About the depth fog effect ...

[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.