1.1's Fog

Check it out. The new fog object. It looks alot better in game of course. :twisted: It adds so much. imo

That looks cool, but I wonder what it does to video...... The game is already whacky from a video standpoint.

my experience, it isn't very intrusive. it would be 80% better performance over 5 smoke objects to do the same thing but not as cool.

If you used the smaller smoke object, It has a sound attached that made it unusable. The big fog has a sound, but its in the center of a Large area, and since im using the top of the fog, the sound is underground. It ran good for me, but we will have to playtest to be sure.

Now the trick is, to import it into my map as midnight blue for GITD instead of brown. That would be cool.

I played all night last night with the fog alone. I love it.

My map is basically a hill, so I took the fog and laid it out all over the ground level. I gotta say, it looks insane. You literally cannot see farther than 20 feet in front of your face and the fog is totally moving and blowing around. It kinda makes things look eerily real.

My first reaction was intense cackling like a mad scientist, but then I started to think how people would accept something such as this. I wanted to ask you guys what you think without anybody seeing it in practice on my map. That way, you can be honest about how you think it would play out. I didn't upload or take screens since it got so late 🙂

So basically, each main base has two components. The base itself, elevated over the ground by a cliff, which is covered mostly from Aircraft and has artillery, plus the flag. Then the lower portion that houses a compound with the vehicle spawns. No flags or anything other than jeeps, tanks, scooters, artillery....etc. are down there. It's basically a staging ground where you drop into, grab a vehicle and go. This is the area where I laid out 5 or 6 fog objects and it's almost totally impossible to see.

So, my question is, before anybody can see this in practice, what would you normally think about something like this? My guess is "annoying" may come to mind as you really can't see anything.

Here's my idea of the Pros:
No enemy will be sneaking in and the choppers have a hell of a time seeing people too.

Artillery will absolutely require a spot from the Loach or infantry.

Getting a vehicle out of there will require you to drive by the map, which I made sure is 100% possible. In fact, I have driven over every square inch of my map while in the third press of 'C' (with the locked cam that stays in place and merely tracks you.) So without seeing squat at all and being clear on the other side of the map, it's 100% navigable. Same would be true for getting out of the fog.

It serves to take the battle away from that area. Since no flag is there, there's no need for the enemy to come there, except to halt your movements or be meanies.

It adds a totally new dynamic feel to the bottom of the hill.

I set it up so you literally pass into the thick fog like a blanket on the ground.

Here's what I think of the cons:
Lag, no clue how this lags. I tested it while running BCV and it ran exactly the same as my map has always ran. No difference on my 2.6G 1G3800DDr 9700Pro machine.

General neusance. I'm thinking it might just be kinda butt to have that limited of a view. This sorta covers a lot of reasons.

Those are really only the cons. Right now, I'm still using DMZFog, so it's very tall and brown. I'm going to make a new emitter that is white and much more dense, yet vertically compressed. Basically my plan for world domination will mean that I'm hoping to get fog that you can stand in and see over, like in a marsh or horror movie. But I'm still kind of digging the way it looks now, like a really thick sandstorm.

I bet you could have scripted events like volcano eruptions and sand blizzards using this stuff. All you have to do is set a random start time ranged in minutes and it would look totally natural. That's an awesome idea now that I think about it. Just seed a ton of fog emitters tied to one effects group, change it to have rapid horizontal velocity, make it spread over a long line (the length of the map,) and make it appear at total random times. That would kinda rule, if it worked. I bet it can be done with one emitter. I'm also scheming on some realistic rain. Only thing I can't fathom is how to get the impact ripples. Is it possible to overlay a tiling animated texture on the terrain?

Ok, that was a big ramble. Sorry guys. So, uh, what do you think about super thick fog?

I think you could get the same cool effect of the fog covering the lower half of the base with less dense fog. Farther you are from it its harder to see into so helos etc have a tough time getting there, but if it's super dense, the annoyance factor might be high. Of course I haven't seen it yet so it might be cool. If there's a good way to put slightly less dense fog on the vehicles and road and VERY dense fog outside that it might make it a little more fun to play for some people.

Yeah, that's a very good idea. I'll try to clear the roads for some visibility. Visually, it's got to be the single most realistic thing I've seen in BFV, honestly. It looks fantastic while in it. You can totally see buildings and vehicles when you get up on them and the multiple sprites give it a whole new depth. Tell you guys what, tonight I'll upload the full-on fogged version of it to check out. I'll name it something like KH_Fog.rar or something when i do. I'll leave it up there so you can see what you think. Or you can try it on your own maps. The only reason that I'm really thinking it will work is because of the nature of my map in that those areas are non-critical, yet unavoidable so while you HAVE to pass through it, you actually HAVE to leave it right away. Besides, I'm really happy at how easy it is to use the map to drive the roads. The key there was to use sharp contrast and clean edges in the texturing so the mini would pop.

