I vote for B) and C) !!! :yeah:

Best regards,
Magic:salute:

:up: Yes, he did a great job on that one!

Hi mate,

Yep it is because the size of the noise speckle but i can reduced this effect to a more convincing sea but it is still ten time better than stock flat ocean.

Like i say it is only some early test and i have other avenues to test further.

Best regards Hans

Hi mate,

I will have a look at Thomsen sea but tweaking this graphic is pretty hard because of the size, we need at least double the size to get decent looking reflections i just noticed that in SH4 the same graphic exist and it is double the size at 1024x512 and in SH3 it is 512x256.

Best regards Hans

Update damage model
 

Hi shipmates,

Since urfish call my attention on the water issue i lost 2 days testing some stuff but now i am back at the damage model and here what i am currently doing :

1. Made some new FX in my 3d application some for explosions and other for shell splash effects on water so now shell hitting the water will look just as the real thing with correct water fallout and speed same go for explosions.

2.Made a new particle fx that spawn a team of sailors(2) that are sent to extinguish the fire on ship with water spraying in the fire area. This event will be trigger randomly from fire after explosions on ship and they will vanish after a certain period. A sailor on fire jumping overboard is also trigger randomly on explosion on deck.

3. I made some new children particle fx that eject very small debris on AP shell impact and bigger one on HE shell.

4. Testing some ways to trigger sound fx on deck when ship under damage so i can add a mix i made of sailors shouting in emergency situation.

5. Not related to damage model but i animated various sailors doing thing they used to do in real life aboard a ship as ex; On all ships you will now be able to see the skipper opening a door and climbing some steps to get to upper deck then using his binoculars to look at the horizon, sailors opening door getting on handrail to smoke a cigarette, sailors chatting on deck.
The only problem i have so far is the walking sailor i made to walk across the whole deck, since we are only exporting obj animation per frame walking across the whole deck totally kill the fps and it is normal considering the walk sequence for the whole deck is 3000 frame of animation. The way we normally do that in a game engine is by looping very few keyframe to get a walk loop that look decent and then the root node of the character is then linked to a dummy bounding box that animated along a path but since we don't have sdk this is not possible. The other way around it is to have short walk cycle at different part of the deck and make the sailor stop and resumed. Will try to find other solutions for this.

The small animated sailors loop give great life on ship now and each one have uniform according to their nationality. So far i noticed no big fps drop when encountering single ship but i will make testing with 5 or 6 ships simultaneously on screen.

Take note that all those new characters are model ,rig,animated from scratch by me so now you have an idea why and where i spent my time.

I know it is only in text form but the minute everything is working without any glitch you will have a couple of new movies to look at all the new feature and they are much more then what i just mention here.

Best regards Hans

Wow Hans....again:DWe need crewmen on the decks of the ships we sink to give life to them.Also,I notice you mention testing a way to trigger a sound file to play when your under attack on deck.This is very good to hear and opens up alot for immersion of interior.I am thinking a trigger that allows a different interior-ambiance file to play when your crew is trying to stop flooding,one for normal operations and one for silent running.

Also Hans,about your work to add reflections to the water.I worry that you guys will take the reflections too far since the reflections are what ruin the shadows on the water.The shadows from boats and land glitter like crazy and is due to the ripples added to water surface.Is there anyway to improve the shadows???

@Hans and Urfisch ,

the editing of reflection maps in skycolor.dat is an old story ,it is not a new 'discovery' ! almost all env mods have made some (or many) edits on the reflection maps .

the main (and most serious) problem of sh3's env is the 'polygon effect' (the sh3's engine ,for some reason, is screwing up the 'look' of reflections maps on water and make them appearing like little squares of lights).
why this is the most serious problem ? becuase this prevents the modders (i believe that OLC -the 'teacher' on env mods- faced the same problem) for using high contrast colors between light reflections colors and water colors.it is very easy(can be done in an afternoon) to create fantastic colors for environment but when the 'polygon effect' appears ....the env is becoming absolutely discusting ! so...the compromise is to use low,as possible, difference between reflection's colors and water's color and this is just reducing the quality of final environment's look.
given the limitations of sh3's engine (the lack of sh4's or sh5's shaders in code) i can garantee that the solving of 'polygon effect' is the best that can be done for sh3's water. if 'polygon effect' is solved then we could use high contrast colors on water-reflections and we will be able to create a 'convincing' sea ...not as good as sh4 or sh5 but very very nice seas with very beutyfull and full colors .

the 'polygon effect's solution is 'hiding' somewhere in executables (myguess). there is an error (my guess) at the algorithm that is rendering the light's reflection on sea's surface . (the strange thing is that the 'polygon effect' is not happening all the time but it shows up ...probably when the weather changes.if weather is constant ...'polygon effect' will not appear).

look at these pics ,are totaly unedited with some quick high contrast colors and some quick edits on reflection maps but have in mind this: as beutyfull these screens may look to you ....when 'polygon effect' appears ...you can't even look at them . here :

http://img221.imageshack.us/img221/3892/35114478.png

http://img803.imageshack.us/img803/5342/28709660.png

http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/7137/20385448.png

I feel that removal of the shadows from the land masses would benefit this game alot.Keeping the shadows for ships and subs and even docks/sub pens is excellent and they do not ruin the look at all but enhance.That said removing the land shadows would stop the ugly glitter and warping from afar on horizon.The shadows first off are not realistically modeled at all since the shadows are not dynamic.Does anyone know if removal of just shadows that land puts on water is possible?

Hi mate,

I know it is not new i just mention it in a new thread but the approach is different many 2d techniques can achieve stunning result when mastered and for the polygon effect this is related with the scaling at certain scale they start to appear but just push the scale a bit and it fix it.

By scaling the water you also scale the the reflex_atlantic.tga but this screwed up the all thing.

Some mods have put higher value in patch and this should be left at 15 stock value because putting them just a bit higher is a huge FPS killer .

I already mention that i was interested in porting our mod to SH4 in past thread but no one show up to explain correctly what was the biggest problem regarding implementing a full Atlantic campaign and all ships and sub and this sound to me as it might be too much work with severe limitation.

Best regards Hans

Hi mate,

Are you talking about SH5 here or am i confused because i never saw shadows in SH3 except for the one i have baked in!

Best regards Hans

I mean the shadows laid down on water from land,piers,subs etc.Thats what Makman was talking about in his post also.To me its what ruins the look of SH3.Here are some pics but it looks worse when in motion since any move and the shadows sparkle like glitter.

http://img231.imageshack.us/img231/4...2820262863.jpg

http://img195.imageshack.us/img195/9...2820270602.jpg

See here: http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/show...7&postcount=98

They can be done dynamically but there are some side effects.

Hi mate,

These are reflections not shadows now i see!

Best regards Hans

Hi mate,

Yep i already saw that thread last year and in fact if they didn't keep it they probably have very good reasons from it.

Faking the shadows by baking is less realistic but not too bad either but one thing that strike me the most the first time i try SH5 was the unrealistic shadows of ships on the ocean this is what i call an immersion killer.

If you can do it you should try to fix them if possible, the shadows need to be less opaque more transparency and they should be color slightly because of light bounced from ocean.

Best regards Hans

:haha:
Useing the base dynamics shadows stuff started with me Hans.
Others tried and failed at things they did not understand.
(Nor do to this day!)
They don't 'work' with SH3 or SH4 any longer as per thier posts.
Listen to them at your peril.