wraitii

I can confirm this. And if the map is intended to be the Loire, I'd recommend making the river a tad larger. Thing's big.

To be perfectly logical, shouldn't that actually be reversed? Make a lot of money selling to the foreign market, make little selling the ally's goods in yours? I'm thinking a 80/20 mechanic would work better than a full 100/0 here.

BTW, I've given a shot at this but it wasn't so good, so I've restarted slightly the other day but I've been busy with the water stuff so if somebody else wants to give a go at texturing it, I'm OK with it

We'll change things when we get that in. But yes, it does look very nice thanks to the depth buffer (particularly around edges, where the normal fancy way gives really wrong results in some cases). I think I'll pick the second option, it sounds like it's the most obvious and the easiest one to implement. Atlas is slow because it recreates the texture every frame, in case the water height has changed. It ought to only when the water height changes, or it could be deactivated in Atlas... Is there a way to know in-code if it's Atlas or not? That should be a very easy fix.

Allright, I've finished the "clean" version. It fixes most remaining problems: water texture/foam texture looping issues, small depth buffer things that could prove distracting, and MEM_ACCESS crashes (I don't think there remains any, but it's always possible that there's a well hidden rare case). The only thing lacking is waves, but in the concern of putting this in the game, and since I believe there will be a lot of trial and error with waves, and I'm not there this week-end+, I think it's better. So it's all committed here. I'm not sure what the procedure on committing to SVN is, I don't think I can do it, or at least am unsure. Since there are probably other modifications than strictly the water stuff in this branch (which I believe I forked from myconid's merged branch some time ago, and anyway it's not up-to-date with SVN), would it be better if I took a clean SVN, merged with the water patch myself (by hand?), and then committed those files/gave those files to someone who can commit? Is the GIT mirror for SVN up-to-date? In this case I could fork that and patch, and then it'd probably be easier to put into SVN.

I do realize that . Okay, so I'm not happy with how the waves look. I could pull out a sort of workable system that would be bugged in some situations but would work in others, but I don't think it's really that good-looking (and given how the rest of the water now looks, I feel it's a step back). Therefore, I'll now try to clean up my patch for the water (without the waves) so it can be put, whatever happens, in alpha 11, and then I'll work on another solution for the waves: cutting the water mesh in two: a "coastal" part and a "high sea" part, that will allow me to have both shaders more efficient at what they do (the main bulk of the code would be the same, but some stuffs about foam or reflections could slightly change). With that system, I'll get rid of annoying mesh and z-fighting issues, and I think I could pull of some niceties a-la AOE3. Perhaps. Not as good. Perhaps. If that's okay with you.

Could use a stronger orange under the forest, but I really like the grass there.

Wouldn't it be easier to store them in subfolders?

I'll give a look at their shaders, could always learn something. I've got a system that should be all-right, but won't look that good…

Thing is, I don't think proper waves texture will do given the way this works. The necessity to do it 360° means that even when upscaling (what I've got on my working copy) there will be some (pretty serious) artifacts. The other solution would be to put waves only in some places, but that wouldn't work so well I think. The best is probably to use a 1 dimensional gradient and then apply a texture (like my foam texture) to re-create the illusion. I'm not surprised that even Red Alert 3 doesn't have waves on the shores. I'm still pondering simply having this done texturally to have the shape of the coast correctly.

You can probably merge some things together. In the ARB shader, to stay under the 8 texcoords used, I had to put the v_tex and the v_los vec2 together in a vec_4, for example.

Okay, so I've finished my first shot at waves. It rocks along with the foam, slightly moves up and down but not too much. The vertices are a bit rough, it doesn't look extremely smooth, there are a few textures that get squished here and there. I haven't had time yet to do that. The system is pretty easy to understand, harder to have in practice: I basically look for the shore, create a point there and another a bit farther at sea, and then connect all those contiguous points. This has the benefit of completely lacking the "holes" or overlapping when using quads. It may however produce artifacts if the water is a too concave pond (I think the RM map Oasis should be able to showcase that), or when two patches of land are too close together. The effect is sort of scaled with waviness for now, but it's not perfect. Here's the mesh around the afore-screenshoted island (you can see why it doesn't look smooth: it's pinned to the vertices' position to some extent): Here's two shots showing the waves when far from the shore and when on the beach: I'll try to smooth the effect now, and fix a few problems, and treat a few special cases. If somebody cares, it would be great to have a nice animated wave texture (from the sea on to the crashing on the beach, then the starting to retreat to the water). Or at least something a tad nicer than what I've added. Warning: I have not really optimized the wave mesh generation, so Atlas may be very slow for now. Also, it only works on superfancy, I think. It may crash in some circumstances, I haven't really tested yet.

