Pacific environment 4 RELEASED

[cdrsubron7]

Really looking forward to your new version of PE, kriller. Fantastic work.

[DeepIron]

Amazing... Certainly looking forward to PE4...

My only critique is that the surface appears a little too "rippled"... like "cats paws" type of ripples. The water color looks very good...

[Probex]

Really great work, Kirller2. I can't wait for the new release.


On the topic of colour; currently in 3.3 the underwater colours have a greenish hue and that's nice, however, that same green hue becomes even more prominent on a dark night which seems quite unrealistic. I was wondering whether there is a game limitation of some sort? Ideally, I would like the green hue when there is sunlight, and gray/black when it is night-time. What do you think?


Thanks.

[kriller2]

My only critique is that the surface appears a little too "rippled"... like "cats paws" type of ripples. The water color looks very good...

Hi DeepIron,
That's because of the way the SH4-engine works, you can decide how the water should look like at f.ex. 4 different wind speed and then the engine calculates the in betweens, I have tried alot of different values and been using some of Wclears excelent scene.dat work for inspiration to come up with a formula that looks nice at 0 -4 m so we have the nice sunsets / sun rises where the sun and clouds reflects in the water, unfortunately there is a problem with the SH4 engine when the sun allmost sets and alot of wind, resulting in the kind of reflections you see on DT's screenshots.

BTW nice screenshots DT !

On the topic of colour; currently in 3.3 the underwater colours have a greenish hue and that's nice, however, that same green hue becomes even more prominent on a dark night which seems quite unrealistic. I was wondering whether there is a game limitation of some sort? Ideally, I would like the green hue when there is sunlight, and gray/black when it is night-time. What do you think?

Hi Probex, I think you do have a point so will see if there is something I can do about it.

Originally Posted by Lynx2069

Thats amazing, you really should be paid for all the work you do. All of the modders on this work do amazing things for "amateurs". I see "talented" coders by the dozen and I'd be more then willing to hire you guys (if I were boss....LMAO) then some of my idiot co-workers.

(ABSOLUTELY NO OFFENSE MEANT AS YOUR TALENT SHOWS YOU ARE CLEARLY NOT AMATEURS, THAT IS MEANT SHEERLY IN TERMS TO YOU DOING IT FOR FREE AND NOT BEING EMPLOYED BY UBI)

Edit: I can't be the only one curious enough to ask Kriller but do you have any idea when we might see a rought "beta" version. (If you do that kind of thing with your mods as I was lucky enough to find PE3 in a extremely stable state.)

Hi Lynx,
Thank you very much , I have worked on this mod from time to time, so it's not something that I have made in a week or something, been testing alot of different methods to archive the current results both for colours and reflections and the formula for rendering the waves, but I am very critical and keep on tryin untill the result is like it looks like at a picture from the pacific

Currently there is no ETA for this mod, still trying to correct a bug where the waves suddenly goes out of sync resulting in some strange liquid ocean, this is a "bug" that have been there allways, but this means that you with current the PE4-state would have to save the game when this happens and load it again to see the nice waves with good reflections again.

Maybe it's impossible to correct this and if it turns out that way, I will release the mod anyway and someone else can see if they can improve on the formula for rendering of the waves :hmm:

Allso I would like this mod to work with both TM and RSRD and OM, so still some work.

[Orion2012]

I too like Lynx (EXACTLY....) have experienced the odd camera problem, but like...I...he...said it seems to be resolved after removing both the camera.dat from the PE3 Install1 and from the TMO patch.

I believe the following glitch/problem is found in the stock game, where you can see light sources through opaque textures. I've seen it in the US campaign when it came to the sun being visible through my conning tower and now on the inside of my IX uboat in OM..here is the first screenshot..


As you can see the light in the Radio room is visible through the bulkhead in the control room.

Now after you press Shift+F2 to "walk" the problem is gone...

I myself have almost no idea where to begin looking for what the difference is between the standard camera and the "free-walk" camera. If anyone has any idea where to begin looking, I'd like to see if I can solve the issue.

Also Kriller, you said there was an issue with wave detail disappearing, any indication it could be related to time compression as I've read some post where the water goes flat after being above 2048 time compression.

[Fish40]

[Quote] by Kriller2: Allso I would like this mod to work with both TM and RSRD and OM, so still some work.



I hope you did'nt forget RFB

[Seeadler]

Originally Posted by kriller2

I have worked on this mod from time to time, so it's not something that I have made in a week or something, been testing alot of different methods to archive the current results both for colours and reflections and the formula for rendering the waves, but I am very critical and keep on tryin untill the result is like it looks like at a picture from the pacific

Be in mind that there are different water shaders for each config option (waves on/of, high texture on/off etc.). If it looks fine for one user it must not for the others with a slight different config. The problem here is you cannot change the ocean/wave calculation for all configs in the same way, for some configs it will never work. The formula for the waves is AFIK hardcoded because the result values are one of the input parameters for the vertext shader.

The vertex shader is the one which moves the vertices in XYZ direction to produce the effect of waves. After this the vertext data are transfered into the pixel shader to return a color value for each pixel of a polygon.

