Ankor's Shaders February 2025 Released!

Haven't installed in there yet. Might take a while to get around to it as trying them out in my TOW II install, but not done bombing missions there yet.
 
In the past I've had to mess with the ZBias section of ConfigOverrides.xml

<ZBiasBitsResolution val="16"/>
<ZBiasTerrainDecal val="1"/>
<ZBiasWaterPolyNear val="1"/>
<ZBiasWaterPolyFar val="0"/>
<ZBiasWaterLineNear val="1"/>
<ZBiasWaterLineFar val="0"/>
<ZBiasFlatEffects val="25"/>
<ZBiasShadow val="16"/>
<ZBiasTerrainAlphaNear val="0"/>
<ZBiasTerrainAlphaFar val="0"/>
<ZBiasObject val="0"/>
<ZBiasObjectFar val="0"/>
<ZBiasEffects val="1"/>
<ZBiasClouds val="1"/>

The new shader recommendations are quite different than this, so that might be the source.
 
Yes the ground flickering. It may or may not make a difference with the new shaders. There's a lot going on that I don't understand with them yet.

p.s. I'm getting red snow as well as rain if I turn Lighting on for the Prelit_Rain in the shader.xml.
 
gecko said:
Ok, that is a new issue then that I have never seen. Has anyone else encountered this issue?

Mine looked the same, but was only encountered around specific models. And I believe I have found the edit I made. It was actually a hex edit to GC_Harbour.m3d. 99% sure this is what solved the issue in my case. Compare the edit to the original below. I know you hex edit models as extensively as I do, could you have applied something similar that might cause this everywhere for you?View attachment 162165
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I can see that there were two lines with transparent colors, one red, and the other green that you made a neutral grey and opaque. Neither one was associated with a texture file. I wonder what function they originally served in the Building Model. Some sort of simulated lights? Head scratcher as to why a building would have anything to do with the lighting of the rain animation.
 
Adger said:
Thanks Major..any possible workarounds? Cheers.
Click to expand...
This was another way of saying what I already told you. If you want cloud formations close to the ground, and also localized precipitation visibility reductions which are critical to the look of rainy and snowy weather, this is the unfortunate side effect. We're just making the best of what is possible in CFS3.

mongoose said:
"This looks like it's unlikely to have anything to do with the shaders, especially if you've seen it before. I recommend checking the relevant aircraft xdps."

Well I will check that. Previous occurrences happened after some file changes were made, but disappeared if I restarted the PC, as I mentioned. This time just changing the ini did the trick. I may have to go though line by line and see what's different.
I suppose, apart from the African time distance, you do have a little more time for all the great work you have done?

So to change the subject; would the new shaders help the appearance of all the nice B C TIs that you made some years back??
Click to expand...
I don't think anything in the texturemagic.ini will create that issue. It is possible that it was a coincidence that it stopped when you changed out the file. Having a duplicate xdp somewhere could cause that and would appear and disappear on different sessions of CFS3 at random.


Threedp said:
Soooooooo close!

I installed the new shaders on all my installs and everything seemed to be going well until I got to the last one, TOW, and an old nemesis appeared, i.e. flashing geometric patterns on the ground (see pic). I feel like I remember this from the initial release of TOW but I can't remember the solution.

If it helps, for comparison, I did a night fire raid on Berlin in ETO and the incendiaries seemed to be flashing more than before, but the effect was not nearly as bad as in TOW.

Any ideas on how to fix this?

View attachment 162190
Click to expand...
Are these self-lit terrain textures? I don't think the self-lit texture feature was envisioned to be used this way, though it is a cool effect. There may be some issues with this since it was never planned to work this way. It may also be possible that playing with the z-order settings as Andy suggests will help. The top two are the only ones specifically needed by the shaders. They are all known working values for me, but they are not-necessarily the only ones that will work.

MajorMagee said:
I can see that there were two lines with transparent colors, one red, and the other green that you made a neutral grey and opaque. Neither one was associated with a texture file. I wonder what function they originally served in the Building Model. Some sort of simulated lights? Head scratcher as to why a building would have anything to do with the lighting of the rain animation.
Click to expand...
I believe there were some lights/beacons on little towers near the harbor entrance that were red and green. I have no idea why it would cause the precipitation textures to turn red, but it did.
 
I went through all 155 building m3d files in this install and didn't find any red/green patterns like the one you fixed.
 
Could it be in another model? An aircraft maybe? Since it's everywhere, maybe it's in the aircraft you were flying?
 
Some further input:

Using the config zBias settings above did not work. The game actually ran but the issue was still there (thanks anyway Major Magee!).

