NVG not working

[topdog]

The problems you're experiencing are of a different nature; the OP and SUBS17's problems that they are unable to get any NVG effects at all, it's like it simply isn't installed by the ground crew (but they have no head mounted sights either) or powered up (but it is). I think in your case, it's looking as normal as can be expected for this version, unless the drivers I'm using are screwy too.

 

 

Taking your screens 1 by 1;

 

Screen 1: I get the same thing with 258.96 drivers on an 8800GTX. I don't think the blackness was intended to appear like that, but I don't have knowledge of how the real NVGs would look in that situation either. At least the workaround is easy enough since I don't think there's much of a necessary use-case for needing them set only to minimal brightness level.

 

Screen 2: There's 2 things going on here, not sure which one you mean specifically but I guess the latter. First is the grainy (noise) feel over the NVG area; that part is intentional and looks the same as it does in the Night Patrol mission briefing image. The other is the loss of edge anti-aliasing. I don't think that can be resolved by us, and is just a known (to the community) defect/limitation.

 

Screen 3: Again what you see looks the same as what I see, it might have been changed in the patch from 1.0.1 to 1.0.2 but it's not something I would have noticed. It IS a big-ass floodlight mounted on the truck that's spreading light across the runway, seems to be intentional as the white cone shape is modelled into the geometry. There seem to be other lighting differences and issues posted, so I expect it is separate from the NVG issue(s) too.

 

 

The changes I made to any NVG shader code wouldn't have a positive effect to correct anything in the screenshots you posted I'm afraid, its only purpose is to get these other pilots up to the point of being able to to see the same things you can, because currently their cards are just refusing to play ball at all and just silently 'erroring out' into the log files (but still letting them fly around and do everything else - blindfolded).

 

The files that create that black (and once the brightness is turned up, transparent) shape where the NVGs are drawn, are plain graphic files in the same directory as the shader code files, and they didn't exist before 1.0.2 so they are part of new changes to the code for this feature, but you can't really modify them in any way to help improve with this situation - the results would only come out worse where you would lose the ability to see NVG effects at all in some areas.

Edited October 1, 2010 by topdog

[topdog]

I found a way to force a minimum NVG brightness value that wasn't zero, so that instead of it being completely black (screen 1 problem/concern), you at least get something.

 

The current brightness level of the cockpit dial is held in c2.y (as far as the pixelshader routine is concerned), so when this is 0 and it multiplies the current colour values of the pixel by the brightness amount, and they're all wiped out leaving you with the black masked area.

 

So this is something we can tweak ( / hack) for aesthetic purposes, but how it compares to real ka-50 NVGs when switched on but set to minimum brightness level, I would not know.. maybe someone else who knows could comment on that.

 

In any case if you just decide that you don't like the black oval enough and want to try ensuring a minimum level of brightness that you can still see through a little bit, you can try this in your ka-50\bazar\effects\postmotioneffect\nightvisiongoogle\nv_p.dat file (additions highlighted in bold purple below, there are 4 lines were additions are placed, a new comment line, 2 new code lines, and 1 edited code line below that):

 

ps.3.0

def c0, 0.1, 10.0, 0.0, 10.0
def c1, 0.3, 0.59, 0.01, 1.0
def c3, 6.0, 11.0, 6.0, 1.0

dcl_texcoord0 v0 ;tex coord

dcl_2d s0 ;diffuse map
dcl_2d s1 ;noise mask
dcl_2d s2 ;main mask
dcl_2d s3 ;mask (HZ nahua nuzhna)

;sample maps
texld r0, v0, s0
mov r5, r0
texld r1, v0, s2
texld r2, v0, s3

;generate tc & sample noise mask
mul r3, v0, c0.w
texld r4, r3, s1

[b][color=purple]; cap the NVG brightness value from c2.y to minimum value[/color][/b]
[b][color=purple]mov r6, c1.z ;borrowing an existing 0.01 value already defined above[/color][/b]
[b][color=purple]max r6, r6, c2.y[/color][/b]

dp3 r0, r0, c1
mul r0, r0, [b][color=purple]r6 ;[/color][/b]c2.y
mul r2, r0, r4
add r0, r2, r0
mul r0, r0, c3
lrp r0, r1, r0, r5
mov oC0, r0

 

I'd also say that this means conclusively it's just coded to be this way in the 1.0.2 patch, and not a fault of any driver.