Water and reflections

[gangrel 1]

Hello,

just began my experience with this amazing piece of software and i cant understand if this is the way the water is supposed to be:

 

 

ok, the white linear stains i suppose to come from the mapper, they should look like waves or sea foam and they give sort of life to the water, nice, but I refer to the whole aspect of water. Is the same in all the maps I saw and I cant understand if there should be at least some sort of ambient reflection in the water and may be also sky... I cant find high-res screenshot to understand.

 

Also: there is a strange wobbly contour on the blackjack and also on the pole but they are really close to the camera not nearby the water...

Is thisa bug? or it's my grafic card?

 

I have a geforce gt640.

 

Thanks everybody! anyway.

[Obsttorte 1524]

Reflective water is extremely resource hungry and therefore only used rarely, for example for a puddle in a small, cramped and low-detailed area. As you can see on your screenie performance is still not optimal, with reflective water it could easely drop to the half or worse (it's a bit like rendering the scene twice).

 

There is the possibility to fake the reflection, but this requires a certain amount of time to be put into it, and most players don't recognize the lack, so it is normally not done.

 

Hope that gives you a clue.

 

Hint: If you concentrate on the things that look good in a mission instead of those who do not, you will be enjoying the game much more

[Bikerdude 3741]

Its an issue with the water shader I beleive and at 'some' point it will have to be fixed

[HMart 334]

IMO the TDM water looks fine, not like the water on the Source engine but it does look like water, the "strange wobbly contour on the blackjack" is indeed a problem with the water shader.

[Springheel 4645]

The issue with weapons being affected in front of water is annoying; I'd love to see that fixed.

[gangrel 1]

Ok, thank you so much every one. It was just to understand. I'm spending a lot of time to configure the game at his best for my (crappy) machine and I was'nt able to understand if I was missing something or not. I played just few missions becouse I think my conf are not at best, becouse I recognize this is an amazing work, really close (and some times better) to the gameplay of a pair of games we loved much.

 

35 fps is average, often is 60 sometimes 12. I have an Athlon dual core 6000 3ghz, geforce gt640 and 3gb ram DDR2. Do you think I can get more fps?

[nbohr1more 2171]

The issue with weapons being affected in front of water is annoying; I'd love to see that fixed.

 

There are options to fix that:

 

http://forums.thedar...on-doom3-world/

 

but I believe they are waiting on Serpentine's changes before going forward.

 

Someone could implement them anyway if the Dhewm3 merge will be taking longer than expected...

Edited February 4, 2014 by nbohr1more

[AluminumHaste 1067]

As far as I know the weapons and things in front of the water being wavy is because it's a post process effect. The area on the screen inside the water has the effect applied, this includes your weapons and the pole on the pier etc. This can only be fixed by changing how Doom 3 renders so that effects like heat haze get applied then the rest of the scene gets rendered over top.

The way it is now, that would just make the game slower.

[RJFerret 270]

I'm spending a lot of time to configure the game at his best for my (crappy) machine

...

Do you think I can get more fps?

 

Tips for performance here: http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Performance_Tweaks

[Springheel 4645]

Someone could implement them anyway if the Dhewm3 merge will be taking longer than expected...

 

Definitely some cool stuff there.

[Obsttorte 1524]

As far as I know the weapons and things in front of the water being wavy is because it's a post process effect. The area on the screen inside the water has the effect applied, this includes your weapons and the pole on the pier etc. This can only be fixed by changing how Doom 3 renders so that effects like heat haze get applied then the rest of the scene gets rendered over top.

The way it is now, that would just make the game slower.

Isn't the post process called from the water material and should therefore only be applied to the surfaces using this material?

[AluminumHaste 1067]

Nope, water material and everything in front of it.

Thanks to rich:

 

_currentRender = what is currently rendered on screen

 

Which is used for heathaze effect, takes what's rendered on screen, the warps the parts that are within the bounds of the (in this case) water.

[nbohr1more 2171]

The problem is sort order. The post-process the water does needs to only affect things rendered behind it. You can sorta fix this now simply by playing with the sort number parameter in the material def but a robust solution that will work properly everywhere needs to hardcode a better sort algorithm for post process shaders of this kind. Sikkpin's code has such fixes but there is a reluctance to investigate it. I would discuss this with Rebb, Obsttorte.

