Jump to content
The Dark Mod Forums

Water too fast


Tels

Recommended Posts

Here is one thing that already bothered me in the past: Our water is waay to busy. It wiggles and the waves lap very fast. This looks quite odd when you have a very small water boy (like a sink or a puddle), but it doesn't even look good if you have a larger water body.

 

The only case where it would look good is if you have a strong wind, but since the vegetation isn't swaying in the wind, the water body looks even more wrong.

 

Looking at the material shaders, it seems easy to modify this (just reduce the factor which the time is multiplied, e.g. from 0.1 to 0.02).

 

However, I'd be interested in hearing what others think and if we should make this change globally. It won't break any missions, it will just make them look more realistic :)

 

The other option is that we double all the various water surface shaders and then the mappers are tasked with the ardous task of always adjusting their water bodies.

 

Which means they need:

 

* to know they can do this (we often had the case that mappers didn't know the most "obvious" things, even team members often fall for this)

* have to redo it everytime they add water

 

IMO it would be better if the defaults are sane.

 

I toyed around with the values of water_green, and about half the factor makes it look already much better. I'll post two videos for comparisation shortly.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yeah, I posted something similar in some random thread a while back. I do think that we need some less aggressive looking water, for lack of a better word. Some nice smooth ripples moving around and just keeping the surface look like a slow flow. If this can be generated by something I guess you could adapt it into a faster flowing version for small rivers and such.

 

I like some of the examples on: Splash Damage Wiki - Water Surfaces However I've never thought of a good way to generate some of the parts or if the shaders are possible.

 

I guess procedurally generating the water heightmaps for normals wouldnt be too hard, but it's a lot of time needed to get 'right'. Maybe someone in the community is interested tho. I'd normally give it a shot but I'm doing some pretty good work elsewhere atm.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yeah, I posted something similar in some random thread a while back. I do think that we need some less aggressive looking water, for lack of a better word. Some nice smooth ripples moving around and just keeping the surface look like a slow flow. If this can be generated by something I guess you could adapt it into a faster flowing version for small rivers and such.

 

I like some of the examples on: Splash Damage Wiki - Water Surfaces However I've never thought of a good way to generate some of the parts or if the shaders are possible.

 

I guess procedurally generating the water heightmaps for normals wouldnt be too hard, but it's a lot of time needed to get 'right'. Maybe someone in the community is interested tho. I'd normally give it a shot but I'm doing some pretty good work elsewhere atm.

 

Hm, I am not sure what you mean. Our water shader has this:

 

           translate    0.01 * sintable[time * 0.2], 0.01 * sintable[time * 0.22]
           scale 0.5,0.5
        }
...
        {
                vertexProgram heatHazeWithMask.vfp
                vertexParm 0 time * 0.1 , time * 0.5

 

And if you replace this with:

 

           translate    0.01 * sintable[time * 0.08], 0.01 * sintable[time * 0.09]
               vertexParm 0 time * 0.04 , time * 0.20

 

you get much slower moving waves already. It is just a problem that each modification needs its own material and that the current defaults are way to "wavy and fast".

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I had a hard time finding the right water for my puddle, and finally stuck with a very tiny resolution, but not ideal.

 

Another option is to make a set of new textures rather than changing existing ones though.

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I tend to agree with the sentiment of not changing stuff in place, but I think exceptions MIGHT be made if EVERYONE agrees that the old water sucks in all cases.

 

If there is even ONE author who liked it the way it is in their mission, I suppose it should remain and just have new ones added, but does such an author exist???

shadowdark50.gif keep50.gif
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I wasn't suggesting changing at all :)

 

Hm, I am not sure what you mean. Our water shader has this:

 

I meant if we could emulate the shaders from ETQW to work in TDM, since they do have some really nice water which would go well in most locations, unlike the current samples which are for the most part very hard to actually use. However when I tried a few months back I got quite confused, but it'd be nice to see someone with a better understanding of shaders and such to have a look.

 

I guess it comes down to "Can we animate the water texture map to stop the material looking so static" at the moment water just looks like a sheet that sort of shifts around.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Absolutely. Don't change what we have. Make new versions but don't change existing water surfaces.

