PRAF68_EU

400% draw distance makes distant objects more likely to be visible through the fog.

I don't know why you find it so suprising, you already know the engine calculates the objects based on draw distance, then adds the fog later, it's clear the apperence and density of the fog is somewhat dependent on graphics processor / driver.

Originally no Hazard zones had contacts.

The Hollows was the first Hazard zone with contacts.

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blue/green tinge on objects that doesn't obscure them.

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It actually depends if it is a light source or not. Light sources sould become reddened, as the blue light is scattered out of the beam. Non-light sources appear blued by light scattered into the beam.

Add into that other colours based on the chermicals present: the hydrocarbons formed by the action of sunlight on unburned petrol tend to have a yellow/green cast, water vapour (as you would expect to see in the sea mists around St. Martel or Talos Island) has a slight blue tinge.

See mists should roll in around dawn and disipate by noon.

(ok we can wish!)

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but it does show that fogging everything to the point where only the outline is legible isn't very realistic.

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Quite so, outlines should be blured by the fog, not sharp, as they are in CoX. The landscape painting I linked to shows that quite well.

Dark has much better aggro management than WP.

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and since when does he work with NCsoft, he can't know, he thinks it works that way.


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It becomes fairly obvious if you tinker with the graphics settings.

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the fog is there to lower the strain no matter how the engine works

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It doesn't, because the engine calculates all the objects in line of sight, draws them if they are in range of the draw distance. then draws the fog, removing objects that have already been calculated, so thier is no saving. This becomes clear if you consider the poor performance of Arachnos maps, which have transparent walls, leading to a high "visible" object count, but a large amount of black fog so you can't actually see far.

The CoX engine is unusual. It is true that most game engines work in the way you describe.

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there is, the smaller something seems to be, the further it is.


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Or it could actually be, you know, smaller.

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in depth paintings, you see the effect already.

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In landscape paintings, you see the the effect of arial perspective. Backround hills and mountains are painted in tones of blue and purple, even though they would appear green if viewed close to.

Example.

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You missed out trot, which I think involves the legs moving in opposite corner pairs.

The other important aspect of horse's movement concerns the driving force employed. At full run, all the legs are pushing independently, or something so there's more driving force to the group (though, also at a a run, all four legs are off the ground at some points, which is never the case in the other modes of movement.

I'm sure there's a really good article in Wiki about this, complete with those old stop frame photographs that won the bet.

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Yup, I thought there might be another one. Was relying on memory, not wiki!

Movement is a complex and interesting field of study, that ties in with robotics, but perhaps the most remarkable thing is the ability of the human brain to spot when something looks wrong, despite no consious knowledge of the subject.

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can you stop the attempted flaming please and keep it on topic. Its not a suggestion we already have covered this.

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Indeed, it is a perfectly sensible topic for discussion.

My feeling about Dual Pistols is that it should use a combo system, similar to Dual Blades.

That would add a new gameplay variant to ranged ATs, rather than simply being yet another lethal damage set.

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then you have never bin in holland, if i'm on a high flat i can see very clear at maximum distance.


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Never been to Holland, but even there, where the air is relatively clean, you would see some effect of atmospheric particle scattering whan you looked at things more than a couple of miles away - it would cause distant hills to look bluer in colour for example. Of course, if there are no hills in Holland you might not have seen this effect.

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the fog isn't there to look realistic, it's to remove the strain from the computer.


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As the OP pointed out, the CoX engine doesn't work this way. The game decides to render or not render an object based entierly on the value set in the draw distance. In a foggy zone some objects are rendered even when they are actually invisible because of the fog.

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a sense of distance is there already

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No it isn't. The generated image is entirely two dimensional. Without the fog there would be no way to tell if The Golden Giza was a large object in the distance or a small object near by.

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well, if they tone down the differences in height and make it a bit more realistic, the animation would be better.


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Yes, limiting all characters to between 5-7 feet tall would allow you to use just one walk animation. I think that would be a really popular move, eh!

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i tried ones a spider animation, it's really hard to get the legs move naturally without having the moonwalk effect.

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The underlying physics of spider and insect walking is very different to human walking. In that case the body remains stably supported by 3 (or more) legs whilst the other legs simply move to a new position. Some quadrapeds also use this walk (3 legs still, one leg moves).

I believe a horse has at least 3 seperate movement modes: Walk, which keeps 3 legs on the ground, so the animal is always stable. In this case movement speed is directly proportional to the size of the horse i.e. one animation would do any size horse; Canter which most closely resembles human walking, where the legs swing at thier natural frequency (which is proportional to the reciprocal of the square root of the leg length); and run/gallop where the legs are driven faster than thier natural frequency.

We need to have a moron who knows nothing about programming to say how easy it would be first.

He isn't arrogant, he just knows what he is talking about.

You are arrogant, in assuming you understand better than the developers, and the experienced programmers on this forum, what would be required in making a walk animation.

You don't need to be psychic to know that Ravenswing is an experienced programmer: he knows how hard apparently simple things can be.

And you don't need to be a genius to figure out that if a feature is frequently requested, but hasn't been implemented, then there is a good chance that is because it is not a simple as you think it is.

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PRAF, neko, or whoever can be bothered, drag a villain to St. Martial at the point -278, 236, -357. That should get you on the very top of a crane. Then, look south, at the Golden Giza (the huge ziggurat-shaped casino). If you can see it, I'll eat my hat.

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Eat your hat, I can see it just fine.

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Play with the world detail slider a bit, even if your FPS dips to "I'm flipping through a comic book" levels.

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I have all my graphics set to maximum already.



