Waveset and Shores Misbehaving....

[andylegate]

ooooookay.

I know that a couple of things changed with wavesets with 1.5.0: y'all added wind, and you had to but in the visual part.

Got it.

However, ever since 1.5.0, my shores (the foam) and the waveset misbehaves. The foam blinks out randomly. When it does so, the waveset goes flat with it. It comes back when the shores do.

It won't do it if I'm close and looking straight at the foam. It does do it if I look up and pan around.

Now it did NOT do this at all with 1.4.0. With the last plugin, my waveset performed great (for those with better graphics cards) and on both my system, my wife's computer, and my son's computer.

Anyone care to explain? Do I have to set Passindex with the shores now?

[andylegate]

Anyone?

I'm sorry, I'm just trying to make sense of this is all:

I export Zephyr with 1.4.0 and the waveset and shores are fine.

I export Zephyr with 1.5.0 and I suffer the problem I talked about above.

What's happened? I've not changed anything, except to add the visual part to the script, as required now with 1.5.0.

[D'Lanor]

My guess is that there are surrounding materials with alpha layers which are doing their bad mojo again.

[andylegate]

I'll go through it with a fine tooth comb again, but I've removed all the Alpha vertex painting.......which has made many parts of the Age look like crud

I'm going to have to go with stencils now (I really hate being forced to change this) even though it WAS working just fine. I've messed, and messed around with it, but I CAN NOT get Alpha Vertex Painting to work like it used to since the new plugin, and nobody has come out with anything new about it. All I can get it to do is make the object transparent.......

I'll look again and see if there is anything that still has it.

What about the wavesets themselves? They have transparent properties..........

[D'Lanor]

Stencils use alpha layers as well so that will push them into blendspans too. I wish we could at least get a word from the devs if there is going to be a reversion of this undesired behavior or not. And if not, why?

[Trylon]

Remind me again, what exactly is causing this unwanted behaviour?

P.S.
I hate the new Z-sorting system too

[andylegate]

Prior to plugin 1.5.0, you could use vertex painting to make an Alpha color and / or stencils to blend the textures of two meshes together.

Now with 1.5.0 they moved the Zoffs to Passindex (but it pretty much works the same, I understand that), but NOW if I make a Alpha vertex layer, or use stencils, it turns either the whole object transparent or the half that has the Alpha vertex painting. It's made it to where I can no longer blend textures together succesfully.

If someone has figured it out, they've yet to come forward, and the tutorials on using Alpha Vertex painting or stencils, still have you using Zoffs the old way.

D'Lanor thinks it has something to do with blendspands. I have no idea what to do, and I've tried doing all sorts of things with the same results: it looks like crud or it's transparent.

The other thing is my waveset and shores in Zephyr cove. Smaller wavesets seem to behave okay with 1.5.0, but mine in Zephyr keeps flickering out, rather it goes FLAT and the shore foam disappears. It didn't do it in 1.4.0 and I've changed nothing.

:shrug:

[Lontahv]

Vertex Alpha and passIndex work fine for me. Just remember to have the lower layer have a higher passIndex.

[andylegate]

That's still not explaining the waveset problem. What changed?

And I have messed with the passindexing with alpha vertex, same thing happens everytime: the mesh turns transparent.

[Nadnerb]

Since this doesn't seem to have been publically noted yet:

The "switch" to PassIndex wasn't exactly "complete". Prior to 1.5.0, using Zoffset would change the span index and change the blend flags on the higher numbered spans. In 1.5.0, using PassIndex changes the span index, but doesn't change the render level flags on the spans. Some fixes are accumulating in the 1.5 tag, and there will likely be a 1.5.1 bugfix release at some point.