Mighty Alpha Tile Broke??

[Hashjie]

k so I was working on my map with no problems, everything worked, the tile worked and I was abled to see through it.

Then when I added the Cinematic -> Sky: Stormsphere it all worked out fine, I changed my Z far to 1000000000 for player 1, which also worked fine.

I could simply see the lovely sphere and my see-through terrain. When I quitted warcraft, went back into JNGP and changed the size of the sphere this happens:



Seriously: Wat The ****!

I tried re-applying my texture, no go.
I tried restarting the editor, no go.
I tried removing the Z far and the Stormsphere and then re-applyed the texture, no go.

Now here is the strange part: it only happened on half of my terrain. the other half still has the normal see-through alpha tile :S???

Do I have to recreate my entire map now ?
(Not that it's much work, I just don't want to re-do this xD)

Any solution to this at all??

 

[Miles111]

Post a picture of what it looked like before you changed it

 

[Hashjie]

What does that have to do with it? But okay... Here you go:

 

[Dr Super Good]

Be aware that alpha blending in WC3 is not perfect. With too many alpha layers tacking you can get visual anommilies.

Could we have a demo map exhibiting this problem to analise?

 

[Hashjie]

Be aware that alpha blending in WC3 is not perfect. With too many alpha layers tacking you can get visual anommilies.

Could we have a demo map exhibiting this problem to analise?

Could you please elaborate? Is there any solution to this?

Here it is:

http://www.hiveworkshop.com/forums/pastebin.php?id=qh9ztz

 

[Miles111]

Hold on.. so changing the scale of the Skybox did this?

 

[Hashjie]

Hold on.. so changing the scale of the Skybox did this?

I don't know exactly when it happened but I think it happened when I was screwing around with the skybox yes,
allthought it can also be the fog or sky that got something to do with it. It might also be the far Z of the player.
I can't recall what exactly caused it since I was continiously testing. But those are the main 3 things I was doing.
I really got to go sleep now, my boss is going to kill me if I get to late to work.

 

[Miles111]

Try decreasing the Far Z and zooming the camera closer to the tiles

If that doesn't work just use the older files that were working. It looks better the original way, anyways.

 

[Dr Super Good]

Shadow map of the map somehow became curropted (in such a way the game loads it).

Use mpq editor to delete shadow map file and it will be fix.

The garbage you see is the terrain level shadow map which is always ontop of the actual terrain geometry.

Proof is that the save and generate shadows function will change the patterning on the terrain so the shadow map complies to WC3 logic. Ofcourse this is not what you want (only proof of cause). To fix just delete the shadow map file (war3map.shd) from the map archive using a .mpq editor.

 

[Hashjie]

Shadow map of the map somehow became curropted (in such a way the game loads it).

Use mpq editor to delete shadow map file and it will be fix.

The garbage you see is the terrain level shadow map which is always ontop of the actual terrain geometry.

Proof is that the save and generate shadows function will change the patterning on the terrain so the shadow map complies to WC3 logic. Ofcourse this is not what you want (only proof of cause). To fix just delete the shadow map file (war3map.shd) from the map archive using a .mpq editor.

That makes sense because it seems as shadow is being cast from a source of light causing the tile to only have half transparency.
I have seen a similar case when I was working with Unreal Development Kit, but that is irrelevant to this topic since it's a different engine and different case.

Thank you sencerely Dr Super Good, You have been my guardian angel these last few days !
Such awesome help your giving me deserves +rep.

But that probably won't make any difference for you, a shame I can't return the favor

Try decreasing the Far Z and zooming the camera closer to the tiles

If that doesn't work just use the older files that were working. It looks better the original way, anyways.

As I have stated in my first post I already tried removing/decreasing the Far Z and re-applying the tiles (including re-importing them).
Which apparently did not make any change since the shadow map of my map became corrupt which we just found out thanks to Dr Super Good's analysis.

EDIT: this thread can be set to solved.