[WIP] Lighthouses mod

Nice pics here : http://www.skreo-dz.com/article-le-r...-87814106.html

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Originally Posted by Kendras

Nice pics here : http://www.skreo-dz.com/article-le-r...-87814106.html

I agree!

We can model the rocks between the Pointe du Raz and La Vielle in game... as 3D models this time
Lighthouses are there for signaling dangers and showing the safest ways. There is no point in having them in place, if there is no danger to be avoided

Changing of topic: while I wait for your answers to my other remarks, here is an update relative to the light effect problem I described before:

Originally Posted by gap

I have noticed a weird glitch: when seen from a distance, the smooth borders of the light particle become partly opaque, and I see a semi-transparent square with the light flash painted on it, where I should se a totally smooth transition from full light to the sky color. I will investigate if this error is caused by my changes but I doubt that

Unfortunately, after some tests, I must say that I was wrong: the problem is caused by the missing RaYTracedHalo controller.
I am sure I have seen other lighthouse flare effects in SH5m SHIV and SHIII, which don't use that controller. Could we modify those particle effects for use with our lighthouse? Can you please look into the issue while I give the last touch ups to our model? The light reflections on water are too a cool feature for simply give it up and you are the king of SHIII special effects, I know you will invent something

Originally Posted by gap

Changing of topic... when you finish drawing that island in a proper way, what do you think about tweaking a bit the light flash effect, so that it resambles more the light of a carbide lamp?

Here's a video:


Imo, the outer border of the light should be red-violet towards its outer border, not blue as it is now. What do you think?

EDIT: found a decent picture



The flame looks bluer near the center of combustion, and it becomes red-violet as it moves away from the center. After all, the current effect color might be compatible with the blue seen in the picture above

What do you think about that ?

Originally Posted by gap

Unfortunately, after some tests, I must say that I was wrong: the problem is caused by the missing RaYTracedHalo controller.
I am sure I have seen other lighthouse flare effects in SH5m SHIV and SHIII, which don't use that controller. Could we modify those particle effects for use with our lighthouse? Can you please look into the issue while I give the last touch ups to our model? The light reflections on water are too a cool feature for simply give it up and you are the king of SHIII special effects, I know you will invent something

Yes, I think there is a way to avoid this problem. In S3D, you can see that the halo tga has a black background which is read into transparency (I don't know how). What if we change this black background with tranparent background ?

[gap]

Originally Posted by Kendras

What do you think about that ?

Very nice!

Originally Posted by Kendras

Yes, I think there is a way to avoid this problem. In S3D, you can see that the halo tga has a black background which is read into transparency (I don't know how). What if we change this black background with tranparent background ?

I will look into that

The halo during the night :





By the way, I don't have the problem you mentioned, although I deleted the RaYTracedHalo controller. What are the weather conditions under which you see a semi-transparent square ?

[gap]

Originally Posted by Kendras

The halo during the night :

So nice!

Originally Posted by Kendras

By the way, I don't have the problem you mentioned, although I deleted the RaYTracedHalo controller. What are the weather conditions under which you see a semi-transparent square ?

Ypu must move the camera a few hundred meters away from the effect for the light flare to become a luminous square.
I use the test mission you sent me. I have edited many parameters of it, but date, hour of the day and cloud cover are unchanged.
I suspect my gfx card being part of the problem: NVidia cards and SH lights even never got along nicely, The weird thing is that the glitch is only apparent when I delete that controller

[gap]

Good news, our specular mask finally works

Originally Posted by gap

Good news, our specular mask finally works

Excellent news ! How did you manage to solve this issue ? And is this modifying the aspect in game ?

BTW, here is the new halo effect, so you can try it directly in your game !

D/L link :

I have modified it a bit compared to the last picture :

Gap, could you send me the grey scale used by Terrain Editor ? I intend to convert the maps I've found into maps with SH3 bathymetric colors.

[gap]

Originally Posted by Kendras

Excellent news ! How did you manage to solve this issue ? :hmm2

Not sure what was the problem.

I replaced the materials previously used, with other materials copied from units which had the specular mask enabled and working. Even in their new location, those new materials worked as supposed. I then edited their properties, names, flags, texture linking etc, one by one, for making them to resemble the buggy materials. By doing so, I hoped that at some point I would have discovered the 'bad' setting which caused the corruption but, at the end of the story, I found myself with materials apparently identical to the old ones, except for the fact that they still worked and the originals didn't

I suspect that the materials initially used were corrupted in a way that s3d couldn't detect (I am not sure, but I might have copied them from a file which had been "manually" tweaked with an hex editor), or perhaps those materials had nothing wrong, but there is some 'hidden' material flag which is a 0 by default and must be set to 1 for the material to accept specular reflections. The old materials might have had this flag disabled, and the new ones enabled. The good thing about S3ditor is that it is able to create exact copies of chunks/addresses even when it doesn't fully understands/handles them

Originally Posted by Kendras

And is this modifying the aspect in game ?