Oh, and I just revealed my best secret for chopper pilots. How to flip them back over when they tip on the ground. Yeah, you just hold down and mouse left or right. Sometimes you gotta rock it back and forth and sometimes you're wedged into something, but it's always possible and easy and don't add damage like trying to flip it back by flying.

You know i'm going to turn a helo over just to try that.. =) what about then they get stuck on the top? Hmm......

You mean upsidedown? This works for that. When I said "down" i meant "S" or "Down Arrow" if that wasn't clear. Whatever key you use to run backwards is it. I have a post on PBF that explains some of the details as it's not "exactly" that simple. But once you know these things and practice it, it becomes that simple really quickly. Pretty much the best trick I got so far, which is why I waited months to release it 🙂 Honestly, I figured somebody would have brought it up, but I guess most people really didn't know it.

http://www.forumplanet.com/planetbattlefie...341&tid=1439242

HOLY SMOKE ON THE WATER BATMAN!

This is just one of many examples of the new 1.1 objects....

Before 1.1 ...

After 1.1

I think I'll cast my vote now on the front page.

I have to say one thing about the new BCV. It renders shadows for overgrowth objects, which I like to use more than LoU and Raze. That is a big plus, nice tree shadows everywhere.

However, I just did my map with full quality terrain shadows and BC42 blows it away, its so much greater resolution on the shadows....

Yeah that looks Reeelly nice. Major improvment.

Yeah, I use quite a bit and I was actually going to post about that, but you beat me to the punch. Yeah it shadows overgrowth. But you can't cheat anymore with the shadows. You can't do medium quality and it look nice. I just did it on GITD and the shadows look like checkerboards. Oh well, at least it didn't take long to find it out. I'll have to see what Highest quality produces.

BTW, what is the size of the map you shadowed, quality and how long did it take? My initial test was a 256x map at medium quality took me 10 minutes but looked like crud.

I did a 256 map at final quality and did all but 3 squares of it... took about 1.5 hrs on an AMD XP2400+ 1Gb of ram. ATI 9800pro

The BC42 shadowing really is much nicer.... This is ok tho.

Well, I have good news about my map. I got my stupid jump working again 🙂 It's not exactly perfect yet as you take about quarter damage, but it's WAY more dramatic than it ever was before. Hehe, kinda like it more now actually.

About that poopie BCV shadow generation. Ok, so you use what "should" be a decent quality and you're getting massive pixelation at the edges, right? This can easily be fixed in Photoshop before you merge. If you open the shadow texture files, you can make an action that will automatically blur, blend or sharpen those edges for you. I have NOT done this yet, but I'm a 10 year vet of PS and know that it can be done with ease. Only thing I'm unclear of is what format it loads in or where it's located and that type of thing. So let's assume you can open each shadow texture in PS and I'll go from there. It's really easy.

Open one tile.
Create a new action titled "BCV Shadow" or something
Do a guassian blur set to maybe 1 or 2 pixels (whatever makes the checkerboard blur enough for your happiness, could be 50 if you want)
Select Image/Adjust/Levels and drag the black and white sliders on the top bar inwards until you get the sharpness you desire. The farther you drag the black slider, the more area your shadows will cover and vice versa for dragging the white slider. Only grab the TOP sliders.
Export (or save) the file.

Now click stop on the action and then close the tile without saving. Select File/Automate/Batch and then pick your shadow texture folder as the source and set the destination to none. The export command should take care of saving. Once it's done, quit Photoshop without saving. (I usually kill the process to avoid hitting "Don't Save" on all the files)


Actually, I'm trying this right now on a file I completely made up and discovered that it's going to be dependant on the image quality of the actual BCV shadow renders. I believe there are grey scales in there for the neutral parts and doing levels will brighten or darken those. This, in-turn will brighten or darken your whole map. This COULD be what you want one day, but it's not what I'm trying to get here.

I'm going to run through this tonight on my own shadows and will record an action that I can provide to you guys that will automatically fix your shadow files. Even if you don't have Photoshop, I will be providing a droplet that you simply drag the files into for the fix. This droplet may include a few other processes to bring that neutral grey back to 50% so your map does not change tones. However, if my settings aren't matching your goals and you don't have PS, then you'll have to give me one tile image to set you up a personalized one. It really takes less than 5 minutes.

Sounds cool.... I use the overgrowth stuff alot so I really do need to do BCV shadow creation.

I was working on doing shadowing in both systems and blending the shadowed textures in photoshop somehow, but have JUST gotten started on it.