The thing though, in the CoX engine, fog isn't directly related to graphics performance. That only depends on the draw distance. It's purely cosmetic, you could remove it without hurting performance, but that would make the game look rubbish. It hides the half drawn objects, it disguises the fact that the game world is flat, not spherical, which would be quite obvious to someone flying, it gives a reason why mobs are invisible beyond perception ranges, it helps to create a sence of distance (It's a technique landscape painters call arial perspective I believe) and most importantly, it's there because fog is part of the real world, and there is no such thing as completly clear air.

I'm all for more realistic fog, and other weather effects, but removing it would be horrible.

When BAB did post here he was met with a torrent of abuse.

I seem to remember the OP being one of the main offenders.

You might find this enlightening:

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Of all the questions asked of me at Hero Con the number one was "How did the D&D game go?"

In a word: Awesome.

Spoilers below

I had a blast, and I think the players did too. When everyone gathered in the suite, I informed them that the characters were level 12, and based on the Cimeroran versions of the Freedom Phalanx: Imperious (Statesman, Fighter), Sister Solaris (Sister Psyche, Cleric), Daedalus (Positron, Warlock), Orion (Manticore, Ranger), Parthenon (Citadel, Paladin), and Marathon (Synapse, Rogue).

Once everyone had picked their characters, they opened their packets to find their character sheets, a four-page primer on the 4th edition rules, and color-coded character power cards. The cards helped IMMENSELY as they had all the bonuses added up already, so the players only had 1 number to add to their die rolls most of the time.

The story started with the players tasked to get the Golden Fleece before Romulus' agents could. The agents had a head start, so they would have to try to make up time wherever they could.

They were in a high walled canyon when they came across the hours-dead corpses of some Cyclopses. They then found themselves ambushed by more Cyclopses looking to avenge their fallen comrades. Once they defeated the boss Cyclops, the Impaler 'clopses ran off. Victory for the players!

Then they made their way to the cave entrance that would lead them through the mountain to the valley beyond. The entrance was blocked by an immovable boulder, and they soon found a hermit who was an "agent of balance". The hermit informed them that they could pass if they could prove themselves counter to the group that had previously passed this way, Romulus' agents. The agents proved themselves to be evil, so Imperious and crew were tasked to prove themselves to be good. Words were not good enough, it would take action to prove this.

Point of order: Proving you are Good by action is a lot harder than proving you are Evil.

The party finally succeeded by healing the wounds of Marathon from the previous fight, an act of sacrifice (of a healing surge) to mend a friend. This was good enough for the Hermit and he let them into the cave.

The cave quickly turned into a maze, complete with Minotaurs attacking. After felling them, they found themselves in the valley where the presipice containing the fleece was found. They made their way to the presipce and found the chewed, dead bodies of Romulus' agents by a cave near the fleece. Approaching the fleece, a Hydra attacked, and while the party dealt with that, the surviving four agents made their way to get the fleece.

In the end the party was victorious over the Hydra and the agents, recovered the fleece and gave it to the Cimeroran version of Azuria for safe keeping. (Or did they specifically say NOT to give it to her? I don't remember, it was like 2am).

The session was recorded, and I have yet to listen to it. If it's able to be edited and put up for download, I will see to it that it is at some point before the next Hero-Con.

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-Positron

source

The plaque was visible last time I went after it, but that was a long time ago.

Tried logging on the same character from my laptop (which uses the same internet connection), and haven't had any DCs.

Very strange. If it something to do with my other machine, why does it only seem to be affecting one character?

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Yet look at it again.

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Just looked at your image, and it is showing way way more fog in St. Martel than is visible on my machine. It must be your graphics card/settings.

It doesn't look all that unrealistic though. If anything there is to much obscuration of the sky background, but insufficient reddening.

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But no city has this much dirty air, and if it really IS that misty, why can I see the sky with perfect clarity?


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Sounds to me you have never actually been to a city. Paragon has to be one of the cleanest cities in the world.

And yes, if you look up in Manchester, you can see the sky. It's if you look across (especially from a high vantage point) that you see the smog. It's to do with the way the particles scatter light.

It could of course be that through some quirk of your computer Paragon looks much foggier than it does on mine.

Certainly a graphics upgrade could improve the way the engine handles fog, particualy for people with high spec graphics cards, but I would be inclined to make it more foggy, not less, for the sake of realism. Oh, and the fog should have a slight yellow/green tint to it.

Hmm, the server seems to be the only obvious common factor. I change the title to see if anyone else has the exact same problem:

"Mapserver disconnected" about every 2-10 minutes.

WAI, it's for any mission, like all the other "get a bonus on mission complete" day job powers.

If you do a Vanguard mission, you get your regular Vmerit for completing the mission, plus the bonus one for having the day job power.

Have you tried using a different character?

I'm still getting it on one specific character. Play for around 5-10 mins, then Mapserver DC.

Play with a different character on the same server and everything is fine. I'm just doing a petition + bug report. It must be something on the character that is causing the mapserver to crash.

What zone are you playing in? What day job power do you have?

Probably, it's a feature of how the engine works. They could get round it by flagging the debuff as unresistable, or simply cranking up the debuff for PvP.

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Isnt it odd that def sets (ice particulary) has recharge debuff resist, gets -def resist, while resist sets get virtualy nothing?

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Resistance automatically resists resistance debuffs. [If you have 50% resistance, and get hit by a -10% resistance debuff, that will be reduced to a -5% debuff before being applied].

Ice gets lots of slow resistance as part of being uber-resistant to cold damage, which usually has slow as it's secondary effect. It's thematic.