Sure it does!

I wish I could take some screenies: I am currently tweaking/balancing material attributes; for making things more obvious, I have replaced diffuse texture's RGB channel with solid medium grey, and I can clearly see how the underlying specular mask affects the texture depending on luminosity level and sun angle.

Originally Posted by Kendras

BTW, here is the new halo effect, so you can try it directly in your game !

D/L link :

I have modified it a bit compared to the last picture :

I would gladly test it, and incorporate it in the upcoming new version of the mod, but can see no link

Originally Posted by Kendras

Gap, could you send me the grey scale used by Terrain Editor ? I intend to convert the maps I've found into maps with SH3 bathymetric colors.

You don't need the grey scale: you have it already

That's exactly the chart you had posted a few days ago, but with tones of grey replacing shades of blue, and grey values used for water going from 0 to 47. From it, I get that a grey value of 46 (R=46, G=46, B=46) is equal to -17 m, a value of 45 is equal to -18 m, and so on.

The 'shallowest' grey tone is 47, but its corresponding depth is not provided in your chart. I have included that value in my Ile de Sein terrain modification (for waters surrounding the island to the South IIRC), but I couldn't notice the side effect you told me. Did you? Maybe I should add a bigger spot of grey-47 on SHIII's elevation map for you to measure what is its corresponding depth in game, as -17 is a bit too deep for simulating the very shallow waters we want to put in game

Originally Posted by gap

I would gladly test it, and incorporate it in the upcoming new version of the mod, but can see no link

For two reasons :

- I decided to improve a bit the "animation" of the light
- I've had a new idea for our mod, and I immediately started to work on it. It's now working fine. More on this coming soon ...

Else, I've just reworked a bit the color of the halo, to have something more pink than violet.

So, why not to add a "searchlight effect" to the main lighthouses ?

With a turning light beam (i've added a rotation controller for that) ?



You can even change the color :



Maybe, we can use this feature to add different colors for the light, depending on the angle ? However, more tests are needed to see if that's possible.

The side effect is that the beam on the sea surface can only appear if the lighthouse has detected an ennemy unit ...

[gap]

Originally Posted by Kendras

- I decided to improve a bit the "animation" of the light

Okay but be careful with those particles: remember that they are FPS killers.
On a side note: have you had a look into the FastParticleGenerators? It has more or less the same parameters as the more common ParticleGenerator (i.e. porting an effect from a generator to the other should be quite easy) but I think it is lesser GPU-intensive and more optimized for quickly evolving particles

Originally Posted by Kendras

- I've had a new idea for our mod, and I immediately started to work on it. It's now working fine. More on this coming soon ...

Eagerly looking forward to your idea!

Originally Posted by Kendras

Else, I've just reworked a bit the color of the halo, to have something more pink than violet.

Pink is not exactly my favorite color, but let's see it and keep a copy of the violet version, just in case

On a partly unrelated note: as I already told you, I would really like our rocks/shoals/islets to have foam around them from the waves crashing on them. Have you started digging into this topic? Do you think there is a way to link a particle effect to the water surface?

[gap]

Originally Posted by Kendras

So, why not to add a "searchlight effect" to the main lighthouses ?

With a turning light beam (i've added a rotation controller for that) ?

...

Maybe, we can use this feature to add different colors for the light, depending on the angle ? However, more tests are needed to see if that's possible.

Brilliant! Maybe this effect is not very useful for the lighthouse we are currently working on, but it definitely could be a valid approach for lighthouses with directional and multicolored lights, as La Vielle

Originally Posted by Kendras

The side effect is that the beam on the sea surface can only appear if the lighthouse has detected an ennemy unit ...

I hope we can find a workaround to this

Originally Posted by gap

Okay but be careful with those particles: remember that they are FPS killers.
On a side note: have you had a look into the FastParticleGenerators? It has more or less the same parameters as the more common ParticleGenerator (i.e. porting an effect from a generator to the other should be quite easy) but I think it is lesser GPU-intensive and more optimized for quickly evolving particles

Don't worry, parameters are still as simple as possible, and I don't think that a fastparticlegenerator is needed (and even possible ?).

Originally Posted by gap

Eagerly looking forward to your idea!

Already posted just above ! I'm currently making more tests about that idea.

Originally Posted by gap

Pink is not exactly my favorite color, but let's see it and keep a copy of the violet version, just in case

It's not really "pink". I let you test the new effect (color and animation) :

http://www.mediafire.com/file/g2i2f3...hthouse_FX.dat

Originally Posted by gap

On a partly unrelated note: as I already told you, I would really like our rocks/shoals/islets to have foam around them from the waves crashing on them. Have you started digging into this topic? Do you think there is a way to link a particle effect to the water surface?

Yes, that would be so cool. I have to see what can be done here.