Boothand

Cool. Comparison: Jamp Vanilla Rend2 Okay, so there is a difference when I use vanilla/rend2. It kind of works. Not sure if it's exactly the same as you have though. Maybe openJK could take care of it if it was an ATI card bug. Who knows what this tiny problem's mom and dad looks like. They could be tearing down the game from the very ones and zeros.

I see. Using a HP laptop I bought about 5 years ago, it has windows 7 and is quite freshly formatted. Tried rend2 just now on a healthy clean steam-install of the game, but as soon as I switch the renderer to rd-rend2, it crashes with the error. Not sure if it has changed since my first error I posted, so I'll post another huge console dump. In about a week I'll be able to test on a stationary PC with different cards.

Yeah that's the next step. Might be able to make some bump files manually actually. Should fs_homepath really be set to [...]/My Games/OpenJK? That's the folder in any case that's causing me trouble, it seems. What if I'd set it to gamedata? What is it actually?

Ok, this works, but there's a hitch! I deleted the My games/openJK folder prior to testing it. Worked. When I've started the game, that folder now exists again with some files. Now I can't open the game again (or vid_restart) without the same error. If I delete it again, it works. And so on...

After compiling it, is there anywhere else I should put the files? I see there's a search patch to Games/Openjk etc, and I've tried replacing those too with rend2 ones. Think I replaced the ones in fabulous_openjk.pk3 too. Got no errors on compile at least, so I'd think it rather had to do with the process after that.

Hmm, okay, I copied the shader where I put all my normalmaps, named it the same with .mtr. Then I deleted the stages that were rend2 specific in the original .shader one. I suspect something else may be causing this error though. Huge console dump:

Ah, I hadn't! Have I missed out on any crucial guides I should read? Ok, so I'm currently crashing on startup, as it can't read my old shaders. I understand it you can use both .shader or .mtr. But all the normalmap shaders must be in .mtr then? I suppose my other shaders are currently incompatible the way they're written? This is what I can find at the moment: http://jkhub.org/topic/2865-rend2-shader-manual/

So, if any others are reading this thread - could you try the map and see if the branches have gradual blending seen against the sky and water? Especially if anyone has ATI drivers. On my main PC, the stationary, I have a geforce card, but I won't be with it until next week.

Hmm I'm starting to suspect I haven't been running rend2 properly if at all. Might explain why I didn't ever see a difference. I compiled rend2 (from openjk's rend2 branch) just like openJK, with rend2 included, and threw the DLLs in my GameData folder. Feel free to point me to the correct way of doing it! In any case, the main error I got in-game was that the "stage" keyword wasn't recognized.

The trees behave like before. Bugged against sky/water. I see, I'll try out some of those. Hmm I'll probably ask for help about the envmap if I don't figure it out... soon enough, some time . Yeah I checked out alphashadows yesterday. Very handy!

Impressive! Thanks so much! I've learned lots of neat tricks from this. The water environment map looks so nice, although for obvious reasons it kind of only looks right from one angle. Wish there was a way around that. I'll play around with it though. One last question, since we've kind of covered all kinds of topics by this time. Would you use the skylight parameter? The sunext looks very nice, but even with bounce8, it leaves a lot of areas not in direct sunlight way too dark. I don't wanna potentially ruin the shading spectrum with a minimum ambience light, although it could be the way it should be done. I was wondering if skylight is involved in this. After this, I'll try more and ask less Just in case it had compiler disadvantages such as surfaceLight, though.

I wondered what the trick is to make normal maps look correct in rend2 (or in baseJKA for that matter). At the moment it looks and behaves the same way it did when I tried this a year-ish ago before rend2 was in the works/ports. It all looks like big plastic bubbles, or the textures get random dark spots spread out, no matter what I test it on. Shader: Test-screenshots:

I could make a thread for this (tell me if I should), but just wondered if there's a quick trick to making normal maps look correct in rend2! Szico deserves a break but I guess I'm hinting a bit at his works At the moment it looks and behaves the same way it did when I tried this a year-ish ago before rend2 was in the works/ports. It all looks like big plastic bubbles, no matter what I test it on. Shader: Test-screenshots: Edit: Made new thread here.

Yeah, it gets rid of the error as well, but it's a bit too dark I think. Liked it better the way it was before. Either way though, it still gives me the same blending troubles. To get those shadows, are you using a really strong intensity value of the sun?

