Battlezone Forums

Is it possible to bring back the smooth terrain rendering feature from 1.2? I'd like to be able to play on high sky detail without having to worry about sloppy cliff births like I did back in 1.2.

sky.renderbeforeterrain kind of does this but I'd like something like that without being able to see the dome through the terrain from <50m.

Or do you guys plan on fixing this in the future? Perhaps in a new patch I believe?

Probably not. These visual issues can be reduced by careful setting up of the sky, fog and visibility settings by map makers.
Some of old bz2's effects , like ground fog and the distance blending, where not implemented because of the amount of excessive processing they would require in dx9. High speed gaming is more fun than an overheating processor and treacle like performance.
Setting sky.visibility and sky.fogrange to the same distance minimizes the sudden appearance of terrain effect a bit.

One of the reasons this was so apparent in 1.2 was cause you could freely set visible distance and fog, and since most did you kind of had to follow to stay on par with your opponent. This no longer is the case and mapmakers now can actually dictate how the map should look/feel/play.

try playing the latest G66 for an example of dynamically altering the vis and fog range and lighting as time progresses. you can also set it to be static, like starting and playing at different times of day and night. set the times and static/dynamic transitions in extra options.

So basically this is an unrestoreable feature that is seperated from when the transition from DX6 to DX9 was made?

Community Project 2 somehow brought this effect back, any clues how?

sorry, just noticed this, too

it is probably done via the dll, but i am not sure.

It's just sky settings.

I wouldn't mind knowing what those settings are. I think the apparent bugs with sky+renderbeforeterrain have to do with the way that the textures or dome geometry is set up, and can be helped out by adjusting the texture or dome distance but it seems to be imperfect. It would be nice if I could study those skies so I can figure out how to backport pre-DX9 fog to some of our existing maps.

The best visual settings are to have sky.fogrange and sky.visibilityrange at the same or very close settings, other factors come into play too such as fog density/range/break, dome type or the texture it displays. Dome lighting could be of some help, but as far as I can tell its mostly broken from the console. There are "place holder" lights added in the 1.3 pack that are used for sky lighting.