water block holes?

#21 I couldnt get your code to work on anything but 8

#22 What were the issues on the other square sizes? Did the water still have holes? Was there some other issue? If you can provide more specifics, perhaps we can get to the bottom of it...

Cheers,

Stephane

#23 I tried this - doesn't work on square size of 8 on 1.4. :(

So, won't go into HEAD this time around - maybe for a later release. Sorry, Stephane.

#24 Hehe... could someone be more specific than just 'dosen't work'! I'd love to fix this, but without any more information, I'm at a loss. Our team has been using this for over a month now on both square sizes of 8 and 4 without any issues, so I'd really like to know what the problem is!

#25 Stephane, I've just tried to implement this on clean TGE 1.4 and found that:
with square size 8 it works perfectly.. (tried on a few different missions)
but when I set 4 or 16 - there are sill holes.
Any ideas?

#26 Nice, screenshots :)

I'm guessing that I missed something in pasting my code changes in here... I will have to take time and go over everything again very slowly...

Stephane

#27 Steph, I'm not that good programmer in c++ to find where is a problem by myself... so if you find anything just paste here and I'll do all "beta-testing".. ;)
I'm more delphi coder ... but with huge background on developing large-scale software... so "testing" for me is a thing that I love ...

I'm really interested in this "waterblocks" to be done...
if anything - just ask

#28 Thanks for the offer man. I've got a huge pile of stuff on my plate right now, but I'll probably have some time over the holidays to look at this.

Stephane

#29 Hey guys.
Im pretty annoyed at torques terrain and waterblock issues with different sizes...going on for over 3 years. When I started editing my terrain at squaresize=4 about 3 weeks ago, I *assumed* all the 'magic numbers' (a term for hard coding numbers like this...total hack) coding would have been updated. Last night I did natually what Desmond suggested, without reading this thread before hand about changing just the 1024 in waterblock.cc, but that was crap. So either I get your code to work, or I hack this thing to crap so it doesnt cut any holes out at all. My eyes cannot take it at squaresize=8, I cross my fingers one of us can get lucky here very soon (like Dec 2005)!

- john

#30 Seems anyone that wants higher density terrain AND water STILL only have two options:

1) Make all of your game art and measurements with an upscale factor (1 meter = 3 world units, or more).

2) Shift-delete the goddamn waterblock off the engine and write something of your own. Might take a while, but might be worth it.

#31 I'm disappointed that GG resources weren't applied to this. It's clearly a bug, and I would have squeaked louder and sooner had I known it wasn't being addressed in 1.4. In fact that is the only reason for this post - so GG can see that there are others out there who had hoped it was being fixed.

But as Ben said, it's too late now. I guess I'd rather have Constructor and Torque AI anyway.
[/squeak]

#32 Hey guys,

I've scaled my terrain to 16 so I can have a larger non-repetitive area, and promptly ran into this problem as well. It would rock if we could get this sorted out and put up as a resource (or better yet, get it permanently fixed in the engine).

#33 Has anyone made any progress on this? I need the ability to go from squaresize 2 to 4 to 8. from map to map.

Has anyone figured out away to do this? I'm having the same problem with using squaresize 2 using TGE 1.4 clean

#34 What is the process for removing the holes al together and what are the ramifications of doing so? "performance loss and / or no shore lines"?

#35 Afaik there isn't a procedure for removing the holes, other than not using the Torque water-block at all. Not 100% sure and I'd love to be wrong..... but I've given up on using water unless squaresize == 8 :(

#36 There is no known way to fix that... as said before somewhere here, on forums... it will work with squaresize different then 8, if you write your own routine dealing with water.

#37 The fluid::RebuildMasks() method in fluidSupport.cc controls rejecting underground water "tiles". There's a post somewhere explaining how to disable this. If I'm not mistaken, it's something along the lines of:

Around line 291 in fluidSupport.cc, inside the RebuildMasks() method, you'll see this code:

// Classify each point as above or below ground.
    if( m_pTerrain )
    {
        u16 FluidLevel = (u16)((m_SurfaceZ + (m_WaveAmplitude/2.0f)) * 32.0f);

        pG = pGrid;
        for( Y = 0; Y < m_SquaresInY+1; Y++ )
        for( X = 0; X < m_SquaresInX+1; X++ )
        {
            i = (((m_SquareY0+Y) & 255) << 8) + ((m_SquareX0+X) & 255);
            *pG = (u8)(FluidLevel > m_pTerrain[i]);
            pG++;
        }
    }

Setting *pG = 1 instead of (u8)(FluidLevel > m_pTerrain[i]); will cause all water "tiles", even those underground, to be accepted.

#38 It blows my mind that GG is completely ignoreing this. This should not be this difficult. that it take this many peoplet this long with no success. and still no help from GG. Sonone from GG needs to Step up to the plate and fix this. I have tracked this topic going back 3 years now.

I'm sure if one of the guys at GG would take an afternoon they could sort this out in a matter of hours. No offense to the guys in this thread. Just I mean they wrote this stuff in the first place.

This is sooo frustrating. I had the skill level to fix this myself but I just don't.

#39 It's not a priority for us, and it's not an afternoon fix for us, either, sorry. I'd estimate a week or two of focused time from one of our more experienced developers, which is pretty costly given how many things we're trying to get done. :)

If you want non-8 squaresizes, use TSE's water and terrain, which fully support scaling that parameter.

Or you can scale the other stuff in your world up or down so a squaresize of 8 looks right.

Or you could contract a programmer to fix it.

Or you could write your own water renderer - it's not particularly hard to make new objects - or contract someone to do it.

Or you could experiment with these fixes. They're not hard, even for a non-coder, to apply.

I bet if you had spent the time working on your game that you've spent waiting for this issue to get fixed, you'd already be past it. ;)

We've been looking for a good community fix, but everything that comes out tends to be surrounded by mystery and imperfect results... we've tried once or twice to apply some of the community fixes but the ones we've tried tended to break things. :)

Meanwhile, we are committed to making squareSize of 8 work, and if a solution does come up for other sizes we're very interested in working with the community to roll it into TGE HEAD.

#40

Quote:If you want non-8 squaresizes, use TSE's water and terrain, which fully support scaling that parameter.

...Sounds like you know how to fix it already to me. and no I'm not gonna give more money to GG when the community clearly thinks this is a bug and you say it is not a priority.