 

Erm, yes, why did I waste my time explaining why I'd rather have the existing ones changed?

 

Seems we just pile on more and more stuff instead of ever fixing the problematic stuff we have :(

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I wasn't suggesting changing at all :)

 

I meant if we could emulate the shaders from ETQW to work in TDM, since they do have some really nice water which would go well in most locations, unlike the current samples which are for the most part very hard to actually use. However when I tried a few months back I got quite confused, but it'd be nice to see someone with a better understanding of shaders and such to have a look.

 

I guess it comes down to "Can we animate the water texture map to stop the material looking so static" at the moment water just looks like a sheet that sort of shifts around.

 

Er, I just wanted a 2 minute fix to the horrible default values of the shift and waves-height, not creating all new water shaders, fake cubemap reflections, add possible code support for this and so on.... You know, I a have a life, too :)

 

In any event, I spent now over one hour recording a video, and then trying to transcode it to something that might be viewable by someone without Linux. That entire video-coded stuff is such a horrible mess (and quite nicely documented, too *sarcastic*) that I installed about half a dozend codecs, programs, GUIs for them etc and all I managed was an .OGV (not viewable by most, and a whopping 34 Mbytes) and an .AVI (horrible quality)... Finally found the magic incantation:

 

mencoder input.avi -of mpeg -mpegopts format=mpeg1:tsaf:muxrate=2000 \
   -o output.mpg -oac lavc -lavcopts acodec=mp2:abitrate=224 -ovc lavc \
   -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg1video:vbitrate=1152:keyint=15:mbd=2:aspect=4/3

 

See, it's easy! But I digress:

 

http://bloodgate.com/mirrors/tdm/pub/video/

 

Ingore the jerky mouse and the low quality please.

 

Anyway, all the time I could possible spent on improving the water has already be wasted trying to argue my point, trying to show the effect, and then toying around with it. Now I run out of time and will simply do nothing at all, just returning to coding. At least there I get some results... </bitter rant>

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I just checked in a new file called material/tdm_water_slow.mtr which contains three copied water shaders (water_green_slow, water_colored_slow and water_blue_slow) which have their waves about half as high and about half as fast moving.

 

Th values can be tweaked of course, and if somebody wants to make that the new default, then please either post here (after the consens) or just do it by copying the values back to tdm_water.mtr.

 

Now back to coding :ph34r:

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

Link to comment
Share on other sites

There's nothing there...?

 

Uh, yeah, the file vanished from the index after the upload finished. Huh?

 

It is still there, tho:

 

http://bloodgate.com/mirrors/tdm/pub/video/tdm_water.mpg

 

Can you download it?

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yeah, I dont really have a problem. The only place I think someone has used fast flowing water for a reason was Fids.

 

If it still looks 'fast' there, I don't see what the problem would be :)

 

And I'll investigate my pretty wanter another time... when I feel like throwing away some of that time! :D

 

(and since we're on this topic: I spent about 10 hours last night debugging the PIL TGA loader to support tagged images. If the first byte of a TGA contains a value, that value is used to denote the length of the ID after the static length header. 67 files in TDM have these IDs for some or other reason most likely the app they were saved in. So the change is simple, check the value and offset the initial raw read by that. Almost 10 hours later it still isn't working. Why isn't it working? I've now rewritten the whole image codec, there is no problem with it... well I go and accidentally manage to work out that some code changed 10 years ago making these images be identified as PCX files (but since it doesnt fail to read them, only parses incorrect data and then stays silent it doesnt tell you!). I change a single line in the PCX codec and everything works flawlessly.)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yeah, I dont really have a problem. The only place I think someone has used fast flowing water for a reason was Fids.

 

If it still looks 'fast' there, I don't see what the problem would be :)

 

And I'll investigate my pretty wanter another time... when I feel like throwing away some of that time! :D

 

(and since we're on this topic: I spent about 10 hours last night debugging the PIL TGA loader to support tagged images. If the first byte of a TGA contains a value, that value is used to denote the length of the ID after the static length header. 67 files in TDM have these IDs for some or other reason most likely the app they were saved in. So the change is simple, check the value and offset the initial raw read by that. Almost 10 hours later it still isn't working. Why isn't it working? I've now rewritten the whole image codec, there is no problem with it... well I go and accidentally manage to work out that some code changed 10 years ago making these images be identified as PCX files (but since it doesnt fail to read them, only parses incorrect data and then stays silent it doesnt tell you!). I change a single line in the PCX codec and everything works flawlessly.)

