[Map] Rajantie (2km) [WIP]

[VapoMan]

The water becomes transparent when you generate lightmaps for the terrain, even on the lowest quality. It will only be transparent INGAME.

[splatters]

Originally Posted by [R-DEV]Amok@ndy

This is a issue with the editor it will be fine ingame (also generating envmaps and terrainlightmaps may be neccessary

Originally Posted by VapoMan

The water becomes transparent when you generate lightmaps for the terrain, even on the lowest quality. It will only be transparent INGAME.

Cheers, worked!

By default (after generating light maps) the transparency of water is inversely proportional to the waters depth*. It means that in deep water you can't see under the surface under at all, for example the bottom of a boat or the part of a swimming soldier that is under water but in shallow water you can. Doesn't make sense, pics:


* What matters here is the distance between the actual terrain and the water surface, any objects in between have no effect.




Here's what I've found out: With a little photoshop magic (as always ) you can have control over the transparency. The red channel in your terrain lightmaps is what controls the transparency of the water, the greater the red channel value the less you see through the water. It also affects how the water reflects the envmaps, so there is still a lot of experimenting which looks good etc. There might be other undesired side effects or performance issues that I'm not aware of but I doubt it.

There's the basic knowledge now, a bit of information I haven't found anywhere else. I'll add more info and pics to this post later and the progress of my map since that's what this thread is really for.

[AFsoccer]

Originally Posted by splatters

Here's what I've found out: With a little photoshop magic (as always ) you can have control over the transparency. The red channel in your terrain lightmaps is what controls the transparency of the water, the greater the red channel value the less you see through the water. It also affects how the water reflects the envmaps, so there is still a lot of experimenting which looks good etc. There might be other undesired side effects or performance issues that I'm not aware of but I doubt it.

Great find. Let us know if you run into bugs using this method. If not, this will be helpful to many mappers. I myself need to create muddy water for a map I'm working on and this would solve the problem where my shallow areas looked too clear (brown, but clear).

[Amok@ndy]

Originally Posted by splatters

Here's what I've found out: With a little photoshop magic (as always ) you can have control over the transparency. The red channel in your terrain lightmaps is what controls the transparency of the water, the greater the red channel value the less you see through the water. It also affects how the water reflects the envmaps, so there is still a lot of experimenting which looks good etc. There might be other undesired side effects or performance issues that I'm not aware of but I doubt it.

you can simply do this by decreasing your waterlevel before generating lightmaps
but it might be useful to paint the red channel on some special areas

[AFsoccer]

Originally Posted by [R-DEV]Amok@ndy

you can simply do this by decreasing your waterlevel before generating lightmaps

That may work if you want your water more transparent, but it won't help make it more cloudy. Hopefully this new solution will.

[splatters]

Originally Posted by [R-DEV]Amok@ndy

you can simply do this by decreasing your waterlevel before generating lightmaps
but it might be useful to paint the red channel on some special areas

Generating the light maps with a different water level than what will be in the final version might cause some artifacts at the water shores or other bugs since the water level also affects the green (sun light) channel. For example shadows on the water surface would be slightly off.

Simply 'darkening' or adding to the red channel seems safer to me. Don't know if it affects anything else than water transparency and envmap.

The way bf2s water is done is rather suki anyway, the water transparency is actually just the transparency of the water plane and you can peak under it from the transparent parts like seen in the picture below. Terrain is obscured but the statics and other objects are visible from as far as the view distance allows, water fog settings appear to have an effect only when you're under water
Thats something to keep in mind when editing the water transparency, maybe it's just a matter of finding the golden mean..




p.s. I'm still in need of a satisfying answer to this question, it was actually the most important one:

The sprucetree objects have a good bark texture in the files, color is very much the same as on the trees here in Finland but in game the color of the trees is more of urine than that of spruce bark. There are some weird gradient colormaps in the texture folder like
objects/vegitation/asia/textures/nccolor.dds

I suppose those have something to do with it. The question is how can I change the tint of the trees?

p.p.s. Just a curiosity, don't really need it for my map but for messing around. I know that you can get the view distance beyond 1000 m but can't do that in the editor, it's limited to 1000. How do I change that? - Edit once more: just got an answer to that but still don't know how to get view distance beyond 1k in-game.

[Amok@ndy]

Originally Posted by splatters

p.p.s. Just a curiosity, don't really need it for my map but for messing around. I know that you can get the view distance beyond 1000 m but can't do that in the editor, it's limited to 1000. How do I change that? - Edit once more: just got an answer to that but still don't know how to get view distance beyond 1k in-game.

open your init.con and modify the Viewdistance (save and read-only or the editor will overwrite it)

[Amok@ndy]

are you still workin on this splatters ?

[splatters]

Originally Posted by [R-DEV]Amok@ndy

are you still workin on this splatters ?

Slowed down a little but yes. I'm not working on the map currently per se but on the finnish statics (including texture palettes etc). I decided to do a decent amount of those before starting to place any statics in the map.

[Amok@ndy]

im workin on a european based map atm, would be nice to have a look at your statics
if you like you could pass over some screens per pm

cheers @ndy