Transparent Surface possible?

[VipertheSniper]

Ok I think the thread title might be somewhat misleading, so let me clue you up.

Just take a look at the following situation:

You've got a pool with muddy water in it, the surface of the water is brown, you can't see all the way to the bottom, yet when you hold your leg in the water until your knee, you can still see your toes...

So is there any way we could have something similar in SH3? Where the water color decides the color of the otherwise transparent surface? I'd really like to see the silhoutte of the U-boat being at persicope depth.

Anyone here thought of that? Working on it? I've already browsed through the texture files but I couldn't find the right ones, I mean adding an alpha channel to the surface texture (if it is a TGA that is) shouldn't be that hard right? If only I could find the corresponding files.

[Kpt. Lehmann]

Marhkimov and I put a great deal of effort into it last year... and we came close. (or so it seemed)

The price to pay in FPS loss was too great.

Unfortunately, we abandoned the project long enough ago that I've forgotten almost all of what we did.

I DO remember that our very limited success had to do with one of the Fresnel coefficiencies in the Scene.dat file.

In SH3 now... looking up from UNDER the water near the surface you can see much of your sub...

In that respect the possibility of the idea is certainly viable.

[VipertheSniper]

Originally Posted by Kpt. Lehmann

Marhkimov and I put a great deal of effort into it last year... and we came close. (or so it seemed)

The price to pay in FPS loss was too great.

Unfortunately, we abandoned the project long enough ago that I've forgotten almost all of what we did.

I DO remember that our very limited success had to do with one of the Fresnel coefficiencies in the Scene.dat file.

In SH3 now... looking up from UNDER the water near the surface you can see much of your sub...

In that respect the possibility of the idea is certainly viable.

Hmm when you say FPS loss, I guess it's more of a coding issue and thus we can't do anything about it. I mean LOD'ing and such. I don't thing modded underwater visibility (as in LESS) won't change the behaviour of the code that is linked to LOD, meaning that the stock visibility is taken into account, but nothing less, so it renders things all the time, things that you might not see with modded visibilty.

I'd like to experiment myself a bit, could you give me any pointers apart from Scene.dat (how to open that? Pack 3D?)

EDIT: Just did some experimenting with first looking at it in Pack3D to see the values (sadly no way to edit them there, atleast in my version) and then fired up a hex editor to change water opacity and reflection intensity in the EnvData Section, with actually no results. Changing the value for the Fresnel Coeff did result in everything out of a certain range turning pitch black...

I've noticed that the values are all nine strings long, but how do they work? I mean the value displayed for the Fresnel Coeff in Pack3D is 10.0 but in the hex editor it's like 42 00 00 20 00 00 00 00 00 or something which is clearly more than 10 in decimal. Also the opacity value displayed in Pack3D is 3.something E-43 which is incredibly low, and wouldn't that mean that the water's surface should already be see through?

Another thing which annoyed me to no end was, that I couldn't look at the scene.dat in Pack3D after editing the file, which would help greatly.

[Kpt. Lehmann]

Use TimeTraveller's minitweaker program found here:

http://www.delraydepot.com/tt/sh3.htm#crushdepth

Apart from that, as I mentioned... its just been too long ago to help you effectively and my focus is on a much larger project. Sorry mate. Best of luck to you.

[Anvart]

Originally Posted by Kpt. Lehmann

Marhkimov and I put a great deal of effort into it last year... and we came close. (or so it seemed)

The price to pay in FPS loss was too great.

Unfortunately, we abandoned the project long enough ago that I've forgotten almost all of what we did.

I DO remember that our very limited success had to do with one of the Fresnel coefficiencies in the Scene.dat file.

In SH3 now... looking up from UNDER the water near the surface you can see much of your sub...

In that respect the possibility of the idea is certainly viable.

FresnelCoef does not influence on a water transparency from a surface to under water.
SH3 engine is unable to set up a transparency of water from a surface to under water.

:hmm: