Strange Vertex paint

[PwnCall]

So i've done the alpha blend for textures a million times, this time i did it the same as before 2 pass textures check alpha blend etc.

Usually where I vertex paint the texture is 100% visible, this time its only like %50 percent visible through the base texture and I have no idea why.  Here are the pictures to see the areas in question, in gmax and then in LE.

as  you can see the gravel texture should blend to itself on the meshes next to it but it just isn't coming through 100% any thoughts? I also tried messing with the settings in LE like the compute vertex solve etc.

[Raap]

I do recognize this problem, I'm just struggling to remember what causes it specifically.

Have you tried re-making the material? Sometimes when you set up the material settings you can accidentally mouse scroll without knowing you did it, and you end up bumping some setting up or down which can cause some pretty bizarre looking effects!

Also double check you didn't accidentally set emissive to anything lower than 255. W3D texture emissive effects are, despite having RGB input for it, an on-off deal. 255 means off, anything else means on.

Additionally, if you are using any sort of scaling noise filter (judging by your picture I assume not, but just stating it to cover it), make sure detail alpha on the shader tab is set to scale and that you correctly flagged Valpha in the W3D properties.

Lastly, make sure your blending mode is either opaque or alpha blend for this purpose, custom effects are vulnerable to problems such as this one.

Edited July 30, 2018 by Raap

[PwnCall]

Yea i didn't do anything fancy to it just alpha blend, i'll double check the settings though.

[ChopBam]

Are you vertex painting with red? Have you tried with black?

[Raap]

1 hour ago, ChopBam said:

Are you vertex painting with red? Have you tried with black?

I think that's a Gmax display thing. Granted, I haven't used Gmax since 1977 so I could be wrong.

[PwnCall]

Yea you can choose whatever color you want in gmax, does it make a difference ? I have always used red no issues.

[Raap]

Well technically you are assigning an RGB value to vertices so it does matter, but because W3D alpha blending only understands grey-scale colours it filters out the colour value and just uses the 'brightness' within those RGB values.

But this is not what is causing your current issue.

[PwnCall]

I just did the old 'duplicate mesh trick'  I redid the texture and the paint using black and it worked fine. Who knows what was wrong earlier, thats the w3d engine for ya i guess.

[Raap]

5 hours ago, PwnCall said:

I just did the old 'duplicate mesh trick'  I redid the texture and the paint using black and it worked fine. Who knows what was wrong earlier, thats the w3d engine for ya i guess.

Might be a Gmax thing. We don't really use that anymore around here (we also do not use level edit anymore).

[PwnCall]

What do you use instead of LE? Is it a custom version for mods?  I am just making normal Renegade maps, well its not normal LE a modded version for MPF's servers.

[Raap]

I do not think Mammoth supports Renegade and the scripts 4.x.x series.

W3DHub uses sort of a branched code (still created and managed by Jonwil and the engine team), a lot of the scripts from 4.x.x are removed and instead only newer code is used in the 5.x.x branch. This is also why the W3D engine used in APB is different from stock Renegade.

Here is Mammoth:

If you have more technical questions, someone from the engine team will be much better positioned to answer those questions, as I might give wrong information! 

[trunkskgb]

Is Mammoth MORE stable then LE? Can it ever be used for Renegade?

[Kaskins]

6 hours ago, trunkskgb said:

Is Mammoth MORE stable then LE? Can it ever be used for Renegade?

I doubt so, since TT 5.0 was designed not to be compatible with TT 4.x.x, when designing it, it wasn't take into account ( as how i was informed/told ) to be based off Renegade, it was design from sketch with all the renegade scripts removed like what @Raap mentioned.

One thing to note, that TT 5.0 support DirectX 11 ( or DirectX 11.1 ) where Renegade support up to DirectX 9.0c. So requirement are vastly different from TT4.0 and TT5.0

But when your referring as more stable as in how? Technically Level Editor on my end is stable ( do note I am still using he very same Level Editor from MPF ) except that I do not use more than 3.87gb memory ram ( on my end which is 4GB ) on the Level Editor or else it will definitely crash. I usually crash when I am doing pathfind generation which most of my time on overhuge ( includes depth, oceans and very high sky ceiling map, will most likely exceed 4GB and I have to improvise to find way to prevent going beyond 4.0GB or closed to 3.87gb.