[kriller2]

Originally Posted by Seeadler

Be in mind that there are different water shaders for each config option (waves on/of, high texture on/off etc.). If it looks fine for one user it must not for the others with a slight different config. The problem here is you cannot change the ocean/wave calculation for all configs in the same way, for some configs it will never work. The formula for the waves is AFIK hardcoded because the result values are one of the input parameters for the vertext shader.

The vertex shader is the one which moves the vertices in XYZ direction to produce the effect of waves. After this the vertext data are transfered into the pixel shader to return a color value for each pixel of a polygon.

Hi Seeadler,
Okay I will keep it in mind :hmm: have I understood your post correctly that the modfifying of the scene.dat at different wave states, not allways looks the same at different hardware setups? or do you mean editing of the shader files?

The files I have edited is the scene.dat to modify the rendering of the waves and some shader files which controls how the colours looks like with postprocess filtering and offcause the env-files and texture files controling the colours etc.

BTW if you want to help me with getting this mod to be as good as possible, I can send you the latest files and you could take a look at it ?

[QUOTE=Fish40]

by Kriller2: Allso I would like this mod to work with both TM and RSRD and OM, so still some work.



I hope you did'nt forget RFB

I will not forget RFB Fish currently testing the latest with both TM + RSRD + OM..

[kriller2]

Originally Posted by Orion2012

I too like Lynx (EXACTLY....) have experienced the odd camera problem, but like...I...he...said it seems to be resolved after removing both the camera.dat from the PE3 Install1 and from the TMO patch.

I believe the following glitch/problem is found in the stock game, where you can see light sources through opaque textures. I've seen it in the US campaign when it came to the sun being visible through my conning tower and now on the inside of my IX uboat in OM..here is the first screenshot..


As you can see the light in the Radio room is visible through the bulkhead in the control room.

Now after you press Shift+F2 to "walk" the problem is gone...

I myself have almost no idea where to begin looking for what the difference is between the standard camera and the "free-walk" camera. If anyone has any idea where to begin looking, I'd like to see if I can solve the issue.

Also Kriller, you said there was an issue with wave detail disappearing, any indication it could be related to time compression as I've read some post where the water goes flat after being above 2048 time compression.

That's strange, it must be some value that controls how the light are rendered that has been changed in the camera.dat file for the free cam mod, unfortunately I don't know the camera file well enough to look into this issue, it's Sergbutos and Mav87 playground :hmm: anyone else have an idea Ducimus MAv87?

[Seeadler]

Originally Posted by kriller2

Okay I will keep it in mind :hmm: have I understood your post correctly that the modfifying of the scene.dat at different wave states, not allways looks the same at different hardware setups? or do you mean editing of the shader files?

If you only edit the wave states - no, but if you change color, fresnel, refraction params - yes.

There are different water????.fx shader files, waterTransPS.fx is for the high settings which takes all params and others for lower settings which don't care about of some parameter from *.dat files.

[Digital_Trucker]

Originally Posted by kriller2

That's strange, it must be some value that controls how the light are rendered that has been changed in the camera.dat file for the free cam mod, unfortunately I don't know the camera file well enough to look into this issue, it's Sergbutos and Mav87 playground :hmm: anyone else have an idea Ducimus MAv87?

No expert here either, but isn't it possible that it's some fundamental difference between the two types of camera controllers?:hmm:

[Orion2012]

Originally Posted by Digital_Trucker

No expert here either, but isn't it possible that it's some fundamental difference between the two types of camera controllers?:hmm:

Thats what I was wondering...And I have no idea where to begin looking for the difference....

[Digital_Trucker]

What I was getting at is that there may not be anyplace to look for the difference. If the view of one of the controllers is rendered differently in the hard code, then it would be one of those things we just have to live with.

Something just came to mind, though. If using the free move camera controller works to stop light from "passing through" opaque objects in the interior, couldn't we make all of the interior cameras free move, but limit their movement (but not rotation) speed to zero?

[DeepIron]

Hi DeepIron,
That's because of the way the SH4-engine works, you can decide how the water should look like at f.ex. 4 different wind speed and then the engine calculates the in betweens, I have tried alot of different values and been using some of Wclears excelent scene.dat work for inspiration to come up with a formula that looks nice at 0 -4 m so we have the nice sunsets / sun rises where the sun and clouds reflects in the water, unfortunately there is a problem with the SH4 engine when the sun allmost sets and alot of wind, resulting in the kind of reflections you see on DT's screenshots.

Ah... thanks for the explanation K2... I can only imagine how frustrating it must be to work through all the settings and test them.

Currently there is no ETA for this mod, still trying to correct a bug where the waves suddenly goes out of sync resulting in some strange liquid ocean, this is a "bug" that have been there allways, but this means that you with current the PE4-state would have to save the game when this happens and load it again to see the nice waves with good reflections again.

Maybe it's impossible to correct this and if it turns out that way, I will release the mod anyway and someone else can see if they can improve on the formula for rendering of the waves :hmm:

K2, I think this is a side-effect of the time compression algorithms in SH4. I've noticed that when I use TC above 2048 for a long period of time, the "game clock" seems to get out of sync too. I'm pretty sure the issues are caused by insufficient CPU time dedicated to updating the SH4 environment...

I could be wrong, but that how it seems to me...


Cheers!

[kriller2]

5m


2 m sun sets


daylight


Progress: the ugly border at the horizont is gone and some editing of the clouds and the way the clouds is drawn and reflects in the sea.