Ankor's Shaders February 2025 Released!

[gecko]

Okay, figured out what's different. The SJ Spitfire Mk.V doesn't trigger the tinted rain because it uses the texture "spit5_navlights_t.dds" to define the color on the transparent surface rather than setting it directly in the diffuse color section of the m3d.

Ah, there's the issue! I had forgotten those light covers used a texture. Now to see if we can find a way to have our cake and eat it too: appropriate lighting on rain at night AND no blood rain.

I redid the small rain mod so now it's much less rain in the animation rather than invisibly small.
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Your overcast shots are extremely dark. Is this during daylight? It seems way darker than it should be showing up if so.

Curiouser and Curiouser . . .

I spent a while today spit balling anything I could think of, with little success. The last thing I did was to search for and delete all the BDP files in my TOW install, delete them, restart my PC, any mysteriously, the problem is gone. Literally scratching my head, but at least I'm finally OK, at least for now.

However, as I had been noticing some visual oddities in other installs, I thought I'd repeat the process. I tried PTO and afterwards, when I dropped a Little Boy, the area of the devastation was flickering in a similar way. Maybe my PC/video card just can't handle the new stuff properly? I only installed parts 1 and 2 so i thought I'd be OK. Oh well. Thanks for trying to help.

The Little Boy issue is caused by a shockwave class effect. You can try playing around with different Z Bias Terrain Decal settings in the config program, it might help.

I've often wondered about this. How exactly does one modify the frontend.xml file for the Pacific installs? Does it fix the in-game times as well or does that require another fix? I've never actually had an issue in the UI, but in game, the times of day are a crapshoot.

You need to make sure the Aircraft and Airbase values are values that are present in your install. E.I. the aircraft should reference one that is installed, and the Airbase should be the airbase ID of one of the airfields in your global layer.

Then you'll want to change the time. That's UTC, not local, so you'll need to make adjustment for the time zone of the map your flying on.

Thanks MM!!

It is also possible to combine normal map, using the RGB channels, and specular, using the alpha channel, and have it all as a single texture. I don't recall the correct naming convention off the top of my head.

 

[greycap.raf]

While this is not directly related to the shaders, it's very much related to image quality so I'll put it here anyway. Someone might get ideas from it.

As long as I can remember, and it's probably an inherent feature in CFS3, distant terrain textures have had a certain shimmering effect to them especially if there are lines in the texture such as ploughed fields or roads. I haven't found any anti-aliasing or anisotopic filter setting that could eliminate it because it's pretty literally caused by the graphics engine drawing a pixel that moves from one pixel in the screen to another but many modern games have an option to combat just that - rendering the image in a resolution higher than what the screen's native one is, and then downscaling.

Has anyone tried this, and if yes, how to get it to work? I tried looking at the config files with hopes of finding the resolution somewhere so I could set it to, say, 5160x2160 (and give my graphics card a serious shock in the process) to see if it makes a difference but came up with nothing. Then again it being well past midnight may play a part in that. CFS3 has a tendency to lose very little performance when resolution is increased so it might not even be that much of a panic situation for the card.

 

[MajorMagee]

I use 4x SGSSAA and it eliminates most of the shimmer.

Knowledge Base

 

[gecko]

Mip maps might play into this also.