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There are 2 fogs you can use, atmosphere fog and a fog plane. The fog plane has to go in a strait line and can not wrap around. It's most commonly used for water. When your in a cluster with a fog plane assigned to it, you will see fog everywhere at the level with the fog plane. However if you had a cluster right next to it without fog assigned to it, you won't see any fog even where it is supposed to be in the other cluster.
Make clusters with little fog (ie in the center) that takes a long distance to get foggy, then increase the amount of fog that shows per cluster as the player goes out?
i just had a thought about using clusters in the first place. one of my unreleased levels i made as several rooms, each a separate model that i brought into one model and Attached them to one element and linked. it works great and cuts down on rendering (52000 poly, ca 7000/room).
thing is the reason this works is that the only thing that gets rendered is the room that the camera is in. its a pain in the ass to populate. what i'm thinking here is that chrisk was right and that the fog wouldn't draw unless the camera was in that cluster however it may if the clusters aren't defined by bsp elements and were defined by something else like portals.
atmospheric fog might be the way to go and i'm also going to try some 'creative' use of skybox.
Culling is different then fog. The game will cull anything it thinks you the player can't see. Exact portals tend to get more stuff culled, but can't always be used. If you have multiple rooms like Chiron TL-34 the rooms your not in will get culled.
i don't know why i picked this project up, i can't even see fog on my shitcomp. i usually rely on testers from my clan to help me out with this stuff but most of them aren't modders/modelers, well, two are developers but they don't have a lot of time to review my work. anyway, here's some of the work i have on this:
(includes maps, models, and all relevant tags)
Fog Experiment Files
here's the maps if you're curious, but not that curious
Fog Experiment .maps
hopefully there's not too much fail in there lol. i know already that at least two may not work because the distance markers i used don't render which means the fog may not either. in one case the markers are actually outside the bsp so they don't render but the fog is in the sky.
i'd appreciate it if anyone who looks at these could put up some screenshots of the results. like i said before...shitcomp.
ok got a new video card so i can finally see the results of my work.
so far it's 3/4 fail. modifiying the fog tag seems to have the most potential at this point. just needs some tweaking.
model for fog tag variant:
the atmospheric fog in the skytag: probably the model but could be tag settings
model for fog in sky tag:
these two involved the same model with exact portal and terrain portal materials. same fog tag as well. neither worked well but there seems to be some potential because there is fog in gameplay area (second ingame pic)
EP model
TP model
Found more stuff...should have taken pics..oh well..
I think i've found why the fog only covered the floor in the above pics. Apparently it only draws between textures with opacity, not skybox or 100% transparent textures. I haven't tested intermediate opacity.
I made a cylinder around the bsp with a render only texture then capped it with a 100% transparent texture. In game there was fog between the player and [against] the sides of the cylinder but not the top and bottom. I could see straight through to the skybox as if there was no fog at all, even when i moved the camera to the cluster containing fog. When I changed the caps' texture to an opaque one I got fog in all directions, and throughout the game-play area.
The application here, to the desired effect in the OP, is to use a render only, uncapped cylinder (or have 100% alpha on the caps). Then make two additional planes above and below the cylinder with an opaque RO texture - but not intersecting the cylinder.
This will produce the effect that the game-play area is surrounded by fog but not in the fog itself.