(REL) Pacific enviroment/ROW/Leovampire and Kriller2

[kriller2]

Originally Posted by MONOLITH

We could start with my lightning questions on the previous page...

Okay I haven't seen lightnings in the game when in campaign and i know Leo has worked hard on getting it to work, but found out that it have something to do with the way SH4 uses it's cache file, but it's still a major bug he tries to solve so that we all can enjoy the thunder with real lightning.

[MONOLITH]

Okay, so that creates two questions...

1. "In campaign".... so have we definatley seen lightning working in either war patrols or quick missions? I've actually been looking in the "Hunt for wounded Bear" War patrol.

2. In regards to above, has anyone actually seen lightning yet at all? I thought I did read some people had it. If not, I assume the lightning textures were tentatively placed into the game by our Romanian friends, but never actually implemented?

[Subject]

Originally Posted by Rockin Robbins

...Whoa! I'm not in Kansas any more, that's for sure. Then I noticed that I was in control room free camera mode by default. I wandered around in a trance, soaking in all the great new lighting effects.

I went to the bridge and the ocean was breathtaking as the submarine moved as part of it, not a gyrostabilized piece of bedrock that somehow could move around the surface of the ocean. I found myself in automatic free camera mode there, too, so I moved around. I could get as close to anything as I wanted, even passing through objects that got in my way. The light played on the boat as I've never seen it before. Just closely examining the deck gun was a transendental experience. This is an amazing mod, a supermod for the environment as Trigger Maru is for the human elements....

totally agree!

But then I took one step forward on the bridge and started slowly sinking... down onto the deck... through the deck... things got psychodelic then... sub disintegrated, 3D-parts hovered... and I slowly sank to the bottom of the harbour... and never found a way to get my "camera" back :rotfl:

Another thing, when using arrows to turn my "head", I'm feeling like a drunk. Rolling and swaying... can that be fixed/changed?

But awesome mod!

rS.

Btw. agree with Rockin': the moon is not good, but I took the one from RFB.

[leovampire]

Originally Posted by Rockin Robbins

I've run Reflections on the Water for a total of about ten minutes now. Man, did it start out good, looking right into the OOD's face as he ordered "All stop!" Whoa! I'm not in Kansas any more, that's for sure. Then I noticed that I was in control room free camera mode by default. I wandered around in a trance, soaking in all the great new lighting effects.

I went to the bridge and the ocean was breathtaking as the submarine moved as part of it, not a gyrostabilized piece of bedrock that somehow could move around the surface of the ocean. I found myself in automatic free camera mode there, too, so I moved around. I could get as close to anything as I wanted, even passing through objects that got in my way. The light played on the boat as I've never seen it before. Just closely examining the deck gun was a transendental experience. This is an amazing mod, a supermod for the environment as Trigger Maru is for the human elements.

Then I looked up. The constellation Orion was high. and about 20º to the right of it was......What the hell is THAT MONSTER?

In the sky, we measure things just like you do in Silent Hunter 4, by angular distances. And sprinkled throughout the sky are yardsticks, which help us, just like the tools on the chart table of your submarine, to measure the sky. One such yardstick is the belt or Orion, which was prominent overhead.

The first standard this yardstick measures is the celestial equator, which passes right through the belt. And the other is an angular distance yardstick. The three stars are almost exactly 1½º apart, making the whole belt 3º long.

The other celestial yardstick in the sky there is the...."moon." The moon and the sun are celestial yardsticks, as they measure hundreds of things in the sky, but their diameter is also a universal yardstick as both are almost exactly ½º in diameter. You can fit six of them between the end stars of Orion's belt.

Except in this monsterous sky, where the moon is more than six times its actual diameter! Any astronomer or mariner will take one look at Reflections on the Water's moon and sun and say, "It's Frankenmoon!" Then they will realize that any navigation is impossible. Five minutes later ROW will be uninstalled.

Why do I think that way? Let us suppose that you took any other aspect of the game and made it six times larger than real. Try the sub's propeller. Is that acceptable? You're laughing! Let's make the sub's interior six times larger than its exterior. It worked for Halo, why not here? We could just multiply all dimensions of the submarine by six while leaving all other ships realistic. That is what you have done with the sky, and it is just as laughable as these stupid examples. While we're having fun, how about just enlarging the captain's gonads by six times. Although they would be spectacular, they would be useless, making neither him, nor any of his lady friends very happy. Similarly, a sun and moon six times their actual size are just ugly, inappropriate and useless characatures of what they really are.

