Remove isInterior restriction from WMO shadow sampling so city
buildings (flagged as interior groups) correctly receive shadows.
Apply shadow to interior-lit surfaces. Enable shadows by default
and persist the setting across sessions.
Zoom speed now scales with distance for fine control near the character.
Default max zoom out reduced from 50 to 33 units. New "Extended Camera
Zoom" toggle in Gameplay settings restores the full 50-unit range.
- Tighten celestial glow falloff and edge fade to eliminate visible quad boundary
- Add opacity support to minimap display shader, synced with UI opacity setting
- Fix audio double/triple-scaling by removing redundant master volume multiplications
- Rename "Original Soundtrack" toggle to "Enable WoWee Music"
- Add About tab with developer info and GitHub link
Audio was being scaled by master volume multiple times: once via
ma_engine_set_volume, again per-sound in AudioEngine, and again
via pre-multiplication in the UI. Removed redundant master volume
multiplications so each channel volume is independent and master
applies once through the engine. Added About tab to settings with
developer info and GitHub link.
Alpha blending caused faint quad edges to be visible against the sky
gradient. Additive blending correctly adds glow light without the
outline artifact. Edge fade starts earlier and discard threshold raised.
Ripples were cleared every frame the player wasn't swimming, which
destroyed foot splash particles the same frame they were spawned.
Now particles expire naturally via their lifetime.
- Replace dark edge RGB on alpha-tested foliage with mip-4 average color
proportional to alpha (low alpha = low trust in original RGB)
- Raise foliage alpha cutoff to 0.4 and remove dither band for cleaner edges
- Disable depth test on insect particles so they don't vanish behind foliage
- Exempt dragonflies/butterflies/moths from foliage animation freeze
Fireflies, dragonflies, butterflies, and moths no longer get
disableAnimation/foliage classification so their bone animation
and particles run normally.
- Spawn dark point-sprite insects buzzing around cattails/reeds/kelp/seaweed
- Fix firefly M2 particles: exempt from alpha dampening and forced gravity
- Make water shoreline/crest foam more irregular with UV warping and bluer tint
- Play WaterFootstep splash sounds when wading in shallow water
- Spawn foot splash particles at water surface on each water footstep
- Reduce inland water wave amplitude from 0.18 to 0.08 for calmer lakes
Remove negative cache for transient load failures in M2, terrain, and
character renderers. Failed textures return white and will be retried
on next model/tile load when assets may have finished streaming.
- Fix HeightMap::getHeight() to use interleaved 17-wide row layout
matching MCVT storage (was using wrong 9-wide contiguous indexing)
- Guard terrain bump mapping normalize against zero-length vectors
to prevent NaN propagation and GPU faults
- Add aura icons below target frame with buff/debuff color coding
- Show spell icons with hover tooltips and duration countdowns
- Change SPELL_FAILED_ONLY_SHAPESHIFT message to cover warrior stances
- Use authoritative playerRace/playerGender at spawn for voice profiles
instead of unreliable model name parsing
- Support nonbinary gender with useFemaleModel body type fallback
- Move voice setup into spawnPlayerCharacter() for all spawn paths
- Remove legacy single-player default Human Male clip preloading
- Make loading screen text black and move progress bar to top
- Cache material UBO mapped pointers at creation time, eliminating
per-batch vmaGetAllocationInfo() calls in the hot render path
- Precompute foliage/elven/lantern/kobold model name classifications
at load time instead of per-instance string operations every frame
- Remove redundant descriptor set and push constant rebinds on WMO
pipeline switches (preserved across compatible layouts)
- Pre-allocate glow sprite descriptor set once at init instead of
allocating from the pool every frame
Shadow casting: foliage batches now bind their actual texture in the shadow
pass with alpha testing, producing leaf-shaped shadows instead of solid cards.
Uses a per-frame resettable descriptor pool for texture sets.
Shadow receiving: foliage fragments now sample the shadow map with PCF
instead of using a flat constant darkening.
Gameobject M2 instances (books, crates, chests) were continuously
cycling their animations because M2Renderer unconditionally loops
all sequences. Added setInstanceAnimationFrozen() and freeze all
gameobject instances at creation time so they stay in their bind pose.
The legacy spline parser successfully read points but then unconditionally
rewound and re-parsed as compact format. When the data was actually legacy
format, the compact parser would read garbage and fail, causing the entire
update block (and all subsequent blocks in the packet) to be dropped.
This made creatures invisible when their spawn packet contained a spline.
removeInstance() and removeInstances() were erasing M2Instances without
calling destroyInstanceBones(), leaking VMA bone buffers permanently.
This caused framerate to drop and never recover after NPC encounters.
All three shadow renderers (WMO, M2, Character) were iterating every
loaded instance with zero culling. Now skip instances outside the
180-unit shadow frustum radius via squared-distance check.
Strip ~30 chrono::now() calls per frame from Application::update() and
GameHandler::update() that existed only for periodic LOG_DEBUG dumps.
Retain renderer timing used by the live performance HUD overlay.
Raise all texture cache defaults from 1GB to 4GB to reduce rejections.
Cap cache-full warnings (texture + model) to 3 messages per renderer,
and cap update block parse errors to 5 messages.
Strip 26 chrono::now() timing calls per frame from renderer update loop,
periodic LOG_INFO/LOG_DEBUG from terrain/character/quest/heartbeat paths,
and dead m2ProfileCounter variable.
Strip per-frame/periodic logging from CharacterRenderer (batch dump,
instance count) and M2Renderer (frame timing profiler) to avoid
unnecessary string formatting and I/O in render loops.