[lost_soul 128]

The grass test map had some VERY nice looking water, and it wasn't slow at all. This was in a large outdoor environment, but granted that there were few lights.

[Springheel 4645]

You can sorta fix this now simply by playing with the sort number parameter in the material def

 

If that's true shouldn't we fix it by default?

 

Sikkpin's code has such fixes but there is a reluctance to investigate it.

 

I don't think there's reluctance...I'm very interested, but it requires a knowledgable person to investigate it, and I'm not sure we have any who aren't busy.

[New Horizon 524]

I wouldn't call it reluctance either. It's simply being cautious. As we've discovered in the past, other graphic fixes had pretty hefty performance hits for many users. It's a trade off. Do you take a performance hit for a minor thing? If it can be done without minimal performance hit, then no worries but generally I've found that anything good always shaves a few more fps off.

[Springheel 4645]

The bottleneck for us with performance is generally AI though, isn't it?

[nbohr1more 2171]

If that's true shouldn't we fix it by default?

 

See this thread:

 

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/15362-patch-rendering-problem/

 

The current sort value may be required for fog to work correctly. Another possible workaround would

be to set the sort value in the player model's material def to nearest or whatever the equivalent sort number.

 

That might interfere with water murk though (fog again).

 

 

I don't think there's reluctance...I'm very interested, but it requires a knowledgable person to investigate it, and I'm not sure we have any who aren't busy.

 

Rebb has commented before regarding his issues with Sikkpin's work (includes other arb programmer's work unattributed, doesn't use proper GPL licenses, etc).

I think he's mostly cleaned-up his act but that may be my own bias for "wanting good fixes". Serpentine has commented that it's likely that Sikkpin's work is a continuation

of the hacks he was doing prior to the GPL release which may introduce codebase stability issues if introduced. From an informal gaze, it doesn't seem that this is the

case. Sikkpin didn't add any sloppy new library dependencies nor did he fix these issues using yet another post process hack. These appear to be true renderer fixes

and they should probably be evaluated for inclusion IMHO.

[Springheel 4645]

These appear to be true renderer fixes

and they should probably be evaluated for inclusion IMHO.

 

I agree, but we're back to

 

it requires a knowledgable person to investigate it, and I'm not sure we have any who aren't busy.

[Obsttorte 1524]

The bottleneck for us with performance is generally AI though, isn't it?

Definetely. As long as they are unalerted and just wandering around they do not much harm, but once a player alerts a high amount of them ...

 

I would also consider this graphical glitch a very minor problem, that besides the possibility of bad side-effects may not be worth the amount of time that has to went into it. I personally don't have the knowledge neither about the TDM source nor graphic programming to fix such an issue, and the other coders around here (which we only have a couple of) seemed busy to me either. But at the end it's someones own decision whether he or she wants to take on this.

 

I may also add that in the 18 months or so for which I'm playing this mod I've never noticed this issue, so it's really, really minor.

[rebb 13]

Afaik Sikkpin's fix is not about removing the issue of things in front of a refracted surface being picked up, but about multiple _currentRender using materials overlapping each other. Something like heat-distortion over a refracting water-shader for example.

 

It's likely doing a _currentRender update after every pass of rendering a material that uses _currentRender, but i might be wrong.

 

It would be possible to reject "things-in-front" inside the shader though, with some extra engine changes ( minor ).

[AluminumHaste 1067]

If that's the case it would just make performance worse.

[Arcturus 694]

The grass test map had some VERY nice looking water, and it wasn't slow at all.

The trick is to set low resolution of the reflection, which not only is faster but also more realistic. I used 128 x 128. Here's mtr file from grass test:

 

arcturus_pool
{

noshadows
noimpact
nonsolid
{
blend	blend
mirrorRenderMap	128	128

translate	0.5, 0.5
scale		0.5, 0.5
}
}

 

[Springheel 4645]

It would be possible to reject "things-in-front" inside the shader though, with some extra engine changes ( minor ).

 

The distortion thing has bugged me for a long time, so I don't know about anyone else, but I'd be excited about that.

[nbohr1more 2171]

Tracker created:

 

http://bugs.thedarkmod.com/view.php?id=3669