AnKor's Shaders

[Anonter]

Ah that would be it haha thought it was ft, was thinking that sounded a little low for contrails!

Thanks gentlemen, all sorted now.

 

[mongoose]

On contrails. I remember I used to have the old versions but I was sure they were in the effects section of the aircraft xdp files; especially the B17s; but I don't see any evidence in any of my US or UK bombers??
I assume we still need to add effects to the xdps; I must have missed details on that.

 

[MajorMagee]

Yes the xdp needs something like

<Effect Type="Track" EffectName="fx_high_contrail" Location="emitter_eng0_exh"/>
<Effect Type="Track" EffectName="fx_high_contrail" Location="emitter_eng1_exh"/>
<Effect Type="Track" EffectName="fx_high_contrail" Location="emitter_eng2_exh"/>
<Effect Type="Track" EffectName="fx_high_contrail" Location="emitter_eng3_exh"/>

with the appropriate location name, or x, y, z coordinates defined to match the aircraft model .

 

[mongoose]

.........................
can be edited to set the starting altitude and fade-in distance to match the weather conditions you're trying to simulate. For the BoB campaign in late Summer and Fall the altitude would be perhaps be a bit higher that the Winter 24,600 ft I provided as a default.

http://contrailscience.com/fightercontrails-over-kent-1941/

indicates it should be more like this for the Battle of Britain over London.
.........................

Interesting in that link people agreeing about chemtrails or even 'smoke'trails!!

 

[gecko]

Facility makers rejoice! Ankor is building a tool to improve FPS at airfields with high tree density, keep your eyes peeled: http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/4408960#Post4408960

 

[greycap.raf]

One thing that would be beyond greatness would be having facility trees that look like the autogen trees. Uniform looks, you know. Anyone have any idea where the models are located?

 

[Pat Pattle]

One thing that would be beyond greatness would be having facility trees that look like the autogen trees. Uniform looks, you know. Anyone have any idea where the models are located?

The facility trees are in the buildings folder, they are just normal M3d's just like the hangars and huts etc.

Ankors new tool sounds very intriguing!

 

[sdsbolt]

One thing that would be beyond greatness would be having facility trees that look like the autogen trees. Uniform looks, you know. Anyone have any idea where the models are located?

If you don't find them, you could fly around and 3d-rip the autogen trees and convert them to facility usable objects. Does require the use of gmax though so maybe someone has a better answer.

 

[Pat Pattle]

How did you get the ripper to work with the 3d viewer please Stephen? I tried a number of times with no luck.

 

[sdsbolt]

Clive,
that 3d viewer screenie was a tree that has allready been converted to m3d .

to launch cfs3 3d viewer from 3dripper make sure you fill out the command line.

 

[Pat Pattle]

Doh! I tried everything but that! Thanks, all working now, just have to fiddle around with the Blender part as its not producing MCX readable files at the moment.

 

[sdsbolt]

Clive,
yeah, I can only seem to open the ripped .obj files with Blender. Then border select the visible parts you want, inverse select the non-visible parts and delete. Now you can export as a 3ds file that Mcx will open. I find its easiest to rotate and scale the model in Mcx.

 

[Pat Pattle]

Clive,
yeah, I can only seem to open the ripped .obj files with Blender. Then border select the visible parts you want, inverse select the non-visible parts and delete. Now you can export as a 3ds file that Mcx will open. I find its easiest to rotate and scale the model in Mcx.

Thanks Stephen! All sorted. To get it to work for me I had to delete the unnecessary bits and re-save as an .obj in Blender than open it in MCX 1.3 and then export to 3ds.

I'll have a go at some trees next.

 

[sdsbolt]

Clive,
looks good! When I export a .obj from blender it seems to merge a bunch of the parts together which is a big problem on larger projects. I have not had that problem when exporting as .3ds. I still need to run that thru Mcx and export as the older style 3ds before importing into gmax.

 

[Daiwilletti]

These last few posts about grabbing objects in m3d view and creating models is very interesting. They really deserve a thread of their won, I fear they will be lost in amongst the pages required for Ankor's shaders.

 

[AnKor]

While I can't help with extracting tree models, I can say that if you list facility tree textures under [Foliage] in TextureMagic.ini they will use the same lighting as autogen trees.

As for merging facility models - it looks good, but I'm still working on improving it. I will likely release a "compatible" version to use with existing DX9 shaders or stock CFS3, but there's also going to be a much more efficient one for new WOTR shaders - it will use GPU instancing and thus will produce much smaller m3d files, also requiring less memory in game.

The problem with "compatible" version is that each tree model has to be copied as many times as it appears on facility, so it can easily reach 10 Mb file for less than a hundred of trees. While I am pleasantly surprised that both cfs3 and my DX9 shaders can handle this, it is obviously not the way to go.
Instancing version will store a single copy of tree model and just 64 bytes (bytes!) per instance. So a hundred of copies will add just about 6 Kb of overhead.

 

[gecko]

Sounds like you've been making some real headway with the WOTR shaders, looking forward to seeing them in action someday!

 

[NachtPiloten]

Question

What is the purpose of putting the search_light.dds entry in the texture...ini? The reason I ask is that is not the dds name of the textures for the search_lights we have in game, I will add those in the same location as the above, but just curious as to why this is done.

 

[AnKor]

search_light.dds is used by WOFF searchlights
I think someone (gecko? ) was trying to make similar searchlights for cfs3, but I don't know if it worked.

 

[NachtPiloten]

Lights

Tks, - we have had searchlights in CFS3 for many years, just trying to take advantage of the new shaders (many thanks). The WOFF ones are copies of the original ground crew ones done way back in 2004 or so. Thanks again for all your great efforts!