Graphics Features

[Pureon]

I like silhouette3 the most too

[k776]

I personally think silhouette2 is nicer. silhouette3 looks more like a painting on the side of a building if the unit is fully behind the building.

Maybe an option to toggle between the two if it isn't difficult?

[feneur]

Just realized bigger objects (objects consisting of many individual actors) make the silhouette appear on themselves:

Now that could be desired behaviour, but imho it isn't. It's a bit confusing, and can be ugly as well.

[Jeru]

Can the PR department ask for some nicer screenshots featuring the silhouettes (without bugs)?

[Ykkrosh]

Should be fixed (just an old typo that affected transparent models).

[feneur]

Should be fixed (just an old typo that affected transparent models).

Aha, good to have it fixed then

[Shield Bearer]

Something I just noticed. Shadows don't fall on water, they pass right through. Thats not how it works in real life. Shadows fall on the surface of the water and(if its shallow) also on the sea bed below. Like this and this. now, i don't think we'll need shadows on the sea bed, but shadows on the surface of the water make it seem much more realistic, imo.

[historic_bruno]

Something I just noticed. Shadows don't fall on water, they pass right through. Thats not how it works in real life. Shadows fall on the surface of the water and(if its shallow) also on the sea bed below. Like this and this. now, i don't think we'll need shadows on the sea bed, but shadows on the surface of the water make it seem much more realistic, imo.

That would look nice, but I wonder how it would affect performance?

[satchitb]

Forgive me for sounding naive, but can't the individual actors in a boat object merged to create a single actor? It seems to me that multiple bugs can arise if these actors function individually, even if the size of the files increases.

[Wijitmaker]

Thought of another feature...

Cloud shadows, rolling slowly across the map.

Westwood RTS engines do a nice job with this. Adds a tinge bit more realism to the player.

[Mythos_Ruler]

This is visible on the terrain in Battle for Middle Earth II as well. It's a nice bit of realism that would help temper our new super bright sun rendering. Perhaps each skybox can come with a corresponding cloudiness factor.

It's subtly visible in this video (I recommend watching in HD so you can see the cloud shadows better). Of course ours can be more stark or more subtle as needed. We don't have to mimic this exactly.

[Ykkrosh]

If we add a weather system then that kind of cloud thing should be good to include (and should be easy, assuming it's basically just a large repeating texture that scrolls across the ground).

Incidentally, I've played a bit with specular maps (currently done by creating a second texture with the specular intensity in the alpha channel, with the assumption that a normal map could be added in the RGB channels at some point in the future; I don't know if that's a convenient way of editing the textures though). It's a simple extension to the shaders, but I think it needs some non-trivial architectural changes to the renderer (to support per-object materials - some need the specular shader, some need the standard shader instead, some might want an alpha-tested material, etc), so unless it's urgently desired I'll probably think about it slowly before getting it to a committable state.

[k776]

Ideally we could support rain and wind as well, since it'd be nice to be able to make a bog lands, or rainforest map at some point.