[WIP] The SH5 EcoMod

[Jeff-Groves]

Really glad you and Mihai hooked up!

[gap]

Originally Posted by Jeff-Groves

Really glad you and Mihai hooked up!

What do you know about LOD distances in the GR2 format?

[Jeff-Groves]

As far as I know off the top of my head there is nothing in the GR2 about LOD. No extra 3D models or such.
Now SH4 has a LOD setting but I don't recall without looking where it's at.
Let me check a few things and get back to you on this.

[gap]

Originally Posted by gap

What do you know about LOD distances in the GR2 format?

I will make myself clearer. This is a first rework of Helgoland:



Maybe, on the far right, you will notice a sea stack, the famous Lange Anna, that I have modelled and imported in game.

The problem is that it keeps popping in and out, depending on camera distance and angle. The same goes for shadows, water reflections and other lighting effects. The same applies to other terrain objects (but not all of them!), though normally we won't notice them disappearing as we move away from them due to their proportionally smaller dimensions and to their fading in the background.
IIRC, SHIII and IV terrain objects have far rendering controllers which set the minimum dimension of objects printed on screen before the game stops rendering them. In SH5, sea and air units have LOD models, but nowhere I could find a controller similar to the ones used in SHIII. Units and terrain objects are probably treated in a different way. For one, the latter have no LOD models, when the player is too far from them, they simply disappear, but as I said they all don't disappear at the same time. An object-specific pararmeter must tell the game when it is time to stop rendering any given object and since most of them have only the StaticObject and the HarborObjectCtrl controller applied to them (one related with collision, and the other with night/winter textures), this something must be stored directly in the GR2 models

[Jeff-Groves]

Is that imported as a dat file with the Unifiedrender controller?
There is a LOD factor under that.

[gap]

Originally Posted by Jeff-Groves

Is that imported as a dat file with the Unifiedrender controller?
There is a LOD factor under that.

No, it is a GR2 file. I imported it into Iceberg01.GR2 first, and then into church.GR2. Little seems to have changed though.

Here is a closer view of the red stack:



Considering how low poly it is, I think it looks pretty nice, especially when the lighting effects "pop in"

[Jeff-Groves]

what texture are you using and how many mip maps?

[gap]

Originally Posted by Jeff-Groves

what texture are you using and how many mip maps?

diffuse map: DX5 dds format, 1024 x 1024 pixels, 11 mip levels, with self-illumination map in the alpha channel.
ambient occlusion and normal maps: DX1 dds format, 1024 x 1024 pixels, 11 mip levels each.

PS: congratulations for your recently earned and well deserved patch