Nice pics here : http://www.skreo-dz.com/article-le-r...-87814106.html

I agree!

We can model the rocks between the Pointe du Raz and La Vielle in game... as 3D models this time :03:
Lighthouses are there for signaling dangers and showing the safest ways. There is no point in having them in place, if there is no danger to be avoided :D

Changing of topic: while I wait for your answers to my other remarks, here is an update relative to the light effect problem I described before:

Unfortunately, after some tests, I must say that I was wrong: the problem is caused by the missing RaYTracedHalo controller.
I am sure I have seen other lighthouse flare effects in SH5m SHIV and SHIII, which don't use that controller. Could we modify those particle effects for use with our lighthouse? Can you please look into the issue while I give the last touch ups to our model? The light reflections on water are too a cool feature for simply give it up and you are the king of SHIII special effects, I know you will invent something :D

What do you think about that ?

http://i.imgur.com/wsMNHf5.png

http://i.imgur.com/uDPPiFk.png

Yes, I think there is a way to avoid this problem. In S3D, you can see that the halo tga has a black background which is read into transparency (I don't know how). What if we change this black background with tranparent background ?

http://i.imgur.com/3qmlEBE.png

:sign_yeah:

Very nice!

I will look into that :up:

The halo during the night :

http://i.imgur.com/yaAjnE4.png

http://i.imgur.com/XkgKUkW.png

By the way, I don't have the problem you mentioned, although I deleted the RaYTracedHalo controller. What are the weather conditions under which you see a semi-transparent square ?

So nice! :yeah:

Ypu must move the camera a few hundred meters away from the effect for the light flare to become a luminous square.
I use the test mission you sent me. I have edited many parameters of it, but date, hour of the day and cloud cover are unchanged.
I suspect my gfx card being part of the problem: NVidia cards and SH lights even never got along nicely, The weird thing is that the glitch is only apparent when I delete that controller :hmmm:

Good news, our specular mask finally works :up:

Excellent news ! How did you manage to solve this issue ? :hmm2: And is this modifying the aspect in game ?

BTW, here is the new halo effect, so you can try it directly in your game !

D/L link :

I have modified it a bit compared to the last picture :

Gap, could you send me the grey scale used by Terrain Editor ? I intend to convert the maps I've found into maps with SH3 bathymetric colors. :D

Not sure what was the problem.

I replaced the materials previously used, with other materials copied from units which had the specular mask enabled and working. Even in their new location, those new materials worked as supposed. I then edited their properties, names, flags, texture linking etc, one by one, for making them to resemble the buggy materials. By doing so, I hoped that at some point I would have discovered the 'bad' setting which caused the corruption but, at the end of the story, I found myself with materials apparently identical to the old ones, except for the fact that they still worked and the originals didn't :doh::haha:

I suspect that the materials initially used were corrupted in a way that s3d couldn't detect (I am not sure, but I might have copied them from a file which had been "manually" tweaked with an hex editor), or perhaps those materials had nothing wrong, but there is some 'hidden' material flag which is a 0 by default and must be set to 1 for the material to accept specular reflections. The old materials might have had this flag disabled, and the new ones enabled. The good thing about S3ditor is that it is able to create exact copies of chunks/addresses even when it doesn't fully understands/handles them :up:

Sure it does!

I wish I could take some screenies: I am currently tweaking/balancing material attributes; for making things more obvious, I have replaced diffuse texture's RGB channel with solid medium grey, and I can clearly see how the underlying specular mask affects the texture depending on luminosity level and sun angle. :up:

:up:

I would gladly test it, and incorporate it in the upcoming new version of the mod, but can see no link :doh:

You don't need the grey scale: you have it already :D

That's exactly the chart you had posted a few days ago, but with tones of grey replacing shades of blue, and grey values used for water going from 0 to 47. From it, I get that a grey value of 46 (R=46, G=46, B=46) is equal to -17 m, a value of 45 is equal to -18 m, and so on. :yep:

The 'shallowest' grey tone is 47, but its corresponding depth is not provided in your chart. I have included that value in my Ile de Sein terrain modification (for waters surrounding the island to the South IIRC), but I couldn't notice the side effect you told me. Did you? Maybe I should add a bigger spot of grey-47 on SHIII's elevation map for you to measure what is its corresponding depth in game, as -17 is a bit too deep for simulating the very shallow waters we want to put in game :hmm2:

For two reasons :

- I decided to improve a bit the "animation" of the light
- I've had a new idea for our mod, and I immediately started to work on it. It's now working fine. More on this coming soon ... :D

Else, I've just reworked a bit the color of the halo, to have something more pink than violet.

NEW IDEA
 

So, why not to add a "searchlight effect" to the main lighthouses ?

With a turning light beam (i've added a rotation controller for that) ?

http://i.imgur.com/hT4aVXZ.png

You can even change the color :

http://i.imgur.com/0JklQ3c.png

Maybe, we can use this feature to add different colors for the light, depending on the angle ? :D However, more tests are needed to see if that's possible.

The side effect is that the beam on the sea surface can only appear if the lighthouse has detected an ennemy unit ...

Okay but be careful with those particles: remember that they are FPS killers.
On a side note: have you had a look into the FastParticleGenerators? It has more or less the same parameters as the more common ParticleGenerator (i.e. porting an effect from a generator to the other should be quite easy) but I think it is lesser GPU-intensive and more optimized for quickly evolving particles :hmm2:

Eagerly looking forward to your idea!

:Kaleun_Salivating:

Pink is not exactly my favorite color, but let's see it and keep a copy of the violet version, just in case :up:

On a partly unrelated note: as I already told you, I would really like our rocks/shoals/islets to have foam around them from the waves crashing on them. Have you started digging into this topic? Do you think there is a way to link a particle effect to the water surface? :D

Brilliant! Maybe this effect is not very useful for the lighthouse we are currently working on, but it definitely could be a valid approach for lighthouses with directional and multicolored lights, as La Vielle :up:

I hope we can find a workaround to this :hmmm:

Don't worry, parameters are still as simple as possible, and I don't think that a fastparticlegenerator is needed (and even possible ?).

Already posted just above ! :03: I'm currently making more tests about that idea.

It's not really "pink". I let you test the new effect (color and animation) :

http://www.mediafire.com/file/g2i2f3...hthouse_FX.dat

Yes, that would be so cool. I have to see what can be done here. :hmmm: