2010-11-19, 12:26 AM
The fog setting doesn't affect draw distance, it just gives you so many meters before the fog kicks in. The tiles being missing along the edges is normal. You can avoid it I believe by always using 1x1 map tiles and keeping your aspect ratio 4:3. Otherwise if your game has a lot of wide open vistas you're going to see a lot of that. Ex has an extension that screens out resolutions that aren't in the specified aspect ratio (currently only 4:3 is implemented) ... in fact last night I added a fix so in case the resolution in the .ini file is not 4:3 it will still work... because if Som can't find a mode that matches the resolution in the .ini file the Options menu goes bonkers.
If you can live with a pretty short draw distance like in DoM you can have widescreen, otherwise you wanna stick with 4:3. Som was never intended to be played on any other shape of a screen... kinda stupid, but forgivable for people used to developing for TV consoles in the 90s.
Unfortunately increasing the draw distance doesn't actually help. If it did Ex could just pull back the fog saturation line. The problem is the shape of the clipping frustum which Som uses. The only chance for a fix I think is to find the frustrum in memory and hope manipulating it makes sense. I've also thought about just clipping the top/bottom portions of the view... but I think I concluded it would be a bit messy, and might not yield desirable results. Still I may reconsider that after a while...
The missing tiles may still happen in 4:3 mode for wide open areas, I'm not sure the frustum is even perspective correct. You also have the problem of capping off the skyline. And objects have a way of disappearing even more so than the tiles. That said, in some cases tiles right in your face will disappear. You can disable "optimization" in the map editor to avoid that, but that will make your map somewhat less efficient... especially if it's very room oriented.
PS: The reason you have to be clever with trees like that is so you don't end up with those flat slivers facing the player that way. IMO that's unacceptable presentation wise.
If you can live with a pretty short draw distance like in DoM you can have widescreen, otherwise you wanna stick with 4:3. Som was never intended to be played on any other shape of a screen... kinda stupid, but forgivable for people used to developing for TV consoles in the 90s.
Unfortunately increasing the draw distance doesn't actually help. If it did Ex could just pull back the fog saturation line. The problem is the shape of the clipping frustum which Som uses. The only chance for a fix I think is to find the frustrum in memory and hope manipulating it makes sense. I've also thought about just clipping the top/bottom portions of the view... but I think I concluded it would be a bit messy, and might not yield desirable results. Still I may reconsider that after a while...
The missing tiles may still happen in 4:3 mode for wide open areas, I'm not sure the frustum is even perspective correct. You also have the problem of capping off the skyline. And objects have a way of disappearing even more so than the tiles. That said, in some cases tiles right in your face will disappear. You can disable "optimization" in the map editor to avoid that, but that will make your map somewhat less efficient... especially if it's very room oriented.
PS: The reason you have to be clever with trees like that is so you don't end up with those flat slivers facing the player that way. IMO that's unacceptable presentation wise.