[REL] Open Horizons II (old thread)

[SteelViking]

Originally Posted by Zedi

Nope, the main goal is to make these ships to look like out of box. Later on anybody can add skin packs to these ships and customize their look, thats why I wanna make them look like the ones from stock game, nothing more, nothing less.

Okay, no rust it is.

[SteelViking]

Zedi, I really think we should stick with the old green normal maps for these ships.

I am able to get them to look perfect(props to TDW for finding a good balance on the texture's opacity levels) even when the sun is very low in the sky when I use the old normals. But the second I switch to using the SH5 style normal maps for them, they look terrible. I thought that they were working, but I hadn't checked them at all angles of the sun until now.

I just think that the shaders for these ships are set up to better utilize the old style normals.

[TheDarkWraith]

Originally Posted by SteelViking

I just think that the shaders for these ships are set up to better utilize the old style normals.

The shaders are almost 100% identical to SH4 shaders for unified renderer. That is why I replaced Zedi's normal maps with those from SH4.

[SteelViking]

Originally Posted by TheDarkWraith

The shaders are almost 100% identical to SH4 shaders for unified renderer. That is why I replaced Zedi's normal maps with those from SH4.

That is what I figured. Thanks for confirming TDW.

Either way, I should have these ships ready by the end of the day. That's textures set to proper opacity, shadow maps redone, and rust removed.

[Zedi]

Well, this is not good because those normal maps are done for the old texture. But I will take a look on this issue when you guys are done with the ships and send me an update.

Please, clean up the roster cfg and remove any unused texture path etc. Thanks a lot.

[Rongel]

Every ship also has to be fine tuned, we must add the right weapons and SH 5 crewmembers. Some ships need also tweaking in the floating mechanics, they roll too much in the water, especially in low speeds. I can help with this stuff. Also it would be great to have multiple textures in all of them, I tried this with one ship and it worked fine.

This is simple stuff and I can help in it, TDW can focus on much greater things!

[SteelViking]

Hmmm It appears that certain objects on the ships do not like having a shadow map applied to them. Even using TDW's setup things like crates get huge spectral phenomena. Not a big deal, I can just make no shadow on these objects, but I am afraid they might end up looking too light colored. Lets hope they look okay.

[TheDarkWraith]

Originally Posted by SteelViking

Hmmm It appears that certain objects on the ships do not like having a shadow map applied to them. Even using TDW's setup things like crates get huge spectral phenomena. Not a big deal, I can just make no shadow on these objects, but I am afraid they might end up looking too light colored. Lets hope they look okay.

For those objects you need to remove the alpha for them (black that section out in the _Oxx map).

[SteelViking]

Okay folks here are the ships. I repaired the shadow maps and applied the setup TDW outlined to them(once again TDW thank you for saving me the time of finding a good setup). I removed the rust from them, moved textures that should have been in the Sea/xxx folders from the Textures/TNormal/tex folder, and cleaned up the .cfg for the ships in the Roster folder. The .cfg files were pointing to .tga files but we have .dds files here.

Anyway, I know they are not 100% perfect, but this is just a rough job. I will work on refining them tomorrow, just thought I would let everyone take a look.

If you look on the stern of the NMFMPC and the Akita, there is a patch of really light hull.....I am not sure where that is coming from, it does not look like the shadow maps are responsible. I will keep digging at it though.

Cheers Mates


http://www.mediafire.com/?xr7lxp3blq87gmd

[Rongel]

Thanks for the textures SteelViking!

I have some time during start of the week, so please Zedi send me the most recent version of the ships and I'll add the crew and guns. Then we can apply the Steelvikings new textures on them. There are now many versions of these ships moving around, and some of them are really old, and unneccessarily complicated. I could clean them up a bit too.

[Zedi]

My latest version is in the released test mod, so I have no updates to send. Im waiting for you guys to finish what you have to do, at this stage for me is more important to have a clean cfg file so we can start placing these ships into other nations roster too and start build up the all nations fleet in the campaign.

[Rongel]

Originally Posted by Zedi

My latest version is in the released test mod, so I have no updates to send. Im waiting for you guys to finish what you have to do, at this stage for me is more important to have a clean cfg file so we can start placing these ships into other nations roster too and start build up the all nations fleet in the campaign.

Okay, I'll check these ships and put SteelVikings new textures on them. At this point I'm not going to make any big changes to cfg-files if they are working well and showing all the different textures in game. This way it's easier to compare them to their SH 4 cousins, and if I start renaming them, we'll soon have a compatability chaos. Let's do that little later .

And that is the question, which nations should have these ships? In SH 4 almost every nation had the "Small Old Split Freighter"/Kasagisan ship. Do you have Zedi some ideas/plans?

[THE_MASK]

Ships placed as terrain objects dont have a collision model . Or i dont know how to give it one .

[Zedi]

Originally Posted by Rongel

...
And that is the question, which nations should have these ships? In SH 4 almost every nation had the "Small Old Split Freighter"/Kasagisan ship. Do you have Zedi some ideas/plans?

Agree and Im open for suggestions. But I dont wanna add Liberty to any nations. My plan was to make a serious documentation on this matter, but it will be hard because is no help to know that Chile had only FunkyXYZ type of ships if we dont have it in the game. So Im thinking about mixing them manually and make sure that Liberty will be not the star of the show again. So if anyone has some good suggestions and ideas, lets hear it.

I consider the cfg files from Steelviking link to be clean, so I start to work with these.. hope there will be no more changes on them. I will remove the japy names and leave the rest as it is now.

Originally Posted by sober

Ships placed as terrain objects dont have a collision model . Or i dont know how to give it one .

Thats bad news as Im still counting on these wrecks for Scapa. As an extreme solution I was thinking to place there docked neutral ships and try to reduce their depth/flotation level so most of their hull will be under water.

Any progres on the terrain modifications, like shallow waters &stuff? Im working now on adding buoys so it would be the right time to send me something new.

[Rongel]

Originally Posted by Zedi

I consider the cfg files from Steelviking link to be clean, so I start to work with these.. hope there will be no more changes on them. I will remove the japy names and leave the rest as it is now.

Some cfg-files in SteelVikings package are older modified versions that don't support multiple textures, for example the Kasagisan ship and PSTyohei. I'll post here soon a new package with the Steelvikings textures that support different textures, please use it. The file structure system is also different, we don't need to put ship textures to "Textures" folder. I think it's best if these ships are modified only where it's necessary.