D-Scythe Posted May 31, 2005 Posted May 31, 2005 I like how very high water looks. I think it's great. I like the ripples, and the reflections...unfortunately, setting it on Very High even with the Enhanced FPS Water mod brings my machine to its knees. So I went back to the drawing board, and began working on a Water FPS mod V2. Trying my best to balance the ever clashing forces of quality vs performance, I somehow managed to decrease the size of the water textures by 75%. So, this means that it's only 25% of the size of the previous FPS mod, and only 1.6% of the standard water tiles - which is good, since smaller is better. Initial results were promising. The advantages were that just as a FPS mod in itself, it boosted FPS significantly, much more so than V1. This means that people playing LOMAC on older graphics cards, who previously had to play with Low water, should be able to play the game on Medium at least, since the water files in this mod take up less space and processing power than the Low Water texture itself (i.e. should be just as fast if not faster). People with higher end machines (like me, P4 3.2, 1 Gb RAM and new ATI X-series or Nvidia 6000-series) should get good FPS with the mod, except around coastal cities. However, there is a noticeable decrease in water quality, as I will show later in the screens below. Despite this, I believe that water on 'Very High' with the quality hit is still better looking than the Water on 'High' without the quality hit. I'll let you guys judge: As you can see, the reflection of the sun takes a notable hit in quality close up. The Ripples mitigates this somewhat, but it's there. On the plus side...acceptable FPS on "Very High": However, the FPS levels still aren't supremely high. When flying over FPS dropping locales like coastal cities, FPS will take a plunge as usual. Mine dipped below 20 - borderline playable. Should I continue this? I won't if there is no interest in such a mod whatsover. This mod also works for medium and high water settings too, btw, so if anything, it should make it possible for even low-end machines to run water at medium at least. Maybe it could eliminate the 'Low' water setting from LOMAC forever...
luke97 Posted May 31, 2005 Posted May 31, 2005 Sure! Please, continue!!!! Besides, a question: Is there any tweak in FC 1.1 to avoid seeing the water under the ground? Is this problem decreasing fps? I remember there was a discussion about this but I dont know if , as Lomac renders water on all map, this caused a hughe fps drop. Tnx!!
D-Scythe Posted May 31, 2005 Author Posted May 31, 2005 Water is rendered below the land. Alt-TAB out and back in and you can see the water before the land is rendered. However, FPS would be worse if water isn't rendered below the land, because then extra computer brains would be needed to figure out where to render water and where not to, etc....
KuostA Posted May 31, 2005 Posted May 31, 2005 I was overjoyed to see that you are creating another version of the water mod. The First one was as good as it could get, with absolutely NO decrease in visuals at all, yet a major boose in performance. I DID raise the quality of water one notch up because of it. However, with this one, the visuals are noticably degraded...especially the sun reflections. The camera is Very close to the water, so I'm sure it may be blocky/blurry down low, but howabout seeing the water reflections from high up or at medium altitudes? Could it still look like this?
KuostA Posted May 31, 2005 Posted May 31, 2005 A picture similar to mine above with your mod would be nice. And if possible, howabout one of a sunset like this. http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v134/Kuoster/LOMAC/ScreenShot_346.jpg
Pilgrim Posted May 31, 2005 Posted May 31, 2005 They really need to look in on the tiling issues of the water texture. Either the water or its bumpmap doesn't scale very well. You can see repeating patterns. Perhaps some Gerstner waves with perlin noise would be the answer? ASUS P4T533-C|P4 3.06@3.45|1024Mb Kingston 1066 rambus|ATI 9.... *EDITED* - Listen to Mods!!!
D-Scythe Posted May 31, 2005 Author Posted May 31, 2005 All on "Very High": As you can see, it looks okay from low altitude. It's just when you start flying really close to the ocean, the sun reflections may start to look worse. Looks increasingly better the higher you get.
Dusty Rhodes Posted May 31, 2005 Posted May 31, 2005 D, I am really trying to find the downside of this Mod, with your slight pessimism. If you like to take screenshots and look outside at how pretty things are, then yeah, I guess someone might not like it. But if you are flying a combat simulation and fighting, this Mod ROCKS!!!! Please continue. I would certainly use it! Dusty Rhodes Play HARD, Play FAIR, Play TO WIN Win 7 Professional 64 Bit / Intel i7 4790 Devils Canyon, 4.0 GIG /ASUS Maximus VII Formula Motherboard/ ASUS GTX 1080 8 GB/ 32 Gigs of RAM / Thrustmaster HOTAS Warthog / TrackIR 5 / 2 Cougar MFD's / Saitek Combat Pedals/ DSD Button Box FLT-1
Guest Cali Posted July 24, 2005 Posted July 24, 2005 I would like to use this also, I'm going with Dusty R on this one.
D-Scythe Posted July 24, 2005 Author Posted July 24, 2005 Hmm, I'll zip it up along with a few other FPS improvements I've been tinkering with.
Guest ThomasDWeiss Posted August 25, 2005 Posted August 25, 2005 You can get v1 here http://www.lockonfiles.com/modules.php?name=Downloads&d_op=viewdownloaddetails&cid=76&lid=240&title=Enhanced%20FPS%20Over%20Water%20Mod#dldetails
SuperKungFu Posted August 25, 2005 Posted August 25, 2005 Very cool...downloading it now. BTW to D-Scythe...what ever happen to that one mod you were making that made the landscape for crisp and had no fps hit. I would like to get my hands on that. ;) [sIGPIC][/sIGPIC]
BearF_CO_159th Posted August 25, 2005 Posted August 25, 2005 Sure! Please, continue!!!! Besides, a question: Is there any tweak in FC 1.1 to avoid seeing the water under the ground? Is this problem decreasing fps? I remember there was a discussion about this but I dont know if , as Lomac renders water on all map, this caused a hughe fps drop. Tnx!! Someone correct me if I talking complete **** here but isn't the fact that the water is rendered over the whole map a means of simplifying things? I mean to cover the whole (square) map all it takes it 2 polygons of water with the required texture being displayed. Otherwise thing how intricate the modelling would have to be the coastlines alone.
Guest ThomasDWeiss Posted August 25, 2005 Posted August 25, 2005 Very cool...downloading it now. BTW to D-Scythe...what ever happen to that one mod you were making that made the landscape for crisp and had no fps hit. I would like to get my hands on that. ;) I have it, but he didn't release it for download. Water not seen is not rendered, so no fps loss.
bflagg Posted August 25, 2005 Posted August 25, 2005 D-Scythe... looks fantasitic! Please conclude this project... It would be very helpfull to all...... Thanks, Brett
D-Scythe Posted August 25, 2005 Author Posted August 25, 2005 I have it, but he didn't release it for download. Water not seen is not rendered, so no fps loss. I'll upload a bunch of stuff I've been working on within the next two weeks; basically just a series of mods that would make it a bit easier on the GPU when various objects are active. And about the new land textures thing, I'll send the final version to Thomas for release. BTW, it's about 50 Mb - are there any upload restrictions that I should now of?
SuperKungFu Posted August 25, 2005 Posted August 25, 2005 Doesnt matter if its 50mb to 1 gig...as long as its cool i don't mind downloading it. ;) lol [sIGPIC][/sIGPIC]
112th_Rossi Posted August 26, 2005 Posted August 26, 2005 Looks good, shame that no matter what happens water always looks like a sea of blue glue. Perhaps Silent Hunter III water can be added in a future project? ;)
Asterix28573 Posted August 26, 2005 Posted August 26, 2005 How do you explain that when a land texture (.cmd) file is removed, water is seen in its place? Water is rendered throughout the entire map. Hi, Water is the texture assigned to the "base" surface, and it's only really rendered when there's nothing above it (i.e. the terrain surface). The card Z-buffer management takes care of not rendering those parts that are obscured by any other object (in this case, the terrain mesh). What happens sometimes is that the terrain mesh and the objects above it, aircraft polygons and textures, etc... loading process take some more time than expected due to system "congestion", and this causes the water to be visible just because, when render occurs, the terrain mesh above it has not been yet loaded. This is normal, and as soon as the terrain info is loaded the water stops rendering, just because it's not yet visible. Well, I hope you get the idea... Believe, this is a very common technique in 3D graphics, and I can assure you that it works fine :D. As stated 1 zillion times, it's more efficient to let the GPU do this "clipping" that do it "manually" by software. The GPU has specific circuits optimized for such a job ;). This is something similar to be wondering if the light of your refrigerator effectively turns off when you close the door... Cheers, asterix
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