Visual Effects & Overlays

TazUO includes a visual effects composition system that can draw dynamic full-screen effects (fog, poison tint, blood streaks, tunnel vision, and more) and drive screen shake, all driven by triggers and rules.

Find it under Options > Video > Visual Effects.

:warning: Photosensitive epilepsy warning — these effects may contain flashing lights or rapid color changes. If you have an epileptic condition or have had seizures of any kind, consult your physician before enabling this feature.

The system is fully opt-in — nothing is drawn and nothing shakes until you enable it. The shipped rules and profiles all default to off, so a fresh install never starts distorting your screen on its own.

General tab

The General tab has the system-wide switches and master volume knobs:

Enable screen decorations — the master switch. When off, neither overlays nor shake run.
Enable screen overlays — gates the full-screen shader effects below it.
Master overlay intensity — scales every effect on top of what its profile says, like a master volume. 1.00 draws each look exactly as authored; lower can only weaken it.
Maximum concurrent overlays — how many effects may be drawn together before the least-important one is dropped. Raising this costs a draw call per layer per frame.
Enable screen shake — gates the screen-shake system below it.
Master shake intensity — scales every shake on top of what its profile says.

Rules tab

The Rules tab is the rulebase: it decides which trigger raises which look. Rows are edited through a configurator (name, trigger, effect), and each rule has a single Enabled switch.

Rules are evaluated top to bottom — first match claims the effect. A rule below one that already claimed the same profile is skipped; two rules raising different looks both draw (that is what composition is for).

The client ships these rules (built-in, switchable off, reorderable, but not editable or deletable — copy one to customize it):

Rule	Trigger	Effect	Default
Player poisoned	Player attribute: poisoned	Poison	Off
Player dead	Player attribute: dead	Death	Off
Earthquake	Sound played: index 755	Earthquake rumble	Off

Triggers

When building or editing a rule you pick a trigger from the catalog. The shipped trigger types are:

Sound played — fires when a chosen sound is played (pick it by name or type its index; press Play to hear it). Supports min/max distance filters and distance-based fade (curve).
Chat message — fires when a journal/chat line matches a pattern (plain text, contains, starts-with, ends-with, or regex), optionally from the player only and/or case-sensitive. A Duration (s) field decides how long the effect runs.
Item properties — fires based on an object’s properties.
Player attribute — fires based on a condition over any player attribute (HP, mana, weight, resistances, stat locks, death-screen timer, and many more), built with a condition editor (field, operator, value).

Each trigger is either a Poll (sampled a few times a second) or an Event (costs nothing until it fires).

Profiles tab

The Profiles tab is the library of looks (profiles). A profile is a list of layers drawn back-to-front, each layer an effect technique (tint, blur, radial blur, or chromatic aberration) with its own blend mode. Profiles also carry their own fade in/out timing and an optional shake envelope (trauma, duration, ramp up/down, gradient, curve, frequency).

A profile is a shared pool item — editing one changes every rule that points at it. Copying a built-in profile produces an ordinary user profile you can edit freely.

The client ships these built-in profiles:

Poison — green poison tint
Bleed — red blood streaks
Fog — drifting fog
Drunk — wobbling/blurred drunk vision
Concussion — struck-head blur with a shake
Tunnel vision — vignette narrowing
Death — death-screen effect
Earthquake rumble — pure screen shake with no drawn layer

How effects are scoped

Viewport-scoped effects draw under gumps (over the world), while full-screen effects draw over everything including the UI. A profile’s FullScreen setting governs both its draw scope and whether its shake displaces the window or just the viewport.

See also Post Processing for the other, always-on post-processing pipeline.