Som discovery in map parts

[Madison Lastrega]

found a discovery last night with map parts...... a few months ago I posted some of my findings on map parts..... One of my findings is that map parts don't observe the "black" rule.......Meaning map parts "show" black areas instead of making " black" invisable...... well Funny thig is that when I make or test new parts , I always leave the sky off.... well I was setting up a pic to post last night and I turned the sky On to night...... upon rendering WITH the sky on , Black went bye, bye............ Meaning that with a sky Map parts DO obey the "Black rule".......... great news for anyone wanting to make low poly map parts out of 2D objects like trees and such but know this unless the sky is off......... black will disapeare...........Just passing this info on..........ML ‎  ‎  ‎  ‎  ‎  See pics.......

[Holy_Diver]

Dunno if anyone will pick this up here, but I'm a little out of commission on the computer front. My work (read: most expensive) computer spazzed out on me the other night. I had just kicked over a full cup of coffee, so after shampooing the carpet I had to take the whole thing apart like an elaborate watch (a portable pc) and put it back together. Apparently the nVidia MXM module used (the entire line) was known for bricking notebooks so that it even lasted as long as it did is maybe fortunate. I have replacement module coming in from HK but it will probably be a couple weeks and I'll go white if it doesn't spring back to life. Same module but I think 7 has new drivers for it even though the OEM probably doesn't which might address the burn out probs, it always did kill my games on occassion since the day I got it.

One of my servers also went down last weekend. I just replaced its one-piece mainboard/cpu but haven't tested it yet. Hopefully I can use it for more convenient internet access for a while if it is in working order again before taking it back into town.

I will try to follow up on everything here when it's more convenient. Looking at your trees. I think if you could map a texture to them that knocks out texels so the triangular geometry is not so obvious that would really raise the bar.

I'm not sure why Som knocks out whole texels. It would look a lot better if they could be filtered first then alpha'ed at the pixel level. Maybe changing some DirectX states on Som's behalf could fix that. Eventually it should be possible to bump Som up to DX8 or 9 and replace the pipeline with programmable shaders.

EDITED: Coffee/computers were unrelated but that was an exasperating night anyway. A horse suicided itself that morning (I was up all night) as horses do (stupidest animals on Earth) ...what is that astrology saying, all things that can go wrong will.

[Holy_Diver]

I can't really see the difference here with the black in the screenshots but this display is dark. I did not realize this was affected. I don't think there's ever been a map piece with transparent elements so no one would know. This sounds like a bug one way or another whether the developers intended for this to work or not. You should try to make a dummy sky if you can so authors can use your trees without having a sky.

There is probably just a render state not being properly tracked, so I could definitely add a Bugfix extension to SomEx to make this a non-issue sooner or later. Like I said last post ultimately I'd like to improve the transprency model in general so it's per-pixel versus per-texel.

BTW, I think I posted in not the thread I'd intended to above but that's probably ok