Yes, it cuts down on the FLASH the sun makes on the water until you get to lower altitude. Now you see the sun when it is overhead instead of a huge flash of white pixels.

As I saidm there are things I like about it and do not like about it. The 2nd one I posted on the last page of the thread which I edited just for you has the moon glow back in it but leaves the upgraded specular reflection as shown in your shot.


Waves depend on several factors including your video card. If you do not like what you see, simply go back to the one you like and that works for you.




As for the files in the terrain shader folder, dont worry Alex. In SP2 they are written to that folder as you fly and as they are called up so the folder will fill up the longer you fly and in different shader environment calls.

Remember, as you go lower in altitude, the sun and moon reflection should still span across the water as it does in real life. That fix corrected the fact that the sun and moon was producing the low altitude reflection at higher altitudes. As I said, its not perfect and as you increase the water slider, it does make a difference, especially with terrain reflecting off the water. Less flicker and better flow is seen.

Leave them Alex, they are under 500k total


Just dont post anymore    

Ashton Lawson wrote on Dec 23^rd, 2007 at 11:20pm:


There you are

Ingvarr's original code does work in the SP2 file, it just requires being placed correctly within its structure. Go back one page to the last post and you will see the original code. The additional code Pwheeler came up with adds a color boost to the RGB and it allows for control of the high/low reflections. You will see those additions noted in RED one page back. He also removed the code that allowed the 'new moon' glow on the water although that could have been corrected with the ENV files.

One thing everyone keeps focusing on is the code. The ENV files can also be altered to fix and enhance things as well which take knowledge of how they work and some Photoshop talent.

Also, the reason you first edit did not work is because I think you forgot to include the 2nd section located toward the bottom, or you may have had the wrong syntax in the code somewhere. I no longer have the test file you sent but I suspect there was an error in it somewhere.

In any case, the edits do work and the 2nd code set I posted is the full edit I currently run which I think is pretty close to excellent but it would be nice to find a way to make oceans less reflective from altitude where you can see clouds like a mirror but still maintain the better reflection at or below 500ft.

DX10 is a different shader file than the DX9. DX9 use the 20 series files, DX10 the 40 and from what I read, the test changes Pwheeler made at AVsim on the DX10 shader file did not work. In my opinion editing the DX10 version is not needed anyway because the performance hit is not there like it is in DX9.

And one other thing.. if you go back and read, this hack does not allow the better reflections with the slider bumped up without a performance hit. It’s the same hit one will get if they did not use the hack and bumped the slider up. All it does is improve the reflections and how they work but will not allow you to run 2xmed without a hit like it did in SP1.

If you want to see the visual low and high altitude results of the SP2 edits Pwheeler came up with, look here: http://www.simforums.com/forums/forum_posts.asp?TID=24248

the numbers he pre-set are very close to perfect. As you increase in altitude the reflections are no where near as smooth and distort, as they should, but its still just a too reflective from 2000ft and above, but, its 110% better than default.

Ashton Lawson wrote on Dec 27^th, 2007 at 11:17pm:



Very little shimmer with those edits. As I said, the edits I posted from Pwheeler are almost perfect. All that is needed is to find a way to keep ocean water from reflecting clouds like a mirror (in MED x2 + on the slider) above 1000-1500ft but keep the higher reflections below that, and it would put the icing on the cake

just tried Nick's code and the water looked much better good work reflections where good and the sun reflections where not pixelated at low altitude

great work, keep it up lads

kermit

Hi guys,

thought I'd register here as I think we're on the right course for a massive improvement in look of the water.

Firstly, I modified a version for SP2 that was done by Jase over on AVSIM. He got Ingvaars original shader mod working in SP2. I don't know if he did anything differently to you Nick to get it working in SP2.

All I did was add muliplication factors against the texture colour and the specular lighting, and also remove the entry that created that annoying moon glow. The first two are scalable so hopefully Str1ker you can add them into FSWC. Although I removed the moon glow line, it is probably scalable too by adding a multiplication factor to it rather than delete it.

There seems to be seven components to the water - base texture colour; sun diffuse lighting; moon diffuse lighting; sun specular lighting; moon specular lighting; reflections (sky (low), clouds (mid), terrain (high), autogen (max)); bump mapping.

I think these are all controlled within the shaders so theoretically they are all modifiable.

I have a few more things that I have been trying to work on. Any help would be appreciated:

1. Someone on AVSIM asked if I could remove the moon glow from DX10. This file is quite different to the DX9 file and apparently just removing the line I removed in DX9 didn't work. I havn't tried to mulitply the line instead as I don't have a DX10 GPU to test it on. Can someone with DX10 try changing this line in the water40.fx (not fxh) and add the bit in red to see if it works?:

Color = float4(lerp(Color.xyz + (g_vSunDirectional * specularFactor.x) + (0.3 * (specularFactor.y + saturate(dot(g_vSunVectorWorld_Moon,vSurfaceNorm)))).xxx, baseColor.xyz, fAlpha.xxxx),fAlpha);

There's alot of guess work involved as I really don't have a clue what I'm doing 

2. The modification I made to the specular lighting reduces their intensity. This is not quite what I wanted to achieve. What I really wanted was to reduce the size of the specular reflections. With my mod the specular glints are not pure white, I essentially just reduced their opacity. I want them to be pure white just not such a wide area. Any ideas?

3. I've been trying to work out how to reduce the intensity of the reflections. It seems to be the envColor.rgb variable that draws the reflections. However it also seems to draw the sun diffuse lighting too and multipliying by ,say 0.3, tends to make the water too dark, although it does reduce the reflections. I'm sure that there is a line somewhere else in the shader which can be muliplied to reduce reflections without reducing the diffuse lighting.

4. What I would really like to accomplish is control over what is reflected at the different water 2x levels. i.e. have the terrain rather than the clouds reflected at water 2x mid. This should help with performance and I'd rather see the terrain reflected than the clouds. Not sure if this is controlled by the shaders. Any ideas?

5. Alot of people have noted the star reflections are way out of proportion. I imagine they are reflected in the same way as the sun, moon and sky. Any one have any ideas how we can remove them? My guess is we can't without removing the sun, moon and sky reflections too, unless they are reflected using an env map rather than what is actually in the sky.

I know the FEX guys are looking into some of these issues with regards to implimenting them in FEX, so maybe they'll come up with something.

Anyway, sorry for the long post.

Happy new year!!!

Paul