Better Land/Water transitions

[Guest cbuchner1]

I did some tweaking of the land/water transitions. In earlier versions there was always this ugly, non reflective transition band near the shorelines which often had a distinctly different color from deep water.I can now control the reflectivity of the water and set a low and a high limit for these reflecions. So for example I can instruct Tileproxy to make water somewhat reflective directly at the coast line and to not use 100% reflectivity in deep water. To me, this looks much more realistic.Also I now allow to adjust the water color from the Tileproxy INI file. So you can tweak it to better match the underlying water color in your flying area.This stuff might find its way into a service update to Beta 6 towards the end of the year.Happy holidays!

[Guest Challenger604]

Since nobody responded I thought I would say looking forward to the new releases. Keep up the good work and I truly appreciate what you do to make the sim more exciting for me. I'm sure everyone feels the same way!

[Guest BradHosking]

The water textures look fantastic in Beta 6 Here are some of my shots over Sydney Harbor and also one from Kota Kinabalu in Malaysia.Sydney Harborhttp://i160.photobucket.com/albums/t192/ho...23-07-57-96.jpghttp://i160.photobucket.com/albums/t192/ho...22-58-40-41.jpgKota Kinabaluhttp://i160.photobucket.com/albums/t192/ho...DN/f882dc70.jpgThank you so much for your hard work on this project. It certainly makes Flight Simulation sooo much more enjoyable!

[ciae985 1]

Christian, you have certainly done a fantastic job on the water blending and relections. IS this something to can share with us please - I'm doing some manual photographic scenery and the water reflection effects at "low2.x" wash out most of underlying reef/bottom colours.How do you change the water reflectivity levels - I couldn't find anything in the SDKs.Rob

[Guest cbuchner1]

By specifying a water blend mask where the alpha component never reaches 0 (water), but stop at ... say 0.2 or 0.3 You can do this with the SDK's RESAMPLE tool by specifying a water blend mask that is never 0 (black). The problem is however: How do you get global coverage for this? With Tileproxy it's easy ;) Oh wait.. even I did not supply phototerrain coverage for deep ocean areas. So here the water will again become fully reflective. The transitions would look ugly, I guess.Another option would be to modify the pixel shader code for the shader 2.0 and 3.0 Path to perform a different LERP operation in the alpha blending. It should be easy, I've already found the part in the shader code that blends land and water together.Christian

[ciae985 1]

Thanks Christian - although I'm a little unskilled in this area.I tried varying the water mask 8 bit values between 0 ( black , water) and 255 (white , land) and Resampler just rounds back to 0 or up to 255 with the result of either full water effects or land and nothing in between.Have I misinterpreted your post ? Not sure how to set the alpha component to a non interger as you suggest.

[Guest cbuchner1]

In the ProxyUser.INI the min_alpha and max_alpha must be between 0 and 1. It's not an 8 bit value.

[ciae985 1]

Christian - I was meaning to get tips on how your water effects "method" could be used in a general sense for photographic custom terrain outside of Tile Proxy. I was wondering how it translates into resampler ini files etc but can understand if you regard this as the wrong forum.Rob

[Guest cbuchner1]

Hmm I thought the resampler (at least that one from the FSX SDK) would accept water masks with smooth transitions. And as such one should be able to apply values other than 255 and 0.But internally FSX seems to round the water mask to 4 bit precision, so that leaves you with permitted steps of 16. Say 255, 240, 224, 208, 192, ...

[ciae985 1]

My experience with the FSX SDK resampler shows that the result is a rounding of a 0-255 graduated water mask down to a single bit decision 0-127 and 128-255;( I had a bit of success using the blend mask on the water but that takes out the seabed terrain at the same time.Thats why I was in awe of what you had achieved with TP as the seabed/riverbed/coral reefs etc are rendered in beautiful full colour (same as turning off the reflection effects in the SIM) but with a lovely transparent water effect over the top...now that is something.