View Single Post in: Sea, Sky and Light parameters- let's learn!

Test Subject
#80 Old 22nd Nov 2011 at 5:04 PM
It did indeed work - thanks for that very useful piece of information.

Whilst testing my new weather in game I did notice one thing, however, which is this dark line along the horizon:



Thinking that I'd done something wrong I tried loading a game with EA's default weather settings but that same line was there again which I find odd since I've never noticed it when playing before. The line is not present in either CAW or EIG.

Is it just me who hasn't been very observant and that line has always been there or have I borked something? The only thing I did different when starting the game was setting all the graphics sliders in game to maximum...

Anyways, to get somewhat back to topic I have spent the last couple of days playing around with both colour ramps and ini files. I started with the ramps, thinking that it would be really easy but found that it's in fact extremely difficult to get the times and colours right relying solely on those tiny colour charts. Especially sunrise and sunset ended up being almost impossible to control so instead I'm going to concentrate on the ini files.

Playing around with the two cloud files (in this case Sky_Custom1 and 2) I have the following to add:

Sky_[type]1.ini controls the lower layer of clouds and sky_[type]2.ini the upper layer.

The value set for VisibilityThreshold will determine how dense the layer of clouds is. The higher the value the thinner the layer of clouds - ie. set it to 255 and there will be no clouds at all whilst setting it to 0 will produce a heavily overcast sky.

Sharpness controls the clouds' opacity. The higher the value the 'whispier' the clouds.

Set it to 1 and there will be no visible clouds.



Set it to 0.5 and the cloud layer looks like this (with a VisibilityThreshold of 30)





The sharpness settings are quite sensitive and even changing the value the slightest bit has quite noticable effects:

VisibilityThreshold 30
Sharpness 0.999




VisibilityThreshold 30
Sharpness 0.995




Cloud layer 1: VisibilityThreshold 70, Sharpness 0.985
Cloud layer 2: VisibilityThreshold 30, Sharpness 0.999