Got some quad stuff going on with the waves, but I'm not really happy with it. It either looks rough (given that to do that properly I must go 360), or there's clipping problems... or rendering problems. And I can have other issues with concave stuffs, and with angles getting weird. I may go with some clever texturing job, or some clever axis-aligned quad, it looks like it would basically be easier and just as good. I'll see.

I think you should aim for half way between the first and last draft. If that doesn't work, choose the first.

I still think your HDR looks oversaturated, Myconid. While I like the effect for a screenshot, it'd probably get tedious in-game. Of course, you've probably set that as a setting by now .

Looks better. I wouldn't mind if you added to the grass small patches of leaves / small leaves here and there (or a "grass and leaves" terrain).

Reminds me of some AOE3's screenshots (which is a good thing). It's perhaps a little too saturated, and a little too orange (needs small blots of green here and there, some more yellow stuffs, some more fed). It also looks like you painted grass, when it look more like leaves to me (I'm not sure what you exactly did, though). edit: but overall, it's gorgeous!

I should be able to convert it to normal maps, though it might take me a bit of time, but that's not really a problem. For other textures... If you find a way to make the caustic light map nice, that would be interesting (as a decal), because I don't think I can reuse the trick I'm using for foam.

I take it from TRAC that Alpha 11 is for mid-late august. I'm fairly confident this should take no more than 2 weeks to wrap up. To give a todo list: -Need to fix all and any segfaults/bad memory accesses. -Need to have waves (I'm on that but for some reason it doesn't work I'll investigate). -Need to redo the scenario and random map water settings (probably quick, but necessary). -Should try to definitely fix some border issues on the super fancy shader. Since I distort the depth buffer, it gives a few quirky pixels. It's certainly fixable, however.

It breaks every map in that every map's setting will probably have to be adjusted if we use some changes. If you want to push quick changes, it's probably better to use myconid's watertest or biwater branches, which are cheap improvements. However, depending on when Alpha 11 is set to be released, this may still make alpha 11.

I'll take a look at that in the debugger. Since the water code doesn't really rely on anything else in the game, it's completely possible that there are special cases I haven't yet considered that would crash. In particular since I'm not the most proficient programmer.

I'll have to look into that, I get segfaults but only in Atlas and it seems unrelated to what I'm doing. I've updated on my local repo the fancy shader, but I don't think I've committed that yet. I'm moving on to waves, and per Mythos' advice, will have to give a thorough look at the decal code. BTW, since this is really a complete modification of how refraction worked in the water, I believe every map would need an update. The good thing is that Water Color is now not only used for the fixed function water, so there is a lesser chance of map makers forgetting to change it from the normal blue.

I'll try to finish the water stuffs (notably waves) first, and then port everything else to ARB, I'll check at that time, but there's no reason to imagine it wouldn't work.

Finished fiddling... This should be customizable and good-looking enough. Under this system, the water refraction is modified by depth and murkiness. The deeper/murkier, the more tinted toward "Water Colour", and the more the objects underwater are tinted toward "Water Tint" (! both colours can be very different). Usually, the ground will begin being tinted by Water Tint, and then Water Colour will take over at higher depths. By adjusting murkiness, the depth where the water is completely "Water Colour"-ed can be changed, so you can simulate very muddy water or very clear waters. Furthermore, sky reflection is less visible (at higher angles. In the distance, it's still basically the same). Had a little fun with the scenario editor... Here's the real thing, and here's the fake: (Still have to change the normal fancy water shader to sort of emulate this, though). @Zoot: should be able to. Edit: Sigh, now I want to make a "Polynesia" random map.

Myconid's improvement with normal's blending is what really cuts it when animated, it looks so smooth and watery like. The rest is just eye-candy (though I'm fairly happy with the foam.) I'm fiddling with the refraction/reflection settings again. I think I'll aim for more realism, so water will always be fairly dark when it's deep, even if the water tint is light (murkiness being the limiting factor once more). I'll have water tint color the objects below, and I'll probably lower the amount of sky reflection, it's too high right now (case here, there or even here).