Guild of Writers

I'm trying to find whether there's a way for some objects to be excluded from the fog, that is: to appear as if there had no fog on top of them whatever the distance from the camera. That would be very usefull to efficiently draw far away objects like sky and backdrops.. Because as of now we have no way of having a far-away backdrop and a fog at the same time because the sky is affected and it doesn't look good.

(You can see that often in other games like in WoW for instance. See this screenshot. Notice how the mountains are greyed out by the fog but the sky behind is perfectly clear?)

I'm worried because I haven't seen that anywhere in Uru, but I hoped someone might have an idea?.. Maybe a shader effect or a special flag?

Well, I went at looked at some of the flags. The Material State has two Shader flags:

kShadeNoFog
kShadeReallyNoFog

I'm thinking that one of these (or better yet a combination of both) will achieve the affect that you want... I will do an experiment today and see what happens

That would be totally awesome if you could do that!
That means the larger Ages could now use fog and have more atmosphere, that'd be great.

Yeah, that'd be really useful to be able to do.. I've been having these same problems with the sky and water in Tromegahl becoming invisible too fast if I set the fog to something that works for most of my objects.

This effect is used quite clearly in Minkata. So no worries as far as that goes. Now we just have to see how long it will take to get it incorporated into the tools.

It will be in the next release of PyPRP, and is already working properly in my development copy.

Trylon is working on some more fixes to the material code, the region code, and the camera code; so expect a commit sometime in the near future.

Haha great work! I don't think I've ever seen something implemented so quickly. :p
Then you can expect Ahra Pahts to have a nice subtle fog as soon as the new plugin is available.
The Material panel has a 'No Mist' button that can't wait to be used..

That's exactly the button that we used