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Why moving cloud shadows, but no terrain shading?


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In the meantime I think it is fairly safe to say that there is no terrain shading in CM:SF:

At least the hills in this AAR do not show any, and I cannot think of more extreme terrain:

http://forums.mzocentral.net//index.php?showtopic=18238&pid=248352&st=0entry248352

Since terrain shading would be a great aid in deciphering elevation changes, I am very curious about what prevented the inclusion of such shading, especially since moving cloud shadows are implemented!

Best regards,

Thomm

PS: Drop Team does an awesome job in this respect!

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Originally posted by GreenAsJade:

I thought that terrain shading was one of those "yay at last" things that CMSF was going to bring?

Thank you Sir, I thought I was the only one!

Destraex, I do not imply self-shading or some-such, just some algorithm like Phong shading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phong_shading, which should not affect performance that much?!

Best regards,

Thomm

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Whether it was supposed to be in there or not it would be nice. I am having a hell of a time judging terrain, much more so than in CMx1. It seems even harder than in CMAK desert maps.

I wish there was a false color overlay that you could bring up that would exagerate the contours, or something like that. Although I will say that it really is hard to tell contours in the desert a lot of the time.

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Ah, you mean terrain shading like this:

snap105.jpg

(That's from a game I wrote back in 2000)

Yep, I'd like that here too ;) Especially considering that there are 3 cheap and a few more "proper" ways of doing that in OpenGL. I used the cheap way back then and just took the vertex normals and calculated the lighting according to the sun angle. Works fine, even though it doesn't cast shadows of course. It shouldn't interfere with existing stencil shadowing though.

[ July 31, 2007, 05:45 AM: Message edited by: Blackmuzzle ]

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That's some very nice terrain there, Thomm!

And yes, I do write games in my spare time. Spent much time on Spoonbot for Tribes, then got DerangedRaid to an almost playable state. Eventually I got a job and had no time left for that hobby. Now I'm doing software related to air traffic control, and let me tell you: Quality problems and/or incompetent programmers? They exist in that field of expertise as well.

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What do you mean by "gridded terrain"? Do you mean pre-calculated lightmaps or somesuch?

AFAIK it should be no problem to calculate the normals of all terrain vertices and just adjust the vertice light value accordingly. Alternatively, if all lighting is done via GLSL and the "primitive" opengl lighting is not used at all, a minor shader modification ought to do the trick.

One thing is for certain though: Please don't do lighting the way it is done in BF2. When you have hundreds of megabytes of shadowmaps, then you did not understand the idea of realtime lighting.

OpenGL can do a lot of things, and it certainly can look just as pretty as any other API.

Does it show that I love OpenGL? ;)

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Originally posted by Blackmuzzle:

What do you mean by "gridded terrain"? Do you mean pre-calculated lightmaps or somesuch?

No, no, no!!!

I mean the mods for CMX1 games that simply paint a grid on the terrain texture bmps. Here is one of mine:

CMAK.jpg

For me, those games are unplayable without a mod like this. Seems that the trend continues in CM:SF.

Best regards,

Thomm

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If you ask me as an OpenGL developer, I'd say the omni-light is cranked up way too high. But yes, I do see terrain elevation having an impact on the terrain lighting - even if the effect is too small to really help in discerning the elevation changes.

[ July 31, 2007, 08:51 AM: Message edited by: Blackmuzzle ]

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Originally posted by Steiner14:

A helping workaround for high noon sun or overcast weather could be, that with the push of button, the sun/moon is placed low, in case a grid is technically not possible.

Absolutely agree!

The problem is that you want to decouple terrain shading from drop shadow generation of buildings and objects! That is what I did when I created shadow maps for EYSA: shallow lighting for the terrain and elevated light source for objects. I do not know if this is even theoretically possible in the CM:SF engine.

Best regards,

Thomm

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Originally posted by Rollstoy:

In the meantime I think it is fairly safe to say that there is no terrain shading in CM:SF:

At least the hills in this AAR do not show any, and I cannot think of more extreme terrain:

http://forums.mzocentral.net//index.php?showtopic=18238&pid=248352&st=0entry248352

Actually I do not play with shadows turned on which is why they are not showing in my AAR screenshots. smile.gif
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