Replaces single-tap shadow sampling with 3x3 grid PCF (36-sample equivalent
with hardware bilinear filtering) for smooth shadow edges. Adds normal-offset
bias to eliminate shadow acne on oblique surfaces without peter-panning.
The projection matrix Y-flip (projectionMatrix[1][1] *= -1) reverses
triangle winding from the GPU's perspective. With the default
VK_FRONT_FACE_COUNTER_CLOCKWISE, gl_FrontFacing was inverted, causing
all fragment shaders (M2, WMO, character) to flip normals on front
faces instead of back faces, putting specular highlights on the wrong
side of surfaces.
Instead of relying on material flag 0x40 (F_CLAMP_S, not F_WINDOW) to
identify glass materials, detect windows by checking for "window" in the
texture path. This correctly applies glass to window textures while
leaving lamp posts and other geometry opaque.
Two WMO rendering fixes:
1. Glass batch merging: BatchKey didn't include isWindow, so window and
non-window batches sharing the same texture got merged together. If
the window batch was processed first, the entire merged batch (lamp
base, iron frame, etc.) rendered as transparent glass. Add isWindow
to the batch key so glass/non-glass batches stay separate.
2. LOD group culling: WMO groups named with "LOD" are distance-only
impostor geometry (e.g. cathedral tower extension, hill tower). They
should only render beyond 200 units. Store raw MOGN chunk for
offset-based name lookup, detect "lod" in group names during load,
and skip LOD groups in both main and shadow passes when camera is
within range.
F_SIDN (0x20) is the night-glow/self-illuminated flag, not a window
flag. Only F_WINDOW (0x40) should trigger transparent glass rendering.
The previous mask (0x60) caught both flags, making lamp post bases,
iron frames, and other SIDN-flagged surfaces render as transparent
glass with Fresnel reflections instead of opaque materials.
Hand-painted weapon/armor textures have baked-in lighting that produces
low-contrast gradients in the Sobel filter. Bump strength from 2.0 to
5.0 to extract visible surface detail. Also increase POM scale from
0.03 to 0.06 since character models are small with dense UVs where
the WMO-tuned 0.03 was barely perceptible.
Extends the WMO normal mapping/POM system to character M2 models with
bone-skinned tangents. Auto-generates normal/height maps from diffuse
textures using luminance→height, Sobel→normals (same algorithm as WMO).
- Expand vertex buffer from M2Vertex (48B) to CharVertexGPU (56B) with
tangent vec4 computed via Lengyel's method in setupModelBuffers()
- Tangents are bone-transformed and Gram-Schmidt orthogonalized in the
vertex shader, output as TBN for fragment shader consumption
- Fragment shader gains POM ray marching, normal map blending, and LOD
crossfade via dFdx/dFdy (identical to WMO shader)
- Descriptor set 1 extended with binding 2 for normal/height sampler
- Settings (enable, strength, POM quality) wired from game_screen.cpp
to both WMO and character renderers via shared UI controls
POM fixes: use blurred height only for ray march (keep crisp Sobel for
normals), reduce pomScale 0.03→0.012, clamp grazing angle denominator
to 0.15, hard-limit max UV offset, smooth fadeout at steep view angles.
Add Normal Map Strength slider (0.0-2.0) in Video settings for user
control over surface detail intensity. Persisted across sessions.
Generate normal+height maps from diffuse textures at load time using
luminance-to-height and Sobel 3x3 filtering. Compute per-vertex tangents
via Lengyel's method for TBN basis construction.
Fragment shader uses screen-space UV derivatives (dFdx/dFdy) for smooth
LOD crossfade and angle-adaptive POM sample counts. Flat textures
naturally produce low height variance, causing POM to self-select off.
Settings: Normal Mapping on by default, POM off by default with
Low/Medium/High quality presets. Persisted across sessions.
Dedicated Vulkan pipeline with alpha blending AND depth writes so
windows look transparent at oblique angles without see-through artifacts.
Fresnel alpha ranges from 0.4 (grazing) to 0.95 (head-on) with sun
glint, reflections, and silver-lining specular.
- Fix MLIQ vertex stride: each vertex is 8 bytes (4 flow + 4 height), not 4
- Use MLIQ tile flags to mask out tiles with no liquid (bridges, covered areas)
- Disable wave displacement on WMO water to prevent edge slosh artifacts
- Convert screen-space depth to vertical depth for shoreline foam and water
transparency, preventing false shoreline effects on occluding geometry
- Add underwater blue fog overlay and scene fog shift (terrain water only)
- Add getNearestWaterHeightAt to avoid false underwater detection from
elevated WMO water surfaces
- Tint refracted scene toward water color to mask occlusion edge artifacts
- Lower WMO water by 1 unit to match terrain water level
- Skybox now uses DBC sky colors (skyTop/skyMiddle/skyBand1/skyBand2) instead
of hardcoded C++ color curves, with 3-band gradient and Rayleigh/Mie scattering
- Clouds receive sun direction for lit edges, self-shadowing, and silver lining
- Fixed sun quad box artifact with proper edge fade in celestial shader
- Lens flare attenuated by fog, cloud density, and weather intensity
- Replaced garish green/purple lens flare ghosts with warm natural palette
- Added zone-based weather system for single-player mode with per-zone rain/snow
configuration, probability-based activation, and smooth intensity transitions
- Server SMSG_WEATHER remains authoritative when connected to a server
Water scene history textures and 1x pass resources were not recreated on
window resize/fullscreen, causing stale undersized textures that produced
directional transparency artifacts.