Another issue is visibility distance. OC underdark and caverns truncate visibility inside pits and under water to about 4m, with a 5m actual depth. I find that if you shine a torch down these holes, it looks weird. But the effect is still beneficial in saving having to actually draw distant places.
If I use this effect, instead of rendering everything out in detail, I could create an intended environment setting for my caves. As with the other caves, if you change the environment to something else, it looks odd. Sometimes really odd.
But if I do this, some of the things you would see at a distance will be exceptionally dark, as if the air itself is preventing you from seeing distant things. One of the optional environments in SCL is, I think, named "Barren Darkness". In terms of NWN environments, it adds a level of fog to approximately 15m of color black, which darkens and even burns the landscape. I've been able to do this same thing in NWN with black fog, and it makes having a torch really handy. However, black fog in NWN has a tendency to also cancel out some of the benefits of having a torch, and I find in a real cave, bright lights are very useful, as they bounce around shiny caves and provide more light than you expect.
On the topic of environments, I was also exploring water textures. As mentioned in another thread, water isn't blue by nature. Nor would you ever expect water in a cave to be blue, unless you were shining a light through it, picking up the mineral rich hue. Even then, to see it as blue, you'd have to be under the water level. What I'd like to do is make some really black water. I think to do that, you need to have an increasingly black water depth, as done in the OC underdark set, but also have a gray-scale water texture. For simplicity, I'm actually quite fond of the water texture in OC Underdark, so I might go ahead and use that.
For other textures, I'm not happy with what OC NWN has to offer, especially in the way of waterfalls built from emitters. What I prefer is sliding textures using animesh. I find that straight line movements are super simple to create in NWN and don't require a lot of processor time. Alternately, animated textures which duplicate the process, can also combine the forward movement appearance with other techniques. The only thing I can't do on my machine, although it does technically work and some people can see it, is making env-mapped water which also moves.
Here's a list of things I'm looking for to complete the texture needs:
- Animated water texture to represent trickling streams. A smallish square texture would be fine.
- Non-animated water texture to represent trickling streams. This texture needs to be 4 times longer than it is wide, so that when translated using animesh, it doesn't repeat too quickly. Only needs to be seamless on the stream-width side, not the length side.
- Non-animated flowing fog texture, same as the stream above. Only needs to be seamless on the stream-width side, not the length.
- Animated smoke texture, preferably 2x1 in dimension, with at least 64 clear frames. Should be at least 128px wide and look good scaled up 2x or even 4x.
