been messing with fog a bit, gots questions

i want to surround a bsp with fog but not have any in the actual gameplay area.

so far i've only managed to get the fog region error which i think might have to so with material/geometry name setup but im not convinced.

first off i tried making several boxes with portal material, but that doesn't work without intersecting the bsp and its not possible to have all planes do that at once without major errors.

next attempts involved using +unused or +unused$ on the same boxes but that doesn't work either.

i guess what i'm shooting for is a way to define clusters outside/intersecting the bsp where i might be able to use a fog plane. the only thing i haven't tried is using terrain portals to cut off the outermost parts of the skybox but i was worried about clipping.


while i'm on the portals i've got this one too: my exact portals error on every run through tool but never in the same place. i can run it twice without changing anything and there will be the same error but on a different plane. i threw them out and used +portal but that doesn't keep it from raining inside :\ i'm guessing that won't help with the fog either.......

Fog in halo is either everywhere no nowhere. Your best bet would to make the atmosphere fog start farther away and get thicker quickly. You can have more then one fog plane, but when your in an area where you removed the fog from that portal, you don't see the fog in the other area.

fog is everywhere or nowhere, yes, but only PER CLUSTER. (defined by portals)

also, exact portals need to be planar

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Originally Posted by neuro

exact portals need to be planar

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sweet, an easy fix. i love it when that happens :D

@ chrisk: that's basically what i'm after, i need very thick fog around the outside to quickly turn to thin or no fog. i'll have to take a look at some tags and see what i can use, any good starting places?

Well, that's also the problem. Once your not in a the fog, you can see into the other area where there should be fog and there won't be any there.

hmm. i wonder if i could change the opacity or density in a fog tag to make it become very thick but only at a far distance, if it starts from the player i would only have to make sure the distance is far enough to cover all areas the player can go. that would save me the trouble of using a lot of effedup geometry.

You can set the starting distance and the ending distance (where you can't see though it at all). Look at some other sky tags as a reference.

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Originally Posted by chrisk123999

Well, that's also the problem. Once your not in a the fog, you can see into the other area where there should be fog and there won't be any there.

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I'm not sure this is true. Think of maps like Damnation- it has a fog plane at the bottom where the fog gets pretty thick immediately. My understanding was that Blam! has very limited capabilities in terms of defining fog regions, however. A year or two ago I wouldn't have thought it possible to define fog regions surrounding but not intersecting a playable area, but these days I've come to realize people can really push this engine, and there's definitely still a lot I don't know about how it works. Theoretically I think you should be able to set fog on the clusters surrounding the playable area and leave the ones in the play area empty.
Then again, I remember something about creating specific fog planes separate from portals, and iirc the entire fog 'plane' has to be planar, ie, the fog region can't wrap around.

I say keep trying, though. I'll be interested to know if this can be done.

Although if you wanted to simulate fog out in the distance that you cant actually reach, you could probably just make some geometry to simulate it and then apply the fog materials to it.

Then again, that's not volumetric and only if you aren't supposed to be out in that playing area.

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Originally Posted by FRain

Although if you wanted to simulate fog out in the distance that you cant actually reach, you could probably just make some geometry to simulate it and then apply the fog materials to it.

Then again, that's not volumetric and only if you aren't supposed to be out in that playing area.

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Revelations.