pipe-line bs, so the asset will always work.

Unity isn't going to approve anything that is actually useful to game devs and want unreal's hollywood money more than they want to help us do literally anything.

HDRP was supposed to be the definitive solution to defeat unreal engine 4's graphics, but 5 is just insane, and now they don't stand a chance. Go look. Download it and try it yourself. Built in features like level building tools unity should have, ai tools that unity wont even approve.

They've rejected about 6 of my assets so far for no real reason, and gave me the run around when i spent time trying to "improve" them. I'm completely done with this company. If I ask what "too simple" means they tell me to just go "research" on my own. Welp, i did, the unreal market place is much better. And more accepting to ACTUAL game developers instead of just people wishing to play around with play-dough.

If my "code standards" aren't up to par with this company (even though their own standards post says they don't have any standards see here: https://blog.unity.com/engine-platform/clean-up-your-code-how-to-create-your-own-c-code-style), I hope they one day learn how to code actual graphics settings for actual game developers.

And maybe learn to give an ounce of respect before they leave for a MUCH superior engine.