Battlecraft shadow glitch?

[reegad]

So this map was done in bc, textured in ed42.. and then entered BC for the last shadow genarting part..
Hit the generate terrain shadows button.. and this is what shows up..
This doesn't happen to the entire map, just maybe 8-10 blocks (and its connected seamlessly with the other blocks that is affected too) in the upper left corner (map is huge) rest of the map is fine.. any thoughts? or better way to generate shadows?

[reegad]

does not occur on the low quality settings.. must be a glitch in my system perhapz

[fo0k]

could those wrong terrain squares be different format tga maybe.. have some been modified..

[GoodDayToDie!!]

Thanks Reegad <3

[reegad]

Worked perfectly on HIGH settings.. just not PRODUCTION/FINAL...

All TGAs were converted from dds, so if there were some bugs there it should affected all squares.. but its just a pattern covering 5x5 squares..

[cajunwolf]

Did you create the tga tiles in your shadowworks folder from your texture tiles you textured in ED42? Remember that when you surfacemap in Battlecraft it creates a set of the terrain texture files in tga format in the shadowworks folder and these are used to crate the terrain lightmaps and then merged to shadow your terrain. If the two sets of files are different then you have issues. I cannot see the effect you are talking about because the link you provided to photobucket is broken, but you mentioning that you textured in ED42 makes me think this might be your problem as many forget to do this. I have even had problems in doing this but not getting all of the tiles properly copied over and will have spot terrain tile issues because of this. Be sure and use the Nvidia undxt tool to do the conversion from dds to tga to insure it goes proper.

One other thing you might want to try, set the light and shadow sliders in ED42 to zero prior to texturing your map. CoinCoin told me long ago that ED42 does not use a raytrace to create it's shadow effect and that it can mess with bf42's ability to do so. Now I have used it many times to (very lightly mind you) to add richness to the raytraced and lightmapped shadows that bf42 produces with no problems, but know many others who have had issues doing this.

Let me know.

L8trz,

Cajunwolf

[reegad]

I used photoshop to batch convert em all to tga
Its weird that only a few of the tiles showed up like this
And that it worked like a charm when i turned down the quality from final/production to high..
I'll give it another go for a diff map, could just be a hickup on my system.

[cajunwolf]

That might be your problem as I often have trouble with dds to tga conversions in PS. BF42 seems to be picky about it's tga files to say the least. Do you have the Nvidia undxt tool? I will ad a link to it just in case. It runs from it's included batch file, simply drop all your texture .dds files into the same directory as undxt.exe and dbl click the .bat file. Wham bam and thank you mam there are all of your .tga files ready to copy the the shadowworks folder in a matter of seconds. You are going to love it if you haven't before. If you have downloaded my ai tool kit it is included.

You can download undxt HERE.

[Senshi]

And if you check the "Modding Tools" thread on this forum, you'll find another, a bit more elaborate GUI-style batch for nvdxt which is useful to convert all the .tga back into .dds properly. Easy to use, lightweight, and as fast as can be.

I probably should add the dds->tga conversion to that tool as well to make it even more universal.

[cajunwolf]

Totally kewl Senshi! Yes you should add the additional feature. I use the cmd or console features as I make .bat files to do everything. Remember that I am an old fart (be 59 Dec 14th) so I still love my DOS batch files.

I tell ya what I really need and that is an easy way to properly convert the 8 bit raw level 0 pathmap files the game engine generates into the proper .tga format. This is a pain in the butt to do in PS and I don't always get it right the first time. I then of course split this image into the separate terrain tiles and convert to .dds so I can edit in ED42. Or would it be easier and perhaps more proper to convert the 8 bit bmp image that 4c's genpathmaps creates?

Your thoughts?

Thanks,

Cajunwolf