Please Mr Modders, treat the sky with the same respect and loyalty to realism as you treat the rest of the envronment. (Battle Hymn of the Republic or Finlandia, choose the choice of your choice, plays softly) Any uneducated farmer from 80 years ago would pick out the problem in a second. Because we are the products of light-drenched skies, where the real sky is banished, and we remain ignorant if its majesty and reality, we overlook a crime here. A crime against reality, and the beauty of reality: a monster masquerading as a hero, a serial killer as president of the PTA. Oh, the humanity!

First of all I did make them a bit smaller than the games original set up of them in the first place so they were a lot larger before I even touched them.

All I did was slightly set them smaller and made sure they worked the same way in size so that the ingame set up will do the Lunar and Solar Eclips and have them look right when they do accur in game.

No I did not take the time to try and get the sizing perfectly real to life because it was not a priority to the mod and there were ton's of other nightmares to work through and deal with first.

Second every time a saved game is loaded when the moon has already rissen it changes it's luner cycle so the only way to see what is happening is to go to a save before the Moon rises and then wait for it to reach the point you need to compair with the stars then shut the game off make an adjustment and watch the moon rise and cycle again to check again.

Almost every aspect of this mod work has to be done like that. Maybe when I have timeI will work on getting the sun's size and moon's size exactly the way they should be. But also keep this one thing in mind. The camera for this game try's to simulate the size distortion we see with our own eye's. So unless you look straight on at the sun and moon with the same camera view each time you will not get to see the object's actual size set up in the game. So the timing and the camera view and the direction of the camera all come into play working on this type of set up.

If you want to do this and get it done for your game or to share with others GO FOR IT!!!

Other wise you need to wait until I have some time to invest in that kind of project for the mod. Plus I to like to get a little game play in so I do not forget why I am doing this in the first place. For everyone including myself.

I will look into it for the final release of the mod but will not guarentee it will be done until that time.

[Quagmire]

Hey on a completely different note but important none the less:

Have you guys noticed that your batteries no longer fully recharge with ROW? Mine only get to 99% and stay there. Very bad for fuel economy.

Anyone know why?
.

[MONOLITH]

@Subject; In order to make the camera allow you to free walk everywhere, the collision parameter was removed.

An unfortunate side effect of that is you can freely move through the 3D models that are incomplete by design. You can even go underneath the ocean bottom and look 'up' at the rocks and plants.

I prefer he camera the way it is though, and it's freedoms, and just have learned to use the movement responsibly (for lack of a better word).

I reall like being able to stand down on the deck by the deck gun and such and move all around the sub. Adds to the realism of the environment to me.


As for the swaying camera, I do believe that setting could be reduced/removed to make the camera stationary, but I like the way it simulates the rocking of wave motion. Just personal preference I suppose.

One thing to be careful of, is with both the deck station view, and the follow (next ship) cam, you can completely move the camera away from the sub and across the ocean. then the camera stays where you last left it. So, this means that if you hit F5 and go to the deck station, then move the camera out to sea far away, the next time you hit F5, it will be at the last 'out to sea' position, and not on the deck. And you may not find your way back with it.

I advise using the F11 to move all around the world, as that resets, and always keep the F5 on the deck somewhere.

[leovampire]

Originally Posted by Quagmire

Hey on a completely different note but important none the less:

Have you guys noticed that your batteries no longer fully recharge with ROW? Mine only get to 99% and stay there. Very bad for fuel economy.

Anyone know why?
.

That has anything to do with the operation of the sub it's self. None of the operation of the sub have been touched in anyway. Only the reflection part of it and how you see them from the ship's and sub's.

Check your mod's out you have installed because my batteries do not have a problem charging to 100% and I have ROW installed on my on Game.

[mrbeast]

Originally Posted by leovampire

....my batteries do not have a problem charging to 100% and I have ROW installed on my on Game.

No battery problems here either, at least not with ROW.

Also if your batteries stick at 99% and won't stop recharging just switch your engines to a normal propulsion loop and your fuel consumption should come back down to normal.

[leovampire]

I will ask l3th4l if he will make a seperate camera mod that has the Terain Collision perameters back into the camera. But it will mean that you will not be able to walk the deck as easily on the ships in the game.

As to the movement you see when you change camera views and the constant movment you experience in high sea's it was to try and create and atmosphere you would experience in real life being on the bridge or inner compartments of the sub as it is pitching and rolling through the waves.

[leovampire]

Originally Posted by DragonRR1

@kriller2

Yes I came to the same conclusion (see my previous post) although since my card has 768mb I suspect the problem isn't so much that I haven't got enough video ram but more that, for whatever reason, the sea foam textures are not kept in video ram but rather swapped in and out again as they are needed. Whether Leo can do anything about this I'm not sure but I would guess that he can't. It may be an Nvidia driver issue or it may be that the devs didn't allow for caching..

