About transparent water

[Ranger]

Can I apply the vis patch on water only, so lava won't be transparent?

[Dreadlorde]

Lava becomes transparent when you vispatch a map?

That's dumb.

[Lardarse]

Not all engines will make the lava transparent.

[foq]

Vispatching a map makes all liquid transparent... water, slime, lava, and teleporters. On some engines (I know Darkplaces is one) you can seperately control the "alpha" of the water and the lava. I don't know if there's commands for slime and teleporters though.

[=peg=]

AFAIK, all these engines allow you to set different alpha values for water/teleport/slime/lava:

DarkPlaces, Qrack, Fitzquake, DirectQ

There may be a few others as well..

Usually the cvars for these are something like:

r_wateralpha, r_telealpha, r_slimealpha, r_lavaalpha

values between 0 (fully translucent) and 1 (fully opaque)

[Ranger]

Doesn't work with Winquake, I take it?


For those engines you just listed... No bsp patching needed?
Just boot n play?

[foq]

...

Winquake doesn't have transparent water.

The way watervis'd maps works is slightly complicated. For transparent water to work properly, the server has to have vispatched maps. The client doesn't need to have vispatched maps... the client can just run r_novis 1 and it will be able to see the transparent water.

If you start a single player game (or a server) and your maps aren't vispatched and you use r_novis 1, the water will appear transparent, but you won't actually be able to see anything under the surface of the water. The same thing happens if you connect to a server that doesn't have vispatched maps.

[MH]

Slight correction - you will see world geometry under water, but what you won't see is entities (other players, monsters, pickups, doors and plats, etc).

BSP patching is always needed to keep performance up. You can just do r_novis 1 on a client, but world geometry that otherwise would be excluded does still get drawn (and overdrawn, and overdrawn, and overdrawn, and overdrawn, and overdrawn, you get the picture).

The server/client split only applies to MP games by the way, for SP games the BSP is shared between the server and client, so none of that applies.

[Ranger]

Oh, I using this for Single Player only,

So all I have to do is vispatch the BSPs then play them in one of those engines you listed?

[foq]

Yes, you'll have to vispatch the maps if you want to see entities under the water when running a server (or, in your case, playing singleplayer... this counts as running a server). Here's what I use... Download vistools.zip

Just put whatever maps you want to vis in a folder with those files. Run bspinfo.bat first, it will go through all the maps and get the .prt file for them... then run vis.bat... it will go through the maps and vispatch them.

This is not perfect, there are some maps that will refuse to work with bspinfo, and some maps can't be vispatched... but it does work for the most part.

Note that this vis.exe is not the multithreaded vis tool.

[Lardarse]

This can also be done with hmap2:

hmap2 -bsp2prt mapname
hmap2 -vis mapname

hmap2 will make liquids transparent by default.