 

Hah, welcome to the club. I haven't got combined clipmodels working *yet*. Any day now! :D

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

Link to comment
Share on other sites

No, forbidden.

 

Edit: Odd. Firefox says forbidden. wget downloads it fine. :ph34r:

 

Yeah, I have a referer check for MPG, wget sends empty referer => good, firefox sends modetwo.net => bad. Changed .htaccess, so it should work now when linked from here, too. Sorry about the mess :blush:

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'll put my post down here since it's moving so fast:

---------

 

Edit: Odd. Firefox says forbidden. wget downloads it fine. :ph34r:

 

Edit Edit: After downloading though, I can't play it.

 

Edit Edit Edit: I'm going for a record here. Not in mplayer or media player. But it does work in VLC. Both the fast and slower versions look pretty nice, IMO. They have specific uses. In the wrong sized pool, the slow one can look like slow motion or the fast like chipmunk speed. So why not both? What's the debate?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'll put my post down here since it's moving so fast:

---------

 

That's what she said :D

 

Edit: Odd. Firefox says forbidden. wget downloads it fine. :ph34r:

Edit Edit: After downloading though, I can't play it.

Edit Edit Edit: I'm going for a record here. Not in mplayer or media player. But it does work in VLC. Both the fast and slower versions look pretty nice, IMO. They have specific uses. In the wrong sized pool, the slow one can look like slow motion or the fast like chipmunk speed. So why not both? What's the debate?

 

Even the slow one would only work if you have at least some wind. But wind = moving vegetaion, blowing leaves, smoke trailing etc and we don't have any of this (and if it is done, it is very complicated and sucks performance). This leaves you usually with a "no wind, calm night" scenarios and there the fast water looks absolutely wrong.

 

Why not both? Needless repetiton of materials, mappers need to choose (need to know they can choose and how etc).

 

Also, even if we have both, one must be the default :)

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Okay, guys, you can slap me with a wet noodle... sometimes I am bit dumb :blush:

 

Apart from the issue "what should be the default speed", there is the issue "how do we let the mapper select the speed". And it just occured to me we could change the materials so they use shaderparms. Then the mapper can just add spawnargs to the water body, and the wave speed/wave height will adjust accordingly. You could even change it at runtime...

 

I might not have time tonight and thus not before 20.9.2010, so if someone wants to try this, be my guest :)

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Well, we do have particle leaf trees... wind blowing... And as in NHAT you can just put rotate props on vegetation (sure that's how it was done) which works good and is probably better than animated models (big file size though I'm not sure about performance - I don't see why models with one or two bones playing an anim idle would have a big performance impact though)

 

Trailing smoke... well.. the particle editor crashes on me right now, but I'd be suprised if there isn't a trailing option for particles.

Dark is the sway that mows like a harvest

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

  • Recent Status Updates

    • Petike the Taffer

      I've finally managed to log in to The Dark Mod Wiki. I'm back in the saddle and before the holidays start in full, I'll be adding a few new FM articles and doing other updates. Written in Stone is already done.
      · 4 replies
    • nbohr1more

      TDM 15th Anniversary Contest is now active! Please declare your participation: https://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?/topic/22413-the-dark-mod-15th-anniversary-contest-entry-thread/
       
      · 0 replies
    • JackFarmer

      @TheUnbeholden
      You cannot receive PMs. Could you please be so kind and check your mailbox if it is full (or maybe you switched off the function)?
      · 1 reply
    • OrbWeaver

      I like the new frob highlight but it would nice if it was less "flickery" while moving over objects (especially barred metal doors).
      · 4 replies
    • nbohr1more

      Please vote in the 15th Anniversary Contest Theme Poll
       
      · 0 replies
×
×
  • Create New...