FS2004 Unable to add Time of Day conditions

[manschy]

Hi all,

I am just trying to solve a day/nighttextures problem like following:

Viewing trees or fences while dusk or dawn, their edges have ugly translucency on it so you can see through it when they are in front of additional objects. Means the edges can let you see through the objects behind.....For example buildings get fence-edges-translucency...

To prevent this, I got following idea:

Export the original Gmax file into another mdl to get two exact identically models (i. e. fences). I use the xml to get the exact same position on it like the original.
Both models have the same texture (i. e. fences.bmp and fences_lm.bmp)
So the original should get the order to appear ONLY at DAY and DUSK/DAWN,
using the day textures, the clone one ONLY at NIGHT with night textures.

I used MDLTweaker with option "Time of Day" with parametres

1= DAY
2= DUSK/DAWN
4= NIGHT

I did perceived about 100 trials to manage it, but each of them failed .

Although I used the tweaks above, I got either

- Night textures, day textures but also both textures at dusk/dawn
- nice day textures on day and dusk/dawn like I need but only when disabling night textures

Okay, so how do I have to use the dusk/dawn tweak, please?

a) VALUE MIN 1 MAX 2

or

a) VALUE MIN 1 MAX 1

AND
second variable
VALUE MIN 2 MAX 2

to get a working tweak?

Sorry for long explaination, but hope it descibes the issue I have.

Best regards

Manfred.

 

[arno]

Hi,

What format are you using for your textures? Probably using dxt1 instead of dxt3 might be easier to fix issues with transparent borders.

There is a variable for time of day. To have day only you would need values between 1 and 1. And to get dusk and night you need the values 2 and 4.

 

[manschy]

Thanks for reply, Arno.

Meanwhile, I tried all texture formats, even extended 32 bit 888-8 , but no improvement. Solving the problem by textures would be best solution, but I can't solve it by that way...
So I tried it like the option above by using two identical models. So I know that using 4 = night works fine by only use one object. So done with my tower beacon. 1 = day works also fine, but I got a lot of frustration by using the dusk/dawn variable.

I noticed to use the day texture while DAY and dusk/dawn (by disabling the night textures) would be the best solution. Disabling the night textures allows this. But just as I enable the night texture, I got a bad mix between both textures, although I allocate the models their textures. The model that I allocate the 4 = night textures also is visible at dusk and dawn ?!? ...Strange...