In what might as well be AW 4.2, build 973 was publically released just a few hours ago. This version is “the special effects” build, including graphical additions such as environment mapping (glossy surfaces), bump mapping, shadows, sub-rendered surfaces (projecting a camera feed on an object, aka poor-man’s reflective surfaces), dual texturing, and support for .x file formats intended for next-gen avatars.
See the AWiki for details.
Welp I been messin around with the features for a few hours now… Here’s my take 😮
Environment mapping – suppose to allow for glossy, specular surfaces. It’s 50% pretty good. There’s a show stopper flaw though – it doesn’t gloss when your moving around or strafting, only when you change your viewing angle. Also you can forget about piecing glossy objects together, because they’re far from being seamless. If it was glossy on all forms of movement, it’d be a major thumbs up feature to the software. One other bit of bad news is that it doesn’t work on transparent objects, so we’re gonna have to wait a bit longer for those glossy windows
Bump mapping – Allows you to add depth to a texture. It’s, once again, 50% pretty good. Show stopper flaw = it doesn’t mipmap, and boy does it need it because its grainy as hell. Forget about using this in outdoor areas because back up 20m and it looks awful. Also, like above, forget about piecing these together, they’re soooo not seamless. Still, this is my favorite feature right now. If only the mipmapping thing was fixed…in the meantime, it’s pretty handy for indoor use, and used on objects with huge UV panes.
Dual textures – Allows you to mix textures together in many many ways. There’s 11 or so blending methods, and you have to use 2 (written out like blend=5:3). It might take a lot of pratice, but so far everything I’ve tried looks saturated and washed out. Plus it has all the mipmapping and seam problems. Still, could come in handy from time to time I’m sure.
Sub-rendering/fake mirrors – they’re definantly fake mirrors when you start messin with them. Still, you can make a pretty descent bathroom mirror that gets the job done. Other than that, I don’t know how useful this feature is o_O
Shadows – look way different than the screenshots seen in beta. They look really…unnatural, messed up. Everybody I’ve seen so far disables them after trying it out.
Transparency fix – this was suppose to make it so you can see particles behind masked and transparent objects…and it does, works great. But it had a really ugly side effect – objects with masks on it are rendered infront of particles now. So for example if you have a water fountain surrounded by trees (a typical park setting), you prolly won’t be seeing your fountain particles much anymore. The same goes for transparent objects. If you look down at your fountain, looking down at the water below it, the water is rendered infront of the fountain particles, making them look a bit washed out.
Does this have anything to do with where the light source is placed in the world setting? :/
No, its the default settings. You can change them through aworld.ini. For best results, try
[shadows]
resolution=9
strength=0.5
blur=2
anti_alias=0
fade=1
Thanks Kyle
This build was kind of a lil’ disappointment.
Nevertheless, the features are nice.
I think this is a perfect example of hype being the cause for disappointment
If it just came out unannounced, it woulda got a different response.
yeup… couldn’t agree more Comit.
Strange, I can’t find [Shadows] in aworld.ini
Do I just add it?
yea, just throw it in.
I’m pretty sure that’s not a side effect … It was happening before … except you said it had to do with draw order – are you saying this overrides draw order as well?
It’s draw order, but its not fixable, no workarounds…. And it never happened before – Before the draw order was only a matter of particles fighting among themselves, objects had nothing to do with it.
Soooo particles have suddenly become useless.. great…
I’m sure it will be fixed… if it gets reported that is.
Judging by the reset bug.. it should be fixed by this summer
Nothing was broken in the first place. User error… :X
Likes how Chrispeg is calling you ‘dude’ so many times on the forums. Cute it ^,~
I can’t really tell much of a difference with this build ..seems crappy to me *shrug*
Yea well, thats up to you to make a difference foo
If you want to that is…seems to be more of an interest to public worlds because you can make new textures with the mix and blend system. Only thing of interest to private worlds is shiney/glossy textures prolly, and not even that for people like baro with a theme that doesn’t have that stuff.