Call for bugs

#21 A minor visual bug I noticed today while flying around looking at the new terrain :)

When the camera is just starting to move under the water it seems to be not quite able to decide whether it is under water or above water (you get a brief flash of normal terrain at the lower half of the screen).

If you move backwards in a slight upward direction from under water to above water (or vice versa) there is a transition from above water to below water where normally shaded terrain is visible as the water plane/screen intersection moves up/down your screen which is the flash you see when moving quickly.

Screenshot is from the terrain water demo with the (Atlas) terrain changed to the high detail download version. The same behaviour can be seen in the stock demo mission.

EDIT: URL :/

#22 How about sound? Or is that planned for a later milestone?

#23 @David - That is a common flaw in just about all games/engines. It seems like a nice little project for someone to take on and contribute back to head. The question is what should you do in that case? In the past i've fudged things pushing the water level slightly down or up to be sure that you do not get that front plane clipping. It wasn't a great solution, but it was better than nothing IMO. We should look to doing something better than that.

#24 @Tom - I mentioned it because I had never seen it in TGE - perhaps I never looked hard enough.

#25 Pretty sure sound works or very nearly works at this point in TSE dev.

#26 Just want to say thanks again for the feedback guys.

@David - yeah, that's a bit of a problem to solve; the camera is clipping the water poly and it hasn't gone below it yet so the underwater shading isn't on. The "underwater shading" is just a cheesy full screen quad rendered over everything, so you can't just turn that on when you get near the water surface. I'm curious to see how Tom's adjustment looks.

@Stefan - the audio was ported over from TGE recently. Let us know if you are seeing problems with it.

@Jameson - Ben and I have been talking about doing a special foliage system for TSE. The terrain really needs it. We'll look at it some more after we release TSE 1.0. Support for .fx will probably not happen - there's too many problems with that format. The specular issue is definitely on the list for fixing.

On Material docs; I added a little bit more documentation in there for MS2, in the TSEDoc.chm that's checked in. There's more info on the water and terrain in there as well. I number of people have requested better Material docs, can you guys elaborate on what you are looking for? Better/more code documentation? An overview on the code modules and how they work together? More docs on the Material script interface?

I'd also like a clarification on the camera jittering. Are you talking about constant lurching behavior, or just occasional jittering when certain parts of the scene are visible for the first time (ie texture/shader loading)?



Thanks!

#27 @Brian - How easy would it be to calculate the line of intersection between the water poly and camera plane then use this line as a variable top edge for your underwater shading quad? I dont think you would notice a little bit of overdraw onto the water either due to the angle you are seeing the water at.

#28 @David - It wouldn't be too bad... it's a collision between two planes (the water plane and the front clipping plane). Someone should try this. =)

#29 Or is the jumpiness an intermittent lurching? (Ie, ok for about a second, then a lurch, then another second of OK running?)

#30 Oh, sound was ported? I'll check it out tonight, thanks Brian and Ben.

#31 I'll try to describe the camera jumping a litter better Brian. First of all it only happens in windowed mode as Ben pointed out at another thread. Also, you must be in 3rd person OR camera mode. Haven't tried it in first person actually and don't have TSE on this PC at the moment.

Now if you hold down the forward key (W) constantly, in regular intervals of about 1 second, the camera jumps. During that 1 second it runs smooth, then jumps.

Also, if you fly with the camera above the water and STAND STILL, the water "pauses" it's animation every one second. During that one second, the waves run smooth, then pause for a split second. The water pausing intervals are equal to the camera jumping intervals.

I hope you understand now. If it's any help, I have a Radeon 9500 128MB. And remember, it doesn't happen in full screen mode.

Nick

#32 Thanks Nick, yeah, that's what I saw when testing the FX5500. That's good I can repro, I'll take a look.

#33 I experienced a issue with incredibly low framerate and artifacts

it happens when i face a village with many houses (difs) all standing close to each other.
Suddenly the Framerate drops from 130fps to 6fps and i see pink artifacts there and all houses are not affected by fog.
when i get close to the village terrain textures start to freak out.

When i quit the engine the logfile shows a remaining refcount of 6 for Direct3D (a memoryhole maybe?)

i use a Geforce 3 on a x64 system with older drivers (because NVIDIA stopped supporting Geforce 3 in their x64 drivers)
i used an unmodified HEAD build from yesterday and just switched mission files of the water demo

i'll try to verify this issue on a radeon later and try to make screenshots of the artifacts

Florian

EDIT: Here is a screen showing what i'm talking about


this is what it looks like in TGE with Lighting Pack
www.seelentanz.de/aim/media/screenshot_03.jpg

EDIT No: 2

The Radeon doesnt have this issue... the Lighting on the buildings doesnt look very good but thats it...

but it shows a RefCount of 5 on the Radeon Card (running under 32bit windows xp btw)

#34 Couple of things I've seen worthy of investigation...

1) Camera stutters like others here have mentioned.
2) Alpha sorting issues, specifically with alpha blended objects over the top of the water. Seems like my planes propeller motion blur image isnt getting sorted properly with the water shader. Might be card specific though.. have a look for yourself, I sent a demo to ben.

Other things:

Ive seen some weird artefacts on the water, when using a geforce 5750, the water at the extreme angles (i.e. where it meets the horizon) gets sparklies. Doesnt occur on the shader 2.0 using a radeon 9700.

Can you document the rotations needed to go from a skybox setup in torque to a env map setup in TSE? its not the same orientation :)

#35 OK Phil, I'll look at the sorting issues with the plane; it's probably not card specific.

Yeah, I'll get to the cubemap docs some day. In the mean time, search for "cubic environment mapping" in the DirectX docs for how the cube maps are laid out. Hopefully that makes sense and saves some time.

#36 The camera stutter I think is caused by the terrain. Increasing the tree depth when creating the .chu file seems to fix it for me, looks to be a relationship between the tree depth and the tile spacing, and some terrian files I made with smaller tile sizes I needed to increase the tree depth before the stuttering stopped.