Pacific environment 4 RELEASED

[Lexandro]

Originally Posted by Fish40

Welcome aboard! Do you have the "Environmental Effects" option ticked in the graphics option? I remember someone saying the same thing about lack of water transparancy, but gained it by ticking this option.

Thanks. Yes I do have enviromental effects on, I also tested it without this option. I have a rather good rig for SHIV (AMD x2 3ghz/HD 3870/2gb DDR2), so performance is not a problem and I have everything ingame maxed out @1280x1024 resolution. Its simply the surface water is not transparent enough. As I said everything else about the mod is fantastic and I really do like it, but for this one detail. I hope that this is taken in to account for future reference.

[DrBeast]

Originally Posted by Egon01

Ok and what about river effect ? I shouldn't use time acceleration over x1024 too ? If this is true sailing from Pearl to japanesse coasts will take agaes

This usually appears when you look at ships that are very far from yours, i.e. at the limit of your sensor's range, and usually after coming out of TC. It's especially prominent if said ships are close to shore. If memory serves, nothing can be done about that. I know it can be annoying, but usually picking up TC and pausing while you're in map view gets rid of it, eventually, especially as you get closer to the target(s). This is not a new "bug" btw, it's been around since ROW.

[ATR-42]

Ive switched back to PE3.2

the ocean is much more graceful. I'll miss the sunsets and colors of PE4 but the wave speed and jelly were just too distracting. I like the transparency of PE3 better as well. Given my experience in the murky Atlantic its even a bit more translucent offshore than PE4.

the ocean is slow, and rhythmic, especially offshore.

I will be looking forward to future changes, if any, i know you guys worked hard on this.

my humble respect.
ATR

[kriller2]

Hi,

I haven't checked this site for some time now and remember that when this mod was released everyone seem to like it and the mod got good critics. :hmm:

Now time have moved on and suddenly PE4 is the fault of all kinds of strange things, things like jelly water in high TC, eyeballs positioning etc, which is mostly stock bugs which have allways been there and is impossible to fix without reprogramming the SH4-engine.

It seems there are alot of different oppinions on how much transparency the water should have and which colour the ocean should have and the answer is simple: The ocean is the most complicated (and challenging) environment on the planet to reproduce on a computer and to make a mod that took all different things into account, different types of water particles from f.ex. the Pacific Ocean in the philipines (which is very very blue!) and f.ex. the great barrier reef in Australia where the ocean is more green would be impossible.

The discussions about these aspects have been endlesly throughout the different version of ROW and PE and there is no final answer on how the ocean should look like, my goal have just been to try and improve on the stock SH4 and ROW and to hopefully make the environments more lifelike and I think we have succeeded with PE4. Yes there are some things that could be different, but which game doesn't have things you don't like? even Crysis water effect looks unnatural at times, which is the most convincing water I have seen in a game yet.

Regarding transparency, this have alot to do how deep the water is and the angle of view on the water, f.ex. if you look 90 degrees down in the water you should be able to see the bottom of the sea and there should be good transparency in shallow water, but if you look in f.ex. 45 degrees towards the sea f.ex. from a conning tower, you would mostly only see the reflections from the water surface and the water would look "murky". I know that Nisgeis has used alot of work trying to reproduce this effect..

This is the reason why I don't feel like changing anything in PE4 at the moment, because mostly we have used ALOT of time trying to avoid some of the SH4-engines limities and trying to figure out how to trick the engine into doing something it wasn't buid for in the first place, just ask Nisgeis he have used 100 hours of work on the shader files for the water alone and I have used 2 months of research and modding for the environment in PE4

Anyway this post wasn't ment to be me proving how great PE4 is, but to give you a picture on how complicated it is to make a mod with so many files being affected and changing one little thing in the mod would affect 100 other things, so then we had to make a patch on the patch for the patch etc. :p and then SH5 arives! :rotfl:

[Task Force]

I myself like the new sea effects.

[kwbgjh2]

First of all i want to thank Kriller for this really great mod. At next i had never any issues with PE 4. I show you all my list and order of mods, maybe its a little help for thos e who have trouble.




This is a typical screen at bad weather which i love most coz it remembers me to SH3 and the always rainy atlantic.




Next screen is fine "Aloha" Pacific weather







Intel Core 2 6600@2.4 Ghz
Nvidia 8800 GTX 768 MB RAM DDR3
4x1 GB RAM A-Data Extreme DDR2 800+
Gigabyte P35-DS3 Realtek 7.1 Sound on Board
Intel RAID Controller 2*380 GB HD as RAID 0
Vista Ultimate Sp1

[Fish40]

Originally Posted by kwbgjh2

First of all i want to thank Kriller for this really great mod. At next i had never any issues with PE 4. I show you all my list and order of mods, maybe its a little help for thos e who have trouble.




This is a typical screen at bad weather which i love most coz it remembers me to SH3 and the always rainy atlantic.




Next screen is fine "Aloha" Pacific weather







Intel Core 2 6600@2.4 Ghz
Nvidia 8800 GTX 768 MB RAM DDR3
4x1 GB RAM A-Data Extreme DDR2 800+
Gigabyte P35-DS3 Realtek 7.1 Sound on Board
Intel RAID Controller 2*380 GB HD as RAID 0
Vista Ultimate Sp1

Nice screenies! I've read a couple of posts dealing with "lines" in the water. Your last picture captures what I believe these folks are talking about. The way the water appears to have a "striated" look to it. That is to say, it looks streaky if you know what I mean. I'm not sure if this is a problem, but rather an effort to simulate a rippleing effect of the water, as well as wind blown seafoam which occurs during heavy weather. If I'm wrong, please Kriller step in and clear the air

[kriller2]

Originally Posted by Fish40

Nice screenies! I've read a couple of posts dealing with "lines" in the water. Your last picture captures what I believe these folks are talking about. The way the water appears to have a "striated" look to it. That is to say, it looks streaky if you know what I mean. I'm not sure if this is a problem, but rather an effort to simulate a rippleing effect of the water, as well as wind blown seafoam which occurs during heavy weather. If I'm wrong, please Kriller step in and clear the air

Thanks for the pictures
Yes you are right the last picture have the ripples people don't like, it's because the wave engine gets out of sync and is a stock bug, to make it go away you have to save the game and reload the game that should take care of it.

BTW I have decided that there will be one last patch which should take care of the purple water and the waves moving to fast... As both of those issues are because of my scene.dat work I will try to make a new one and release it.

[kriller2]

@nisgeis check your Pm

[gimpy117]

Originally Posted by kriller2

Thanks for the pictures
Yes you are right the last picture have the ripples people don't like, it's because the wave engine gets out of sync and is a stock bug, to make it go away you have to save the game and reload the game that should take care of it.

BTW I have decided that there will be one last patch which should take care of the purple water and the waves moving to fast... As both of those issues are because of my scene.dat work I will try to make a new one and release it.

I have lived on the great lakes all my life and have never seen lines in the water like that...it's gotta be a glitch...

[Task Force]

Probably a texture issue, they will iron it out.

[kwbgjh2]

When i took this screenshot


i didnt pay attention to the "ripples". But reading the answers of other skippers made me to try to reproduce the error.

On my rig the ripples appear only under special light conditions and swells AFTER heaving used the time compression. When the sea is very calm (no matter if the sky is blue or dark) its no problem to go via F12 from fastest tc (8192) outside the sub. Always excellent graphic. But if there is any swell the "rippels" appear.
I dont know anything about modding or programming so i can only try to describe my observation in my own words.
After pressing the F12 there was for 1 or 2 seconds a strange effect. To me it seems as if the swells (ingame mechanic that makes the waves moving ) needs time to sychronize with the texture. The texture was correct as it should be and the waves were rapidly moving below like under a haze. Nearly like 2 pictures layd on top of each other. After this i took the following screen.






So my intention was it must be a problem of the ingame clock because here is nearly the same screen just after saving and reloading the game.





Hope this will help u to solve the problem.:hmm:

[Syxx_Killer]

I was thinking a bit about the purple wakes people seem to be having. I never got the purple wakes, but I do use this from the mod: PE4_high quality bow and stern wakes (stock SH4 lower FPS). Does anyone use that part of the mod get the purple wakes? I've been using that since PE4 was released.

On a different note, when the more important stuff is ironed out, could the grain effect be reimplemented? I always liked that little effect. I know I'm probably in the minority, but if it could be put back I would really love it.

[Wilcke]

kwbgjh2,

Good pics up there demonstrating the issues. Kriller has commented somewhere about this issue and pointed to the TC sync...etc. Its all too complex for me. As for the purple water there is a new scene.dat coming out with a fix.

[kwbgjh2]

Thx for the info, Wilcke