Before I started, I backed up my entire install (although I forgot that the config file was elsewhere, so I didn't have a backup of that). Nevertheless, I copied my old TOW install back into place and using the recommended settings for the new shaders (even though it has older shaders), it works fine with regard to the issue. Therefore, the issue does not seem to lie with the config settings.
 
A little more on the color tinted rain. Any transparent entries, including the canopy, and reflector sight that have color entries that are not neutral grey will show up as tinted rain. The amount of transparency does not matter. Anything from 00 (clear) up to FC (almost opaque) will cause the tinting.
 
Ok, something is not adding up still. My main testing aircraft has been the SJ Spitfire Mk.V, which has semi-transparant red and green tinted light covers, and I don't have this problem.
 
On a whim, methodically went through the d3d8.ini file and mapped out the differences between old and new (not counting all the new entries in the new version) and changed the new one to have the old values where they differed. Surprisingly it ran, but the issue remained. I noticed that the flickering reduces when looking straight down but whole blocks go black (regardless of the ini settings used):
1740371056203.png
 
gecko said:
Ok, something is not adding up still. My main testing aircraft has been the SJ Spitfire Mk.V, which has semi-transparent red and green tinted light covers, and I don't have this problem.
Click to expand...
It's very dependent on the angle you're looking at the rain from. From most directions it will look normal. Then there will be that one quadrant where it appears. It's one of those things that could go unnoticed for years. The only reason I even knew it was happening was that the new weather changes has rain in one of the start up screens and it came down looking like blood. In game I was able to swing around in different directions and saw it turn grey and then green, as well as red.
 
I did some more testing on the meshbuilderbudgets file that caused my issues, this time by deliberately swapping it for the one Daiwilletti (I never remember his real full name) made that smoothed a lot of the terrain. The result? No clouds in the distance, once again. So there's something specific in the new one that affects them, I'll have to try to wrap my head around the values to see if the best parts of the two could be combined.
 
gecko said:
Ok, that is a new issue then that I have never seen. Has anyone else encountered this issue?

Mine looked the same, but was only encountered around specific models. And I believe I have found the edit I made. It was actually a hex edit to GC_Harbour.m3d. 99% sure this is what solved the issue in my case. Compare the edit to the original below. I know you hex edit models as extensively as I do, could you have applied something similar that might cause this everywhere for you?View attachment 162165
Click to expand...
What if the issue is not the part that defines the color of the material, but the color of one of the reflective properties. F3 04 35 41 on line 640 and 66 DC 5E 41 on line 660. I always make these grayscale even when I'm using colored transparent materials. I'm not currently able to test, but maybe this accounts for the difference. I did a huge amount of testing with the weather, viewing things at all different angles over a two year development period. I'm sure I would have noticed if the color of the rain changed when flying my numerous aircraft with colored glass material.
 
greycap.raf said:
I did some more testing on the meshbuilderbudgets file that caused my issues, this time by deliberately swapping it for the one Daiwilletti (I never remember his real full name) made that smoothed a lot of the terrain. The result? No clouds in the distance, once again. So there's something specific in the new one that affects them, I'll have to try to wrap my head around the values to see if the best parts of the two could be combined.
Click to expand...
Where is this file available?
 
Threedp said:
On a whim, methodically went through the d3d8.ini file and mapped out the differences between old and new (not counting all the new entries in the new version) and changed the new one to have the old values where they differed. Surprisingly it ran, but the issue remained. I noticed that the flickering reduces when looking straight down but whole blocks go black (regardless of the ini settings used):
View attachment 162274
Click to expand...
Wow, so much is going here. Can you tell me the means by which the terrain is being lit up? Is it self-let terrain textures, or light effects in the effects.xml?
 
gecko said:
Wow, so much is going here. Can you tell me the means by which the terrain is being lit up? Is it self-let terrain textures, or light effects in the effects.xml?
Click to expand...
Afraid that answer is beyond my limited knowledge, but I would hazard an educated guess that it's the fires on the ground in London in the early TOW He 111 mission I've been using for testing (as in the screen shots). Similarly, the effect in ETO, while not of the same order, was a function of the incendiaries I dropped. Thanks for looking into this.
 
gecko said:
Where is this file available?
Click to expand...

New Meshbuilder Budget.zip

This is an update of my previous offerings for a meshbuilderbudgets.xml file to be added to the Assets folder. This one requires a reasonably high end computer setup. Its origins in conception come from Charles Simpson's Meshbuilderbudgets_OUCH...
sim-outhouse.org

Having said that, I haven't checked yet if the new one in the package has the same benefits already.
 
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