Underwater units indistinguishable from units on land

Caydr · Post by **Caydr** » 28 Oct 2005, 01:43

Can units underwater be given a uniform shadow... or... something? It looks retarded for them to be bright as sunshine when they're supposedly a kilometer underwater or something.

Vehementi · Post by **Vehementi** » 28 Oct 2005, 02:02

I noticed this too and assumed it was just a video setting on my side, but it wasn't (I just got a new computer.) Yeah, it's pretty silly. It's almost impossible to tell that they're even *underwater* at all.

Gnomre · Post by **Gnomre** » 28 Oct 2005, 02:16

Maps already have water color tag things, right? Can't they just run the same filter they run on land units for sunlight settings, except run it only on UW units with the water settings?

AF · Post by AF » 28 Oct 2005, 17:51

They're meant to look bluer but i swear sometimes subs look like they'v surfaced and stay surfaced sometimes.

NOiZE · Post by **NOiZE** » 28 Oct 2005, 18:13

yeay they should be more blue imo

Caydr · Post by **Caydr** » 28 Oct 2005, 19:21

I would've just said they should look blue-er, but on maps with different-coloured water, it wouldn't look right.

Either:
1) it takes on the color of the water set in the SMD, plus darkened a bit
2) it just gets shadowed when underwater, period.

Option 2 would probably be the simplest to implement in the short term, right?

Problem is, AFAIK still most people can't run Spring with shadows so it would have to be lighting the same was as units change brightness when they're facing away from the sun/light source.

Speaking of which, what's the status on that? My computer's plenty fast and I've got a reasonably common graphics card, yet shadows crash the game?

NOiZE · Post by **NOiZE** » 28 Oct 2005, 19:28

cadyr do u got a ati and non-ati drivers, i had that, swicthed to at drivers and everything works okay now.

SwiftSpear · Post by **SwiftSpear** » 29 Oct 2005, 06:36

IMO water just needs more murkiness. Right now water looks crystal clear on all maps, irregardless of the "water color" setting. If there were tiled sprites with partial alpha of the water color blending into the water until a cerian depth it would look alot more realistic.

[edit] I have a radeon 9800 pro, it can run doom 3 on reasonably high setting, yet it crashes with spring shadows... Why don't shadows in spring have proper driver support for third party drivers?

FLOZi · Post by **FLOZi** » 30 Oct 2005, 01:57

Shadows work perfectly fine on a 9550 with proper drivers.

Maelstrom · Post by **Maelstrom** » 30 Oct 2005, 06:05

Shadows work fine on my 6600 GT, with drivers.

Water does need to be darker. Ill have a play with some SMD settings, see if the WaterAbsorb can be fixed to make it murkier.

SwiftSpear · Post by **SwiftSpear** » 30 Oct 2005, 13:25

FLOZi wrote:Shadows work perfectly fine on a 9550 with proper drivers.

If you call the catalysts proper you really don't know too much about video cards. Omega drivers are far superior for ATI, with the possible execption that they take longer for releases then catalysts do, because he rebuilds them based on whatever changes were made to the most recent catalysts. There's no reason shadows shouldn't work on omega drivers.

FireCrack · Post by **FireCrack** » 30 Oct 2005, 14:46

Omega drivers never worked for me, crashes crashes creashes...

SwiftSpear · Post by **SwiftSpear** » 30 Oct 2005, 14:56

FireCrack wrote:Omega drivers never worked for me, crashes crashes creashes...

Crashes are why I switched from catalysts. Did you go for tech support?

FLOZi · Post by **FLOZi** » 30 Oct 2005, 23:29

Maelstrom wrote:Shadows work fine on my 6600 GT, with drivers.

Water does need to be darker. Ill have a play with some SMD settings, see if the WaterAbsorb can be fixed to make it murkier.

Those too.

FireCrack · Post by **FireCrack** » 31 Oct 2005, 02:12

SwiftSpear wrote:
FireCrack wrote:Omega drivers never worked for me, crashes crashes creashes...
Crashes are why I switched from catalysts. Did you go for tech support?

Tech support? no.

The cat's ahev always worked for me and they are the "proper" drivers regardless.

Spring RTS Engine

Underwater units indistinguishable from units on land

Underwater units indistinguishable from units on land