Visual issues when creating 3d water spaces

[Origamyde]

Hello there, fellow doom builders !

 

I am currently working on a bunch of maps intended to form a bigger Megawad soon enough, and experimenting with 3d spaces - notably the watery kinds.

 

Now, I've been able so far to create, thanks to a few tutorials, some decent water spaces, but I always encounter the same sort of problem (which I haven't been able to fix, nor find anything related to that on other editing topics) :

 

 

Here's a standard-looking pool of totally not harmless nukage. You can see the tiny sector space intended for the lineDef action of the aforementioned nukage pool.

 

 

Here's how it looks in Visual Mode. So far, so good, right ?

 

However,

 

 

Even though I make a functioning pool, I always encounter this peculiar visual issue with pools of water.

 

I don't know if it's a known issue, with a specific name and characteristics, but I would love to be told how to make it disappear and give back my water pools their prime beauty :o

 

Thanks in advance for any help provided within that topic, and good building ! :)

[Bauul]

Can you provide a little more info on what you're trying to achieve, what is going wrong, and what source port and map format you're using?

 

I'm struggling to work out from the shots what the issue is. I see from your 3D view editor shot you have a empty pool, but then a full pool in the game? Are you trying to have an empty pool?

 

Edit: Also, are you using the original Doom Builder? That's quite archaic now. You might want to check out Doom Builder X or Ultimate Doom Builder (I personally use the latter)

[DooMAD]

Oh, I think I see the issue.  You're adding a green coloured lighting effect to the whole sector and it makes the area above the fall green as well.  Try applying the lighting effect to the control/dummy sector outside of the map.  Then, only the liquid itself will be green, not the structures above it.

 

Basically, your liquid and your coloured light need different tag numbers.  Give the control/dummy sector a sector tag corresponding with the coloured light.

Edited September 4, 2020 by DooMAD

[Origamyde]

1 hour ago, Bauul said:

Can you provide a little more info on what you're trying to achieve, what is going wrong, and what source port and map format you're using?

 

I'm struggling to work out from the shots what the issue is. I see from your 3D view editor shot you have a empty pool, but then a full pool in the game? Are you trying to have an empty pool?

 

Edit: Also, are you using the original Doom Builder? That's quite archaic now. You might want to check out Doom Builder X or Ultimate Doom Builder (I personally use the latter)

 

Hi Bauul, thank you for your input !

 

To answer your questions more accurately :

 

- If you go back to the images I provided, and especially the last one, you can see that there is a jutting green square that covers the whole lineDef, even though there's supposedly nothing. I mitigated that issue by making smalls sectors between the pool and plain "walls", but sometimes it's not that efficient, as you can see here for instance :

 

- I'm not trying to unfill a pool of 3d water (sorry if I wasn't clear on that one), but merely trying to mitigate or suppress that one visual issue where some color brightness takes over lineDefs that are directly in contact with that pool :/

 

- I'm using Doom Builder 2, and wasn't even aware of other softwares such as UDB or X. If it can fix my problem, I'll try them for sure.

[DooMAD]

Here's a quick example map:

 

http://www.teamhellspawn.com/3dliquid.zip

 

Spot the difference between the left and right pool.

[Origamyde]

7 minutes ago, DooMAD said:

Oh, I think I see the issue.  You're adding a green coloured lighting effect to the whole sector and it makes the area above the fall green as well.  Try applying the lighting effect to the control/dummy sector outside of the map.  Then, only the liquid itself will be green, not the structures above it.

 

Hi there, DooMAD !

 

I made several attempts at following your suggestions, before realizing that I am utterly confused since I didn't apply a lightning effect at all. I simply created a script like this one :

 

#include "zcommon.acs"

Script 1 open
{
Sector_SetColor (1,0,100,0);
Sector_SetFade  (1,0,100,0);
}

 

Then made the aforementioned dummy sector with a 3d sector lineDef (and which has only the sector tag and swimmable type checked). If a lightning effect is activated by accident, then I do not know at all how it could happen in the first place :/

[DooMAD]

22 minutes ago, Origamyde said:

 

Hi there, DooMAD !

 

I made several attempts at following your suggestions, before realizing that I am utterly confused since I didn't apply a lightning effect at all. I simply created a script like this one :

 

#include "zcommon.acs"

Script 1 open
{
Sector_SetColor (1,0,100,0);
Sector_SetFade  (1,0,100,0);
}

 

Then made the aforementioned dummy sector with a 3d sector lineDef (and which has only the sector tag and swimmable type checked). If a lightning effect is activated by accident, then I do not know at all how it could happen in the first place :/

 

Scripting isn't my forte, but the concept is the same.  If the liquid is currently using tag number 1, change your script to:

 

{
Sector_SetColor (2,0,100,0);
Sector_SetFade  (2,0,100,0);
}

 

And then give the dummy sector a sector tag of 2.

[Kappes Buur]

So much trouble because you use DIHF.

 

If you were to use UDMF then all this could be done with simple colour selections for the control sector in the Colors menu of Edit Sector

 

[Bauul]

It's probably worth taking a step back and understanding what Light and Fade are in Doom.

 

"Light" is a feature that recolors everything within a sector.  "Fade" re-colors Doom's natural distance-based darkness functionality, meaning the further you are from a Fade-applied sector (or the darker it is), the more it fades to the color you assigned (rather than black, which is the default).

 

Your script sets the Light and Fade of sector 1 to 100 Green.  I can't tell from your map shots which sector is sector 1, but my hunch is it's the green gunk sector, and the waterfall sector.  At the top of the waterfall you are seeing "through" the Fade and Light effect, so everything behind it is correctly being affected accordingly.

 

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to achieve here.  Are you trying to have a kind of green fog hanging above the pool?  A 3D floor that you fill with fade would work a bit better in this case (although it still won't look really like fog, because the thickness of Fade is based on distance from the player, not the proportion of fog you're looking through like real fog works).  Are you just trying to light the floor green?  A Doom 64 style floor light, or even dynamic lights, would probably work better than a sector light.

 

Finally, you're using a rather outdated map format (Hexen format).  This has been superseded in all ways by UDMF, and one of the many UDMF benefits is that you can set the Fade, Fade Intensity, and Light directly to a sector without needing scripts, which I think would make your life a bit easier.