black water

[iveskins]

While my gforce 6600 was in its death troughs it gave me all kinds of strange rendering errors in pirates. One of these was completely black water and terrain which I think looked pretty neat.
I am currently working on a a machinima project as part of my degree and I want to recreate this effect.
I've tried breaking the shaders and so far all I've got is the water to look like like the wavedudv.tga file (pak6) and this was only on the second to lowest water detail setting.
I've tried various things but looking through the files it seam like half of the game data is devoted to rendering water
I had hoped to just change the textues in a water .nif but I'm stumped as to which files work at which detail settings.



So can anyone think of a way to achieve this texturless water.
Removing the UI overlay would be nice also (the compass and fame and gold thing)
Also with the custom folder do you need to put pak# folders in it to the corresponding pak files or do files just go straight in it, .. and will any file in the custom folder replace one from the assets or is it limited.

--
-Desperate Machinimatographer

[loki59]

Hey iveskins, Welcome to HOP. Changing the colors of anything in the game is done with the .DDS files. I played around a bit this morning and though I didn't change the water exactly as yours, I came close. A little more experimenting might get you closer to what you're looking for. You need to find the following .dds files in the Assets folder, water shader.dds, ocean.dds, ocean1, ocean2, ocean3, ocean4, ocean5, ocean shallow and ocean deep. Convert them to .bmp format, paint them black and convert back to .dds. Place them all in the custom folder and you get this.

Using just water shader.dds, ocean.dds, ocean1 and 2.dds gets you this.

There's not much change with ocean3,4,5 and ocean shallow but once you add the black ocean deep.dds it gets closer. The lower number ocean.dds files are closer to shore so leaving them out gives you lighter water at the coast lines. I liked this one with just water shader.dds and ocean deep.dds.

as to your other question, any files you edit,.NIF, .DDS and even text files placed in the custom folder override the corresponding files in the Assets folder. There is one problem with the black water though, You can't see your cannon balls when you fire the cannons You could paint the cannon balls white to fix that.

[Dave the Knave]

Looks like a nasty oil spill with that black water, mateys...


_________________
Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves;
Britons never shall be slaves.

[Tom Pullings]

I think I will stick with blue - though the first screenie in Iveskins' post is cool. Quite surreal.

[iveskins]

thanks for all your help
I'm pleased to say the offender here was a miss-named dds file water_spaarkle.dds
didn't show up in searches but I found it with thumbnails.
I replaced all the ocean textures with black, and all the ones with sparkle in their names.
This seams to only work at the highest water detail levels.. lower and I get the green and red thing and at lowest it is still some blue water texture.
Now just have to sort out the land, although I kind of like the white.
Also maybe add an alpha channel to all the compass textures .. to make them all completely transparent.. which will probably be the easiest way of turning it off .. even though that's heaps of files .. arr.. give me 'cl_drawhud 0' anyday.
[edit] Also Any Thoughts on how to change the name of waterways text to other writing?[/edit]
so two questions.
What time of year/ place on the map has the most clouds
and can i get a Save file with some cool ships because I cant find mine any more. .. I guess I could just nab a frigate, but I don't think my deadline can account for a SOL haha.





it really is a testament to how lovely the cloud art is..

[loki59]

[von Luckner]