I did a thing... image - Rise of the Mandalorians mod for Star Wars: Empire at War: Forces of Corruption
The Empire has fallen and a New Republic is born out of the conflict. But in the ashes of civil war, yet another life stirs...
I've been trying to learn OpenGL and other shader languages for a while now and have been slowly creeping my way towards an understanding of it. Though, its not just enough to know the syntax of OpenGL, you have to know how shaders work in a game, what render states mean (and what they are), learning about things like the Z Buffer and etc etc... Anyway, after playing around a bit, I finally got some payoff for my efforts with what you see here.
Previously, grass could not receive shadows at all. As you can imagine, this looked terrible in most cases. Now, with some editing of the grass shader, it does!
Originally, the game creators tried to lazily get around this issue by making the grass props "thin" for lack of a better word. Each "point" of grass was a few blades or some such, leaving grass to look sparse and stupid. When I started to retexture the grass to be thick and luscious, I noticed right away that not receiving shadows was going to be a large problem because now huge swaths of the map were masking away unit and prop shadows and looking "light" when they should be cast in the darkness of a shadow. Anyway, all is fixed now. Grass can be tick and full...and look great at the same time!
The shading does look a lot better, good work
Thank you! That feeling when months of trying to understand a specific code language finally starts to pay off. Lol
Hard work and love, I can already tell this is gonna be fantastic
If only I could be as cool as modders. Then I could understand the amount of work that goes into things like this.
So much work... Literally years of painstaking (but loving) work and frustration. We don't have the funding of game companies or the wealth of resources so it takes much more time. However, we are free to take all the time needed to do great things, rather than "must release now...make DLC later."
Start a Patreon - make the perks something like getting sneak peaks at development or being beta testers. Most likely won't even begin to offset having a real job or anything, but it certainly can't hurt and you might be surprised at how many people sign up.
I'll look into it :)
I've never considered asking for donations...but even if it offset the cost of taking one day off per week to work on the mod or something... Who knows.
And the thing was good.
And _W_ looked upon my mod and said, "it is good." Thank you internet God. Thank you.
Is this something that can be enabled in the base game and other mods with relative ease? If so, would it cause a 'version mismatch' error when attempting to play multiplayer if others don't have it?
The shader itself is just a simple code file that can be placed into any mod with ease.
As for multiplayer... It doesn't change anything drastic with the engine, it simply changes how the game tells the GPU to process anything with the "grass" shader assigned to it. I wouldn't think that multiplayer would be affected by this but i have not tested it.
Are you hoping for a standalone, generic EaW, release? ;)
The good news though is that it doesn't appear to have any negative effects on performance, which is always nice.
Maybe he's thinking like I am of dropping your ground stuff pretty much into every personal mod I've made. Great work.
A standalone release would be cool. I was just wondering if it was something I could copy out of the mod and put wherever to get sexy AT-AT shadows on grass in whatever mod I play.
Although I guess it doesn't matter that much since most mods don't change the vanilla blow-*** grass that consists of a whole 5 pixels.
Haha blow-*** grass sounds like a name for a type of weed or something. Lol.
But indeed, the shaders in my mod can be injected into any mod so give that a go once I release them.
Really nice man :D
Thanks! :)
You must have made a deal with the devil to accomplish this amazing piece of work.
Wasn't kidding when I said my heart and soul have been put into this mod. lol
See that's my plan after all... Those three got out of crossroads deals and cheated death plenty of times. I figure it can't be too hard.
Yeah, just keep in mind, you're not a Winchester.
And you haven't answered the important question:
Did you use tongue?
Lol
If you are actually rewriting shaders, for the love of all things holy and sacred, please rewrite meshbumpcol so that it can reflect light from objects such as particles. Oh ma lawd we need this so badly.
That's a bit more advanced as it will probably require writing an entirely new shader, not just editing an existing. However. besides just for the sake of adding it to a resume, I have three goals in mind when learning OpenGL... The first of which was accomplished with the grass. The other two are:
Make independent light sources that can be attached to objects like lasers and explosions so they cast actual light onto their surroundings.
And second, re-enable unit reflections on all water...as currently the knuckleheads at Petro have them disabled in FoC (but not the in the un expanded predecessor...go figure that one out...). This issue doesn't exist in the XML. I've looked. Tirelessly. I think they got turned off in the shader itself.
Wait, are you saying original EaW had unit reflections on water and FoC didn't? I never even noticed.
Also that's ******** galore.
Correct. You can still force reflections in the map editor but that presents an obvious problem for objects which are spawned in-,game. However, it shows that reflections are still IN the shader, they are just disabled by default. Now, for reasons which are beyond comprehension, Petro did physically disable reflections and refractions in each unit's XML code if graphic settings were below level 99... which, being that max settings is 3, 99 means reflections always off... But, even if you change this to something like 0, which should mean reflections ways on, they still don't show. So it has to be something else. The shader is all I can think of.
Then, the next level of ******** is that they didn't include the source water shader with the mod tools when released... So I can't look. The best I've got is the source water shader from universe at war. But the engine is too different and you can't really transplant one to the other. I've emailed Petro asking if I can get the source water shader or if they have any insight into the issue...but have yet to get a reply. I doubt I ever will...their PR is less than great. I've talked to them in the past and you basically get a courtesy "thanks for addressing your problem" email and then they never speak to you again. lol
This game is a wonderous journey through ******** valley. About two monthes back I found out I couldn't capture mining asteroids because the asteroid fields they were sitting on had the xml tag "is collidable by living projectile" enabled.
That was fun to fix, took me three hours to find out that that was causing the issue.
And yes, independent light sources, please, pretty please, ur ma gurd, yes please.
Imagine the engine glows...
PS. To be the party pooper, remember the game only has 2 gb of memory to work with, 4 with a 4 gb allocation patch (which only works on the gog version of eaw) and that secondary light sources might make the game run out of memory, at which point it promptly crashes. Just something to keep in mind.
Yeah, it's definitely an interesting journey, that's for sure. EaW is like a super hot chick....from Thailand. You take it's clothes off and find...disappointing surprises. lol
Lol, your analogies are the best. You had some... memorable experiences in Thailand?^^
Haha. Personally not...thank God. Just making fun of the stereotypes.
I am still amazed how well the modding community for this game is doing and how much there can still be improved. Great job, man.
PS: Yep. I just assumed your gender. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
**TRIGGERED**
Damn that is nice! Maybe one day the dream of PBR Shaders in FoC come true :P
We can dream right? lol
Wow i didn't ever noticed than FoC do not reflect any object on the water, That sucks!! Perhaps the way to change this is on that compiled file TERRAINWATER.FXO
Yep, that's my bet. But unless us modders can acquire that source shader from Petroglyph... No luck.
You know, I always think than extract files from the meg files does not work completely, for the reason than you cant play the original EaW Rebel and Empire campaings for bugs on the maps, I actually made the way to fix all those bugs but is curious why eaw can actually play those maps when the extracted campaing map have some missed objetcs than are the reason for some modders never bringed back those campaings in forces of corruption
It's one of those things you wouldn't think is important, but it looks great, and shows the tremendous dedication you've always put into your work. Fantastic.