Things I miss! :) - GSH

[jaydenbz2]

Hi, I would like to make a few requests...graphical requests.

If these are simply not possible then so be it.

I miss the old fog system which nicely blends the sky and the fog together so as to not create harsh terrain silhouettes, also, adds... HEAPS of immersiveness.

The new fog system from my current observations is either not working properly since sky.fogbreak does not work and the only alternative to fog rendering is fog.renderbeforeterrain, which looks terrible.

FOG is one of the key things that made me like bz2, the fog actually *looked cool...so please if any more graphical changes are made fixing the fog would be a VERy, VERy awesome way to help modders make the maps look much nicer...

This could be useful?
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library ... s.85).aspx

...Since I think this is direct x9 fog, whatever the old one was it was looking much better than the new one which is weird...

Thoughts?

[bigbadbogie]

I miss the old fog system which nicely blends the sky and the fog together so as to not create harsh terrain silhouettes, also, adds... HEAPS of immersiveness.

I completely agree. This would be a massive improvement for QF2, not to mention all other mods and the original game. It's one of the few graphical issues for which there is no work-around. You just have to suffer it.

1.2 and prior did not experience this, or even the early 1.3s. I'm pretty sure it didn't arise until the DX9 upgrade, which was around pb4 (2008-09) -- when I was working on FS2.

I think that large-object silhouettes are even worse than terrain silhouettes.

[Zero Angel]

From my observations, sky.fogbreak used to work like D3DFOG_EXP2 or f = 1/e^((d*density)^2)

[jaydenbz2]

I'm glad there is agreement, We should try to articulate the problem though.

From what I've heard yes it is a dx9 port error; when the code was ported over...

THIS:


Looks great.

THIS:



NOT SO GOOD.

(Talking about the fog here )

Future mods and even existing ones could look so much better with something that emulates that old fog look.

[MrTwosheds]

I found its best to set visibility range and fog range to the same values, so that texture appears as soon as the fog starts to drop below %100.
Another possible work around is to make a sky dome with is edges faded out by alpha channel, to fade the sudden appearance of terrain in front of the dome, this however limits you to a static dome and does not effect sprites.

[Red Devil]

an item was created in the bug database for this issue and comparison screenshots added to illustrate the differences and it was noted that fixing this would be a giant pain, especially considering there are more pressing issues around and extremely limited time and resources available.

the best way to counter this that i have found is to remove the fog at night and have it close in during the day to limit the terrain clipping. you can see an example of this in the most recent G66 release, however, after playing Borderlands 2 and Tomb Raider (2013), i am going to modify the settings to try to make it more like BL2/TR (not so dark at night, although i love the lighting in Arma 3 - BOO! )

edit: forgot to mention that Slaor had a neat trick of setting the start of fog to a negative value, so that it started behind you, which helps.

[jaydenbz2]

Thanks "GSH".

Pressing issues?

[Red Devil]

i'm not pretending to be him; just couldn't sleep and saw this and thought i'd respond to help. disregard.

[GSH]

Try changing the dometype. If it is set to an even value (0, 2, 4, 6, ...), then fogging is NOT applied. If it is set to an odd value, then fogging IS applied. Also, if the sky's ambient color is not the same as the world's ambient color, it has to do a D3D flush to reset that color. So, try making them one and the same.

The old fogging code was done 100% on the CPU. It's not simple at all to do a port over.

As I tell all bug reporters: screenshots don't really help debug this. Actual working maps are more useful.

-- GSH