About the depth fog effect ...

[Little David]

Is there a way to remove or change its intensity?

I'd like to try and get some good screenshots of zones at night without the fog turning skyscrapers a mile away into murky black shapes.

[Aggelakis]

That's "depth of field" effect. You can turn DOF off in the options.

[Little David]

No, not the depth of field effect, the actual fog.

http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/dc.html

This stuff. I want to get some shots of Paragon City zones without buildings in the far back turning completely black due to this fog.

[FatherXmas]

Advance graphic settings: World Detail

Also /vis_scale 4 (which I think is the max).

[Little David]

I've always had World Detail set to 200%, but even at that level buildings turn to solid fog colors from the opposite end of the zone.

Viscale didn't get rid of the depth cue fog either. Not even trying setting it to 400, which caused the FPS to drop to 1 per second (yikes!) without any noticable change in fog (though it did seem to make everything in the zone render as if I were right next to it, in addition to making the war walls look weird).

[Codewalker]

/accesslevel 9

Then your choice of

/nofog 1

/fogdist [float]

/fogcolor [float] [float] [float]

[Little David]

/nofog 1 almost worked, but for the shot I wanted, well ...



/fogdist 0 0 didn't affect it any.

Though, /nofog did help me get some shots that aren't normally possible due to the depth fog, I just had to try and hide the buildings that were still pitch black with camera positioning.

[Noyjitat]

If only we could get rid of the war walls permanently

[Azrael]

I liked the 'war walls...'

But it's an interesting technical question.

Could the zones, in theory, be linked in one continuous map one day?

Azrael.

[The Fifth Horseman]

Doubt that. There are practical considerations to splitting up the game world into instances.

[Kyriani]

Doubt that. There are practical considerations to splitting up the game world into instances.

I always wondered if it could be set up how Praetoria is. Praetoria is still zones but has no war walls separating them. You just transition when you hit the zone border (like entering a tunnel in Paragon).

[Takinalis]

I think I read something about Heroes and Villains being one large zone...

[Little David]

I liked the 'war walls...'

But it's an interesting technical question.

Could the zones, in theory, be linked in one continuous map one day?

Azrael.

Not unless some new terrain is made for the areas between zones, I think. Paragon City's map shows that a lot of the playable areas are not directly adjacent to one another, so ... it wouldn't make much sense otherwise.

[Codewalker]

There's also issues like Terra Volta the zone being WAY too big to fit inside the area that it's supposed to go into in IP.

Many of the Paragon City zones don't even come close to lining up in a sane way. I think the Rikti War zone ends up overlapping Faultline unless you do some really creative placement.

[Kyriani]

There's also issues like Terra Volta the zone being WAY too big to fit inside the area that it's supposed to go into in IP.

Many of the Paragon City zones don't even come close to lining up in a sane way. I think the Rikti War zone ends up overlapping Faultline unless you do some really creative placement.

So it would take some serious map redesigning to actually make the zones connect seamlessly then. I take it that means its possible but not practical.

[Blondeshell]

[Noyjitat]

Not unless some new terrain is made for the areas between zones, I think. Paragon City's map shows that a lot of the playable areas are not directly adjacent to one another, so ... it wouldn't make much sense otherwise.

It would be nice to replace them with forests, other buildings, mountains or something... I just don't like seeing big forcefield walls in all of the paragon city maps in my videos and such. And Fog is a poor replacement

[Crimson-Oriole]

[Crimson-Oriole]

Better late than never, right?

https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=B5EA7EC83211CBC5!127&authkey=!APd4e8QXI-_S_kA&v=3&ithint=photo%2cjpg

And since I can't figure out how to embed an image, a link will have to do.

Some Notes:

• Dashed lines are original zone borders.  As you can see, with a minor amount of trimming, things fit quite nicely.
• The areas with hash marks are areas where the zones don't quite fit together.  These would be incorporated with either landscaping, filler buildings, or both.

[Felderburg]

There were also lots of filler buildings set outside the war walls to give the impression of larger city areas beyond what you could access. And, considering that all the transit tunnels turned to the right directly beyond the zone boundary, there's no telling exactly how much space could be considered 'official' between zones.

It would be nice to replace them with forests, other buildings, mountains or something... I just don't like seeing big forcefield walls in all of the paragon city maps in my videos and such. And Fog is a poor replacement

If you look at Top Cow 1, the very first page indicates that the stuff between zones is a lot of forest. There's also some buildings not inside the War Walls, which fits with what we saw in game, but not enough to actually match up. The walls are MUCH shorter in the comic, as well, and the implications of the sequence are that we're following a flying hero in first person as he / she flies to a battle in another zone.

While the war walls are a necessary conceit for server technology issues, and they were worked in to the game's story relatively well, it really did stretch the suspension of disbelief when no one (except Rikti drop ships) was able to fly over them, and no one tunneled under them.

And if the trains really are as shown in the comics, elevated over the areas between zones (and there's no in game indication that they're not like that) we really should have seen many more villain attacks on those parts of the train.

