Modder Durante adds game-specific plugin support to downsampling tool in major update

Before the launch of Dark Souls 2 , modder Peter "Durante" Thoman released an alpha version of GeDoSaTo, his generic downsampling tool. He'd been working on the tool for months, and wrote about the process of developing the tool (at launch, specifically aimed at Dark Souls 2) on PC Gamer. At the time, Durante made it clear that the 0.1 "Dark Souls 2 Edition" was just the beginning. He planned for GeDoSaTo to eventually support all DirectX 9 games. Today marks a major milestone for GeoDoSaTo, as the tool's first beta build—dubbed "Stranger Than Fiction"—introduces a game-specific plugin system to support games other than Dark Souls 2. It's time to start downsampling everything.

General:
Large-scale internal rewrite introducing game-specific plugin system
Moved all Dark Souls 2 specific code to a Dark Souls 2 plugin
Added generic plugin which supports AA and postprocessing in games without a game-specific plugin
Added performance monitoring system (per-frame CPU and GPU timing)
Added per-game settings support

GeDoSaTo now activates by default when it boots up. In the above screenshot of Ys Origin (running with postprocessing and SMAA ), you can see the performance monitoring system in effect in the top-left corner.

Durante also added a built-in text editor for making changes to the tool's settings, keybindings, and whitelists/blacklists that control which applications it will run for. If you're not already familiar with downsampling or messing with postprocessing via .ini files, the built-in text editor makes GeDoSaTo easier to use. It displays all "commented" (inactive) text as light green, and all active text as red. It's easy to see what effects are enabled and disabled.

The game-specific plugin system is the update's biggest addition. GeDoSaTo users have already compiled a giant (and ongoing) compatibility list of games the tool works and doesn't work with. With the adaptable plugin system, programmers aside from Durante will be able to write plugins for specific games, adding or improving support for games like Tomb Raider or Stalker or The Walking Dead.

Now that GeDoSaTo includes support for game-specific plugins, Durante is preparing to release the project's source code on Github, along with documentation to help out eager contributors. For now, you can download GeDoSaTo "Stranger Than Fiction" here , and read more about it on Durante's blog .

For more on the development of GeDoSaTo, check out Durante's articles for PC Gamer leading up to the release of Dark Souls 2 .

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).