Stwaaaynge. I'll see in a week or so if I can further identify the issue. Could ATI drivers interfere with these things perhaps? Even though I'd highly doubt it. Nolightmap did hurt a bit to get rid of them, since it reverted to the state where it could only be seen in its own shade, and was hard-edged against anything else. For now I'll use the one that worked with non-shaders (and probably improve the texture itself!)

Yep, even with the exact same shader. No assets colliding with it. Thought it might be a rend2 issue, but tested it on a clean base install in a pk3, and same results. Not able to test it on other PCs at the moment, since I'm *home* for a week. Crazy days. The reason why I brought up the lightmap was because the console is accusing me of not keeping my promises of a lightmap stage... for every branch

Yay! Success I don't expect a 100% bugfree solution, but I'll just mention the last few things I notice. When viewed against the grass, it works as it should. When viewed against the water, and the sky (or I suspect *any* shader) it shows the hard edges only. It's not something I passionately intend to fix, but it's worth noting, just in case. Lastly, when removing the onlyvertexlighting command, it becomes in need of either a lightmap stage, or a nolightmap. Adding nolightmap, it loses what it gained by removing onlyvertexlighting. Adding a lightmap stage, it seems to kind of override/collide with the "lighted" spawnflag, and appears very shadowy and dark compared to before. (Oh it was you Of course)

That's very similar to what I had yeah. Hmm now I see what happens. When viewing the branches against anything else - the sky, the grass, the background, I can't see the soft edge blend at all. But when viewing it against the tree, it appears. Yours seems fine either way. Hmmpf! This happens also with lighting applied - which is really exciting by the way. You're right, it only takes a couple of seconds when adding q3map_sunext [etc]. I've seen it used with q3map_skylight as well, and the shader manual didn't seem to forbid it. What do you think about that? Edit: Seems like someone marked the thread solved, and moved it to modding assistance I'll make a new pine showoff thread once this is all settled.

You're a wizard. I'm kind of still struggling to make it look slightly similar to your first one. But the idea was to make pinestem4's alpha smaller than the original (for instance shrinking the alpha using the burn tool?), and making pinestem5's alpha bigger than the original (but... exceeding the area that is textured?) I also noticed, though it won't be a real problem I suppose, that the part of this which is the blendFunc blend still bugs with the other trees etc. But it's not very noticable since it blends with the hard edged version. I suspect I'll be more than happy when I get it to look the way you did. I haven't compiled with lighting yet, because the lighting stage takes about 20 minutes even on small portions of the map...! (Which in turn generally makes it hard to experiment and finetune lighting in my maps. But that's an issue for a different thread, another time )

Fantastic, as always I'll make sure to learn something from this. Thanks for the effort!

Here's a testmap: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/58757568/testmapBoothand.pk3 Thanks for your time! Granted, the water shader is totally broken and for months untouched, but the pinetree also crashes with itself and its fellow pinetrees. testregion3.bsp

Hmm. That leads me right back to this problem again. Collides with itself + other shaders. Current shader: models/map_objects/bootland/trees/pinestem4 { cull disable surfaceparm noimpact surfaceparm nomarks surfaceparm nonsolid q3map_onlyvertexlighting { map models/map_objects/bootland/trees/pinestem4.tga blendFunc blend rgbGen vertex } }

Your first shader works for non-gradual transparency (looks the same way as before), but the second one leaks. I remember I tried some things that caused that before I posted here, but yes it gives gradual transparency, although it leaks. The blendfunc blend causes it. The branch texture is WIP/placeholder but it's not too far away from what I want. The alpha channel seems fine though.

If you compare this one @ all-or-nothing transparency with this one @ gradual trasparency, you probably see what I mean. Hard vs soft edges. I'm trying to replicate how it looks in 3DS max as closely as possible. The current shader is thus: Actually now that I think about it, I recall failing to implement gradual transparency with lightmapped shaders, in a previous thread. Surprised I didn't realize that before. You answered that one actually! If it's still undoable in 2014, it's fine the way it is though (although it seems almost that only a bug is holding it back..) By the way, you said to use twosided. Does it differ from cull disabled, which I had?

Hmm yeah I had already tried the GE128 + the depthfunc equal option I'm afraid, and it gives me all-or-nothing transparency. It looks good from a distance, but loses some credibility up close compared to what I had in the previous shader (although very buggy and unusable). I replaced blendFunc with the alphaFunc, otherwise it had no effect. Wasn't aware of the lightmap ("lighted") spawnflag! Thanks. I can't quite realize the difference between blendfunc and alphafunc and their roles in each others' lives. Further suggestions appreciated!