Coast/Lake/Major River Anomaly

[Mike Dora 171]

In the last couple of weeks I've been tinkering with Stary's new seasonal terrains to enhance Edward's Flanders and Gepard's Vosgesen. Thanks to a lot of help from Stary, I'm happy to report that these terrains now have the same excellent seasonal effects as Cambrai and Verdun.

 

There's one snag that's still bothering me though (which I hasten to say, pre-dates Stary's recent work). In both Flanders and Vosgesen, there's an odd change of land "brightness" and water shade at the coastal and Rhine River tiles respectively. On checking, I find a similar (though less marked) problem with the lake edges in Verdun, please see the attachments.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Does anyone know how to sort these issues, is there a tile-specific "shade/brightness" parameter tucked away somewhere?

 

Thanks

 

Mike

[Panama Red 22]

What you have is two differnt color tiles meeting. The only way that this can be fixed (that I know of) is coloring one or the other tiles to match. This is one of the downsides of "mixing & matching" terrain sets.

[+Stary 2,427]

Panama Red's correct.

 

The 3rd pic (bridge) -it's the custom Rhine tile coloured a bit differently that's not matching the (slightly different) color palette of my tileset than defalut one.

 

The others -check for the frlake.tga tile from my "visual upgrade pack".

[Mike Dora 171]

Panama Red's correct.

 

The 3rd pic (bridge) -it's the custom Rhine tile coloured a bit differently that's not matching the (slightly different) color palette of my tileset than defalut one.

 

The others -check for the frlake.tga tile from my "visual upgrade pack".

 

Thanks guys

 

I appreciate that this is looking like a long shot. BTW the frlake.tga tile is there, in all main terrain "front" folder (Fla/Cam/Ver/Vos) and all the seasonal folders (though I notice that the "water" area appears darker than in the other "coastal" *tga files).

 

Do you think it might be possible to fix this "different shade" issue by fiddling with the "color" lines in the relevant Texture0** sections of the *_data.ini file? I ask because I notice that these color parameters for the frlake.tga tiles, especially the first number, seem very different from the colour parameters for the "lakeside" tiles in several of the terrains. The following extracts from the ww1verdun_data.ini file show what I mean (recall that the screenshot shows that the middle water area of the Verdun lake appears darker than the lakeside water areas) :

 

[Texture087]

Filename=FrLake.TGA

HasWater=2

Color=0.059937,0.159937,0.173565

 

[Texture090]

Filename=FrLake2Farm25.TGA

HasWater=1

HeightMap=FrLake2Farm25_hm.BMP

HeightMapScale=10.000000

Color=0.148263,0.229823,0.199033

 

[Texture091]

Filename=FrLake2Farm50.TGA

HasWater=1

HeightMap=FrLake2Farm50_hm.BMP

HeightMapScale=10.000000

Color=0.227466,0.293988,0.221188

 

[Texture092]

Filename=FrLake2Farm75.TGA

HasWater=1

HeightMap=FrLake2Farm75_hm.BMP

HeightMapScale=10.000000

Color=0.289184,0.345524,0.237826

 

BTW, while I'm at it, does anyone know what the different "HasWater" parameters do?

 

Sorry to keep chipping away, but as I've admitted in other threads, all the improvements in FE seem to have made me a bit greedy to "have it all"!!

 

Thanks again

 

Mike

[NathanKell 0]

The one other issue you may be hitting is the plane the water shader is rendered on is a set amount above sea level, which, when the heighmap for the shore is not flat (or the height mesh has too little detail) can lead to the terrain mesh clipping into the water mesh (load up Gepard's Test Terrain and look at the lake in the center for an example, or at least such is the case for me).

 

My WAGuess on the color is that they're for computing shading. It may just be a straight-up average of the color in the image (and I'd have to do find how to do pixel sums in Photoshop, I know you can)--that is, the lake and the shore are going to be radically different because (a) shore has all that green (and nontrivial amount of red) and (b) shore will be significantly brighter.

 

What's the last pic from, btw? (the rest I recognize the issue, but the last...shouldn't be there, as Stary says--frlake is replaced along with the frlake2 tiles)

 

As a stopgap for Flanders, you can use Sopwith Snipe's Max188-in-Flanders mod, which uses Max's hires terrain (follow the instructions). That will at least give you tiles with the same layout as stock and Stary's terrains, though of course the color will be off.

<horn tooting>You can also grab my snow package, and/or the summer one too (which itself requires Sopwith Snipe's)</horn tooting>

 

EDIT: One other thing. You can ease troubleshooting by pointing _all_ terrains to a single set of season folders (by putting all of the "main folder" tiles into a new Stary_Summer folder too, and having no days during the year that are not defined as a season). This way you only have to check one set of tiles in each case, and any change you make is applied globally.

Still have to update the terrain_data INIs though, but you can make one master list of tiles and copy-paste to all _data INIs.

 

Still have to copy the TODs everywhere, though--they don't get picked up by seasons, or at any rate (even if they are, which, honestly, I never thought to check) it's cheaper to have the TODs in every terrain folder than in every season folder!

Edited September 12, 2009 by NathanKell