question about cazic thule

[OrisonSeven]

After further review of the photo... when you look outward from the bubble does the water buckle as well making the outer wall have a similar issue by looking outwards from the center. If this is the case, then the water's model (i.e. then mesh is changed from a flat rectangle to something more.

[Shendare]

My first thought when I looked at it was, "Oh, it looks like the water render is happening after the sphere, and isn't acknowledging the sphere in the z-buffer."

I wonder if it's related to the new water rendering system that was put in place. Is there an in-game option or eqclient.ini option to switch to old water rendering systems so some testing could be done?

- Shendare

[nilbog]

Sorry I'm just now getting back to respond to this conversation! I'm glad to see other people are interested though. I turned on flymode for more tests and screenshots.

when you look outward from the bubble does the water buckle as well making the outer wall have a similar issue by looking outwards from the center.

here is a pic of me from inside the bubble.. near the center, looking forward.




now, panning upward just about 2 degrees or so, the dark square/water area vanishes, and you can see through the bubble again. (similar to when you were near the top layer of water, where it met the sky, you could clearly see underwater, from a certain view)



it most definitely is not touching the ceiling



ground view, looking up.

[OrisonSeven]

i feel like it is the textures that are being manipulated by the game engine. This would cause them to look distorted.

[Shendare]

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