Hey guys. I was discussing preferable methods of hiding seams between terrain and structures with Duce, when the idea popped into my head that I should probably show the good, faithful community my old test map that exemplified it best. Now I know the final product in this case may not look absolutely perfect... this is because I was rushing and had little faith that this would actually work. I'm dropping all of this onto you all so you can may the informed decision of whether or not this is useful. So let's start...


This is the scene that I tried to hide the seam of, using methods that produce results similar to Halo 3. (Halo 3's looks and functions better, guess why.) Notice that the "fake" decal is just away from the geoemtry so that it doesn't cause z-fighting.



This pic is because some people's understanding of shaders is severely depressing. This is where most of you will probably mess up. I can't explain it any better than the pic. If youre still confused: give up.


The final, half-arsed product:


As you can see, the possibilities are somewhat endless if you were so properly motivated. I encourage you all, try it!


Things to note:
-This is a ".shader_transperent_chicago" and thus has little to none impact on performance. (Unless you go all out at use a freakin huge bitmap!)

-Regular game decals will usually render UNDER the "fake" decal we made; dynamic lights will be obstructed by it, too! With that said, I highly suggest that this is ONLY used for hiding fine seams.

-The bitmap we made...
~~~~~~~~~The original diffuse is what you would get if you took a sample of the main ground map at the real world level. I'd recommend reusing the ground map's diffuse, unlike my method of just hand painting it.
~~~~~~~~~Radiosity is faked on it via lightening, darkening, and/or recoloring it to seem right. With the right motivation, you could get this ray traced for you!
~~~~~~~~~The Alpha channel is transperancy! Treat this channel with lots of care and respect. Use a bitmap format that will preserve 100% of it's quality!

-I am DSalimander; I am also working on another SP that is currently in internal beta testing mode, you'll know more about it soon. My Xfire is dsalimander.
Edited by il Duce Primo on Jul 29, 2010 at 08:13 PM

[20:20] DSaLi,MaN: post

very good, jesse needs to do this with sandtrap

Why not just place decals in sapien?
:/

ino ur secret

And delay it even more?

HAHA

.. this is new? so easy to do just by using the same ground texture/changing the detail maps and bump maps, allows you not have to do retarded "fake decals". (check out immure2)

another decent way to have done it (the way it was actually done in h3) is to take the actual metal, bring it up a bit, give it a texture with a alpha in the middle (middle does not show), surrounding will show with proper detail map..

Edited by Higuy on Jul 29, 2010 at 08:56 PM

No.

i know it to :D

Apparently decals just aren't enough for them.

Dee, you don't get it, do you. Placing decals in Sapien like you know you want to would cause oodles and oodles of horrid lag for a good portion of people trying to enjoy the game. My method, AS I SAID, causes almost no lag, because of how it's implemented. Go to Google and type in "define:new". I think you'll find a few supprises.

-I am DSalimander

Neat trick.

This is what i was thinking. It might overload the screen like scenery does and mess up performance/quality with too many decals.

so we can make a dirt texture blend into a grass one in max, without needing photo shop at all?
Edited by StatutoryTrOy on Jul 30, 2010 at 09:53 AM

lololol

A large area of non-alpha tested transparent images to do something as simple as that is not worthy of sitting in your ram like the rest of your BSP geometry. Decals are occluded the same way scenery is, if the origin isn't on camera, it will not draw. So it will be better optimized than what you are doing. You seem to do this a lot, you do something simple and throw it off as "revolutionary" or something.

Having something like this in the BSP will completely throw off the BSP tree as well as the light map's texel space if it was to close off something in such a concave manner.

And no, this is not new. We tried using a method similar to this in the making of fracture.
Edited by DEEhunter on Jul 29, 2010 at 09:05 PM

Thats just a ground map with a alpha.

∆Shadow∆: deehunter replied
DSaLi,MaN: i know
DSaLi,MaN: everything he said is wrong
DSaLi,MaN: its funny
∆Shadow∆: he's saying its not that awesome because he sucks
DSaLi,MaN: i think hes what btards call a troll
DSaLi,MaN: but im not sure
DSaLi,MaN: he seems like he genuinly thinks hes right
∆Shadow∆: he does seem that way
DSaLi,MaN: mhmmm
DSaLi,MaN: i think this chat should be copy pasta'd into the thread, the whole world should know of our discovery

Are you honestly saying that it is less expensive to render BSP than decals?
Edited by DEEhunter on Jul 29, 2010 at 09:40 PM

there is a heaps easier way but then you have to be good at a number of certain things. VERY GOOD.

you could make it a scenery peice.... obviously dont spam the whole damn thing, otherwise you get performance issues D:

What'd be the point of doing that over a decal? You can place decals in sapien, and you'd be able to use them on non-specific terrain and stuff.
Edited by Koo294 on Jul 30, 2010 at 08:39 AM