Windows dosn't always alowcate on it's own enough virtual memory to make things run as smoothly as it should so for my own PC I usualy match my virtual memory settings to the amount of Ram I have installed manualy.

Also since patch 1.3 came out the Game no longer uses the disk for the game so everything is run from your hard drive now only.

Even though the new video card's have their own internal video ram it still nedds help with both physicle ram and virtual ram to run a lot of graphics.

[leovampire]

Originally Posted by MONOLITH

We could start with my lightning questions on the previous page...

Yes the Dev's did have most of the work set up for the lightning to work in the game but they didn't set up all the perametors for them like matching up the Cloud and water reflections and sub reflections for them to the actual lightning working in the game for starters.

The more I worked with the lightning emmiters I realized that every thing had to match up between all the Omni settings in the Materials files as well as the Actual Particles emmiters in the Particles file. Once I did this I was able to start getting the lightning to work. But at first all we had was a test mission set up by Captain Cox to do all of this and get it set up. Once we got it to work perfectly in the Single Missions we found out it didn;t want to work in the campaign layers.

So what I ended up doing that made the lightning work for my game. I deleted the entire SHIV save file from My Documents and then added the lightning work to the game using JSGME and started the game with a new Carrier and Campaign and let the game build a new save file in My Documents again.

This fixed my problem and got the lightning to work in the Campaign layers as well as the single missions.

But there is several key triggers that seem to have to be in play for the lightning to actualy happen. The clouds have to be at a level 2 state and there has to be rain as well.

If those 2 perametors do not happen then the game just makes the thunder noise like there is a storm way in the distance that is making the wind and wave conditions. So you hear thunder like there is a storm near by just not actual in it.

But there is something missing some where in the game files that makes this all work without going to extreams and force the game to use it.

Everyday I try to read the text part of the files you can only see in HEX editing to try and find that one part which has eluded us. Unfortunatly since my stroke's I can not HEX edit so when I find anything that says lightning in the Hex read part I ask someone to look at it for me to see if it is an adjustment we canmake to fix the problem.

So the process of this is slow with my Physicle limitations.

[RDDR]

You know Leo,I'm as happy as a pig in .... with both your wonderful mods but,there is one thing that from time to time bothers me, and it was there before these mods were even introduced into the game.
To me, the stars at night often seem like they are placed in front of the clouds when I'm looking out at the night panorama.
Am I just seeing things,or have you or anyone else noticed that anomoly?

[leovampire]

Originally Posted by RDDR

You know Leo,I'm as happy as a pig in .... with both your wonderful mods but,there is one thing that from time to time bothers me, and it was there before these mods were even introduced into the game.
To me, the stars at night often seem like they are placed in front of the clouds when I'm looking out at the night panorama.
Am I just seeing things,or have you or anyone else noticed that anomoly?

That is why you can see the sun's halo through the sub's hull and why when the sub's hull is placed in a camera view after and before a sun set you can see the sun's halo effect through the water.

Also why the lightning appears through the sub's hull. I have a feeling there is something in the Shader files that controls this but again with no program that works with them it is up the the Hex readers to find the problem in them and try to repair it.

This is also why the crew becomes transparent as the fog starts to build something to do with either the shaders or game rendering.

[mrbeast]

Wondered why the sun halo could be seen through the ships hull. Thought I might have my card set up wrong but not as it turns out.

Cheers Leo

[Canonicus]

I wanted to add a note regarding the sun-halo effect and the ability to shine through solid objects....
If you have a Nvidia card and enable a feature called...Gamma AA correction you willl loose the halo effect...but as a side effect... the sun will no longer seem to miraculously shine though solid objects....

Perhaps a better understanding of how Gamma AA correction works, would help. Here's a detailed description from the Nhancer website....http://www.nhancer.com/


"Gamma-corrected Anti-Aliasing"

"Also starting with the 7x00 line of cards, nVidia introduced another new option that can be added to all anti-aliasing modes: the Gamma corrected Anti-Aliasing.
This option only changes the selection of the in-between colors, that are used to smooth the transition at the edge of a polygon. The reasoning is that monitors are not linear in their display of colors and brightness, and the standard, linear way of selecting in-between colors is therefor not ideal.
If you enable gamma-corrected anti-aliasing, the result is that the edges are usually slightly less visible than without this option. But the effect depends on the monitor you're using and how this monitor is configured (brightness, contrast, etc.).
This option doesn't cost any performance."