For what it's worth - there may be another way to get this working (and I agree, it would be awesome if we could).
I'd posted much of this over on SimHQ:
...there are OpenGL->DirectX wrappers out there. Awesome, right? So you'd set the game to render in OpenGL, which gets you the 'perfect' landscape and pixel-shader-based water...but this would be 'wrapped' to a DirectX call, that could then have the HDR/bloom post-processing applied.
Win-Win!
And the thing is...it WORKS! Almost. Problem is that there are two OpenGL wrappers out there, and neither seems to do exactly what is needed:
- TitaniumGL. This one at least seems to render the shaders, but...for some reason, all 3d objects are gone. It also has a rather weird FSAA mode 'forced' on it, that kinda makes the game look...weird.
- GLDirect. This one renders the game just fine, everything is there, but...it doesn't seem to support pixel shaders. So the whole reason for using it (to keep the nice, detailed, shiny water) is moot - the water shaders don't run.
In any case, the enbseries DirectX wrapper does seem to work fine with both of the above. It's just a question of what gets left on the table. Ah, well. I think both wrapper projects are still in development. So, maybe some future release of these will fix the IL-2 issues with them.
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So...maybe that's another path. The HDR/Bloom .DLL using OpenGL would obviously be one avenue. But wrapping IL-2's OpenGL calls to DirectX would allow us to use this .DLL as it is...which would also work.