Couple of Age Issues

[Tweek]

Yo.

So I'm working on Fahets and I've stumbled upon a couple of issues that won't go away.

The first is a halo of sorts around some items with alpha, grassblades, water lillys etc as you can see here:



Try as I might I just can't seem to get it to go away, I've played with the Zoffs and Ztransp settings but they only end up making the textures partially fade here and there despite what the Zoffs number is set at.

The second issue is with the skydome. I've been following the "your first real age" tutorial for this Age in regards to the creation of skydomes but every attempt I've done the dome has come out really dark, not bright:



Any help or advice would be appreciated, thanks.

[dendwaler]

In my opinion it has something to do with transparency of your texture in relation to the order of rendering of the background.
The waveset is not rendered in the edges of the transparent part of your texture, so you see directly the layer behind the waveset.
I assume you have a black/white blender layerto arrive the correct texture cut out. (But i am a dayly "learning something new"noob, i can be wrong.)
I do have similar problems for which i am still trying to find a solution.

Look at this picture.
you see the transpart of my palmleave renders the background without the mountain wich is first in the background.
It looks through the mountain. exactly on the horizon line.

Its seems to me as this is also related to the camera view, which is never the same as your original texture view was, which I suppose was "a lily" seen from straight above.

For your second question:
Have you tried to give the sky some light Emitting ?
You can find it in the shader option in blender

[Jojon]

I'm not sure we have a fully satisfactory solution to the alpha blending egde halo problem, but the sorting order, that used to be handled per material, using "Zoffs", has now been moved to per-object assignment, using the "PassIndex" value on the object buttons panel (higher number is drawn later and setting the value to non-zero also enables runtime face sorting) -- also; you might try ticking the "Transp" button in the "draw extra" field on the same panel.

EDIT: I have also recently noticed that if you have several materials on a single mesh, faces using a "later" one often overdraw others with a lower texture index (for that mes, in Blender), depending on flags set via Ztransp and Zoffs...

This still will not help in every case for me - I even tried using a mask with only 0 and 255 alpha values, without any intermediate ones and still got an outline around the edge... Having the texel colours themselves blend to a colour similar to the background, might hide it a little, if no real solution presents itself.


On the skydome; I take it the material has "shadeless" and "nomist" ticked and that colour, ambient light and any possible vertex colours, are for the most part cranked up to the max? Texture mixing amount=1?

[Tweek]

On the skydome; I take it the material has "shadeless" and "nomist" ticked and that colour, ambient light and any possible vertex colours, are for the most part cranked up to the max? Texture mixing amount=1?

I forgot about the nomist button, there was a shadow button (not shadbuf) that I had missed too, thanks Jojon.

I have a brighter sky.

[Chacal]

That looks great, Tweek.

[tachzusamm]

These tubes, together with the machine (or boiler), give the impression that there is more behind the scene. That this garden is not limited to itself.
Great work, and congratulations: You implemented one of the (in my opinion) most important basics of age writing - which is "make the visitor to think about the age".

And it looks great as well.


Regarding the alpha problem: Do I assume right you made the alpha mask the same size as the leaves texture? If true, it could help if you make the mask about a pixel or more smaller (wider? depends on what your understand to be the mask).

[Tweek]

Regarding the alpha problem: Do I assume right you made the alpha mask the same size as the leaves texture? If true, it could help if you make the mask about a pixel or more smaller (wider? depends on what your understand to be the mask).

I tried that too and it seemed to have no effect.

[Jojon]

I'm just now struggling with the same thing and believe it is the waveset that is causing your woes... *does some searching*
Try adding the following alcscript to the lilypads and see what that does:

Code: Select all

Your_object_name_here:
    visual:
        renderlevel:
            major:
              - late
            minor:
              - blend


If this helps, the problem would be the fact that wavesets are by defualt exported with the renderlevel: Late/Opaque, which means they are drawn later than the likely Blend/'dunno...Blend?', that the other transparent objects are likely given.

The change decribed above may have unwanted side-effects; if you have yet other transparent objects, that can obscure the lilypads, you may need to change them as well.

Lowering the drawlevel of the waveset instead, does not seem to have the desired effect, in one little test here.

Hopefully Paradox will spot this thread and share some wisdom. :7


EDIT: And once again I forgot to compliment you on the great visual qualities of that age... :7

[Paradox]

Code: Select all

Your_object_name_here:
    visual:
        renderlevel:
            major:
              - late
            minor:
              - blend


[...]
Hopefully Paradox will spot this thread and share some wisdom. :7

Eeep, I've been summoned by name Yes, that Alcscript should provide a solution for people using 1.6.

[Jojon]

Eeep, I've been summoned by name :P

I may need to stop doing that; the local supply of the fullmoon-born albino goat's hearts required for the sacrifice, is beginning to run low.