Ohhhh, the sphere is actually partially transparent! That totally makes sense to me now.
I've noticed for a long time that the EQ client doesn't handle well the situation where multiple objects are rendered to the same area of the screen when transparency is involved.
My understanding of what happens is that transparent textures don't get written to the Z-buffer, so if you have multiple transparent objects rendered in the same frame, later renders always render on top of earlier ones, even if the earlier objects are closer.
This is a client graphics engine related problem, and I don't think there's anything that can be done to fix it.
Generally what happens in this sort of situation is that the graphics engine makes sure to render transparent objects from farthest away to closest, so the closer transparent objects get rendered on top of the farther ones, as the eye would expect to see.
The fact that the water ceiling is so big means that the graphics engine isn't going to be able to follow that ordering method. The closer parts of the ceiling will be closer than the sphere, while the farther parts will be farther, so the sphere is going to intersect with the ceiling from some angles and give visual anomalies no matter what.
Like I said, I don't think there's any way to fix it. It's just a result of the way they created the graphics objects and a side effect of the rendering method. If the sphere were 100% solid instead of having transparency, the problem would go away, since it would be written to the z-buffer and the transparent ceiling wouldn't render over its areas of the screen.
- Shendare
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