MII: Total Smog

[Ilsamir Lord]

Hi everyone,

Not sure if this is really a mapping question, but here goes anyway.

I'm sure you've all noticed the massive difference in time given to rendering distant land forms in Medieval II as compared with Rome - Rome had extremely long, clear views of massive snow-capped peaks:

While Medieval II just has a cloud of grey fog with slightly darker grey shapes to pick out mountains (the following shot was taken on the map Swiss Alps in the "morning" in "clear" weather):

It's clear that CA decided the close detail was more important than the long vistas, and they certainly produced some great looking foliage - the middle-distance forests, and the forests in general really, are a huge improvement over Rome - however, surely there would be some way to strike a balance which didn't eradicate the spectacular views but also maintained the greater foreground detail sorely lacking in Rome.

If there is some way to elliminate fog, or to reduce it, just steer me that way, or if there is a mod with this in mind a link would be nice.

Any thoughts?

[Tominokar]

I've never been able to put my finger on it, put I've always felt the battles in RTW were more epic than M2. Now I know why...

[Muizer]

If there is some way to elliminate fog, or to reduce it, just steer me that way, or if there is a mod with this in mind a link would be nice.

Yeah well in RTW you can push back the fog or eliminate it alltogether. The file that controls it is called descr_battle_map_lighting_and_fog_control.txt.
There's one in M2TW that looks much the same. If it does the same thing, fiddle around with the bottom 4 or 5 parameters. I don't remember which one does what exactly, only that you should reduce these numbers.


Edit: dug this up from an old map

settlement_exponential_modifier 0.0002
camera_height_exponential_modifier -0.00025
camera_exponential_modifier_max_height 100.0
min_fog_exponential 0.0000075
min_fog_intensity 0
haze_to_fog_transition_exponential 0.000004
haze_to_fog_transition_exponential_range 1
gloom_fog_exponential 0.000005

[VoodooTengo]

I like it better the way it is in MTW II, in Rome it was ridiculous to be fighting on the south shore of asia minor, and be able to see Rhodes, or on the south west coast of italy and see sicily, the fog is somewhat realistic anyway, looking out of my window right now my field of view kind of ends like that, though not so sharply as it does in the game.

[Ilsamir Lord]

Thanks for the ideas and opinions guys , and yes, I think that what you could see in Rome was too expansive - in terms of sheer distance - but I think that is more the fault of the scaling of the battle-maps in relation to the campaign map than anything to do with being able to see too far.

Could someone give me a precise location for that text file? If I need to unpack to find it then could someone upload it for me? Cheers.

[Miraj]

Another great and informative lesson from Ilsamir. Thank you! +rep

[Ilsamir Lord]

Thanks, Mirage . I hope that it actually ends up coming to something, as I'm yet to get at the text file or to see the results from other users. I'll persist though, as I'd like my mod to have much longer views to snow-capped mountains and such.

[alpaca]

You need to unpack it, but since it's not long I'll just quote it:

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
;
; lighting
;
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

min_light_intensity							1.0
max_light_intensity							1.4
ambient_reduce_proportion					0.75
ambient_red_increase_proportion				0.25
ambient_green_increase_proportion			0.25
ambient_blue_increase_proportion			0.5

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
;
; unit lighting
;
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

unit_min_light_intensity					1.0
unit_max_light_intensity					1.6
unit_ambient_reduce_proportion				0.25
unit_ambient_red_increase_proportion		0.25
unit_ambient_green_increase_proportion		0.25
unit_ambient_blue_increase_proportion		0.5

unit_ambient_multiplier						1.3
unit_diffuse_multiplier						1.3

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
;
; fog
;
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

settlement_exponential_modifier				0.0002			
camera_height_exponential_modifier			-0.00025		
camera_exponential_modifier_max_height		100.0
min_fog_exponential							0.00015
min_fog_intensity							0.35
haze_to_fog_transition_exponential			0.0004
haze_to_fog_transition_exponential_range	0.00005

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

[Ilsamir Lord]

Cheers Alpaca, but where does it go? And will I be able to see its effects without having a fully unpacked game? If you don't know the answer to the second question then its easy enough to find out on my own .

[alpaca]

Into your data folder of course. Just name it accordingly.
I didn't play around with that file at all so I don't know what it does (if it does anything)

[Tominokar]

Lemme know how this goes, am interested in incorporating it into my mod

The reason you can see far off lands and such in RTW is because the scale is all wrong. Sicily for example only looks about 10 miles across. On a clear day you can easily see about 20 miles from a hill. So altering this will be good for big maps.

[Muizer]

The reason you can see far off lands and such in RTW is because the scale is all wrong. Sicily for example only looks about 10 miles across. On a clear day you can easily see about 20 miles from a hill. So altering this will be good for big maps.

That is correct. On big maps covering small areas you can push the fog out much further than on small maps covering large areas. The scale discrepancy is also important to remember when you're making a map. There is always the temptation to add too much detail to the campaign map. I was asked once why Lake Kinneret (north of the dead sea) wasn't on RTR7's campaign map. Thing is, I could put it there, but on the battlemap it would look like a fishpond.

[Ilsamir Lord]

Well, I've placed the file in my mod's data folder and changed some of the values but I can't see any difference regardless of what I change or by how much - I've only been editing the fog section and I've used Muizer's values.

Perhaps the game is still referring to the packed, vanilla file? Though I'm using a modded descr_sm_factions text in the same way and I'm able to change border colours etc...

Perhaps the game just will not allow such tinkering without substantial modding. I'll try other stuff, but if people already know about this file and haven't been able to change anything before now then I don't think I'll bother trying myself.

Regarding scale - I've also been considering this for my mod, and for mods in general, and it seems to me that the size of map MII uses is just about right for a map of an area roughly the size of Greece - or thereabouts. My map, which is of an area roughly the length of modern day Greece, works well at the size given to all of Europe in the vanilla map. An example would be a particular lake in my mod which is supposed to be large, as lakes go, with mountains half encircling it. I wanted to have the mountains visible from the southern shore of the lake - over a distance of perhaps five-ten miles/8 pixels on my height map - and they showed up great (aside from the fog).

It's interesting how much of the 3D engine for Rome and MII seems unfinished - in spite of some fantastic visuals in certain areas -; the default scale of the generated battle-maps and the massive walls of fog are the main calling cards of a far from optimised engine in my opinion.

[Muizer]

Well don't be surprised if there are defunct files in the install. RTW is full of them and M2TW probably is no different. Another file you could play with is descr_daytypes.txt. It also has numerous references to fog.

[Ilsamir Lord]

Ok, thanks guys. I sort of suspected there would be such "left-overs" but its a shame as I'd really hoped to clear out that fog . Still, I'm sure there will be other things I can do to get a specific look for the mod.

[Serious Spamurai]

Have you tried the "weather_db.xml", this line looks like it might be useful:

<fog min="-50" max="2000"/>

[Ilsamir Lord]

Once again, could someone post that file? I haven't unpacked MII and I haven't got a big enough hard drive to do so .

That does sound encouraging though.

[Trajan]

You can't share vanilla/original files in this site. The best thing you can do is find out how to make the unpacker unpack certain files. It's explained in the unpacker readme.

[Ilsamir Lord]

Ok cool, I'll look it up. Thanks, Trajan