And Crimson_Oriole, while I do like what you've done, I don't think it was ever the intent that the zones were actually right next to each other. The original map that came with the game (http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/File:CoH_GvE_Map_1_Front.jpg) does show space between zones (this was mentioned earlier). But I'm interested in the measurements you got in Icon....

Edit: Although the map does make it look like there's a whole city's worth of roads throughout the area, and not just in the actual zones... I wonder if the little roads lines inside the zones match up with the actual zones...

As for the Red River, that was always a source of contention when the Hollows was added. I suppose the easiest way to explain it is to say that it used to be one river, until Talos Island happened.

[Little David]

And Crimson_Oriole, while I do like what you've done, I don't think it was ever the intent that the zones were actually right next to each other. The original map that came with the game (http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/File:CoH_GvE_Map_1_Front.jpg) does show space between zones (this was mentioned earlier). But I'm interested in the measurements you got in Icon....

Edit: Although the map does make it look like there's a whole city's worth of roads throughout the area, and not just in the actual zones... I wonder if the little roads lines inside the zones match up with the actual zones...

Yeah. I would actually like to see a contiguous/"open world" version of Paragon City that allows you to see what those parts of the city between the War Walls look like.

There's a lot of instanced locales we as heroes would visit throughout our career in City of Heroes: remember the "Board Train" missions that would take you to some distant neighborhood where they had to put up an emergency forcefield until you arrived to contain the situation? Sure, those missions all used the same couple of maps (or was it just one map in specific?) but the intent was to show that there IS more to Paragon City than just the playable zones.

[Felderburg]

Now that this thing showed up in my notifications again, it got me thinking - maybe the issue isn't fog at all, but the actual rendering of the objects? I know that in STO, once you move a certain distance from objects, they get turned into low-poly versions of themselves, since you can't see the high level of detail on a real model anyways. Does CoH do a similar thing, turning far away buildings into basically solid slabs, on the assumption that people won't be able to see them that much anyways due to the distance and the fog? Or is that the World Detail function? I can't remember...

[The Fifth Horseman]

It does, with occasionally hilarious results.

[Solitaire]

/nofog 1 almost worked, but for the shot I wanted, well ...



/fogdist 0 0 didn't affect it any.

Though, /nofog did help me get some shots that aren't normally possible due to the depth fog, I just had to try and hide the buildings that were still pitch black with camera positioning.

Little David, do you have the top picture in 1920x1080 size? Would make a great desktop wallpaper.

[Little David]

Little David, do you have the top picture in 1920x1080 size? Would make a great desktop wallpaper.

1,280 x 1,024 was the resolution I was playing in when I took those pictures, which is my monitor's native resolution. I can see if I can play for a bit at 1920 x 1080, but it'd probably be easier and faster if you used Icon to get that screenshot using the same settings I did. (/nofog 1, setting time to midnight, max settings without depth of field effects enabled, etc).

[Solitaire]

1,280 x 1,024 was the resolution I was playing in when I took those pictures, which is my monitor's native resolution. I can see if I can play for a bit at 1920 x 1080, but it'd probably be easier and faster if you used Icon to get that screenshot using the same settings I did. (/nofog 1, setting time to midnight, max settings without depth of field effects enabled, etc).

Thanks for the advise, gave it a go and seemed very dark compared to your picture, far builds weren't lit up either? I'll keep trying

[Crimson-Oriole]

It would be nice to replace them with forests, other buildings, mountains or something... I just don't like seeing big forcefield walls in all of the paragon city maps in my videos and such. And Fog is a poor replacement


If you look at Top Cow 1, the very first page indicates that the stuff between zones is a lot of forest. There's also some buildings not inside the War Walls, which fits with what we saw in game, but not enough to actually match up. The walls are MUCH shorter in the comic, as well, and the implications of the sequence are that we're following a flying hero in first person as he / she flies to a battle in another zone.

While the war walls are a necessary conceit for server technology issues, and they were worked in to the game's story relatively well, it really did stretch the suspension of disbelief when no one (except Rikti drop ships) was able to fly over them, and no one tunneled under them.

And if the trains really are as shown in the comics, elevated over the areas between zones (and there's no in game indication that they're not like that) we really should have seen many more villain attacks on those parts of the train.

And Crimson_Oriole, while I do like what you've done, I don't think it was ever the intent that the zones were actually right next to each other. The original map that came with the game (http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/File:CoH_GvE_Map_1_Front.jpg) does show space between zones (this was mentioned earlier). But I'm interested in the measurements you got in Icon....

Edit: Although the map does make it look like there's a whole city's worth of roads throughout the area, and not just in the actual zones... I wonder if the little roads lines inside the zones match up with the actual zones...

As for the Red River, that was always a source of contention when the Hollows was added. I suppose the easiest way to explain it is to say that it used to be one river, until Talos Island happened.

While I understand the intentions and original design of the development team, I was merely trying to attempt what people have requested for ages.  If I can find the notebook I originally took notes in (I recently moved and have yet to fully unpack), I will PM my notes to you.

And about the roads...

While they do not necessarily line up very well from zone to zone, the tunnels themselves actually do line up quite well.  I measured the tunnel connections and compared them to their corresponding locations and they are almost spot on coordinate-for-coordinate.