bungie doesnt use decals and such for that, their halo 3 engine had what most next gen game engines have as "super masking". Halo ce's engine can only mask two colors, Black and white. But when you have an engine capable of super maskin you can have up to 5 colors; Green, red, blue, white, and black. Of course we cant have that in the halo ce engine, so its best using this technique or the technique i use which is at a intermediate level, but i dont want to share such secrets now, do i?

They still used decals to hide seems. If you ever opened up their maps you can find the decals they used.

The problem with what dee's saying is that the textures won't line up very well.

Attention inhabitants of this thread:
It would appear that my simple concept is too far beyond any of your mental grasps. This both shocks and disturbs me. I have prepared a breakdown of why I am right and every single one of you are, unfortunately, completely wrong:

The purpose of this:
To hide extremely obvious seams where two materials (IDs) connect in the BSP model. One material is usally a natural material like grass, dirt, or cliff (terrain). The other is anything that could be classifable as opaque (in my demonstration, I used the Forerunner metal plate floor). Protip: this is a work-around for the same resultant effect that was reached in Halo 3 by whatever method they used to do it that isn't available to us.

The problem:
Using standard decals in Sapien will produce several problems:
-You would require well over what the render buffer can handle without lagging so hard that you're head will explode. I don't need much evidence to prove this.
-Most people can't handle Halo's decal system because... it's absolutely horrible. I once froze my Xbox because of how many decals I was purposely generating by beating the crap out of dead bipeds.
-Certain graphics cards don't support or barely support Halo's decals. My card is an 8500GT... which tends to make playing with decals a nightmare.
-I (and a ton of other people) usually play without decals on; if seams were covered by said decals, I/they would never get to see them.

The solution:
Use special decals that are apart of the BSP so that...
-You don't have to risk messing up the placement by placing them in Sapien as an object. This is why the "fake" decals are NOT scenery. Although, I suppose you certainly could.
-THIS CAUSES NO LAG. Contrary to what DeeHunter believes, BSP isn't that valuable. You can do this as much as you want and you will notice, for yourself, your FPS doesn't exponentially decrease as fast as using a billion normal decals. And yes, I am very freaking aware of what the normal Halo decals are and how they work. Maybe next time he'll learn to the shut the hell up because he's not always right.
-By using ".shader_transperent_chicago"s, you can apply traditional detail maps to these "fake" decals to your hearts content with any kind of blending you like. I suggest referancing the terrain shader you based the "fake" decal off of, for this. (Like I obviously did.)


In-conclusion:
I'm right and you're all wrong. I wasn't being a jerk in my first post, but now I am. Guess why. Perhaps next time you'll consider thinking before posting. With love, Sali.

PS: If you figured this out before me but didn't tell anybody, you might as well have never found it. Understand how that works? Good.

pwned by sali and his need to stick it to teh man :p

this looks awesome though
Edited by Delicon20 on Jul 30, 2010 at 12:51 PM

Hey, i was agreeing with you. Well, atleast that the decal method didn't work well.
Edited by Koo294 on Jul 30, 2010 at 01:14 PM

Why is sali so smug with this.
He always has such a childish approach to these situations:

(I'm right, all of you are wrong)
(None of you have the metal grasp to understand what I'm saying!)
(Don't use decals because it doesn't allow me to place a billion of them! Put it all in the bsp using an expensive shader!)
(It's my method! MINES! Not yours! MINES!)

no sali is right about alot of stuff 98 percent of the time. trust me

I'm sure. He made up a bunch of crap about Lumoria after his failed attempt at saying he is on the team so he can leak maps out of us. I suppose those are right as well?

he never said that to me :P

but higuy did leak ivory tower... and you cant lie about that.

I don't know about that, so I don't really have a valid opinion on it.

Still though, Sali's attempt at making something as simple as this exclusive to him and him only is pretty pitiful. And throwing a bunch of common rendering terms around claiming he is right just shows how dedicated he is to making "his" method look superior to others. It's nothing new, and from personal experience, it has proven to be inefficient in comparison to decals which are occluded out of view rather than have it in my BSP geometry where it sits in memory, regardless if I was looking at it or not(obviously with the exception of user defined portals).

I leaked Ivory Tower to get him mad. He was talking about me behind my back, so I decided to mess with him. And apparently, he also can't control himself around me.

He's also made several attempts to get back at me by telling my team members he's on the team (TM, Lumoria, etc) and that im busy and can't send him a build, but they can.

No need to get too much into that now.
Though I'm sure sali will acknowledge it at his next interval of getting someone to post his 2 cents for him.

:P sali doesnt have a account here that i know of and im posting what i think... whenever i needed help and asked sali he was right.
Edited by Hydrogen on Jul 30, 2010 at 02:18 PM

Wow! No way! This can make stuff around the Standoff boulders way more detailed! And think of the eventual use on levels with a lot of cliff, like Valhalla! This is great!
Oh, wait. This wouldn't work with decals turned off, right?