- 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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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
Player interaction ripples: vertex shader adds radial damped-sine displacement
centered on player position, fragment shader adds matching normal perturbation
for specular highlights. Player XY packed into shadowParams.zw, ripple strength
into fogParams.w. Separate 1x render pass for water when MSAA is active to
avoid MSAA-induced darkening — water renders after main pass resolves, using
the resolved swapchain image and depth resolve target. Water 1x framebuffers
rebuilt on swapchain recreate (window resize).
- Add .setMultisample() to minimap display pipeline and recreatePipelines() for MSAA changes
- Defer all swapchain recreation in window.cpp to beginFrame() via markSwapchainDirty()
to prevent mid-frame render pass destruction crashes on resolution/fullscreen change
- Move spawnPlayerCharacter() call to after loadTestTerrain() where character renderer exists
MSAA change was called mid-frame from settings UI, destroying the render pass
and framebuffers while the command buffer was still recording. Now deferred
via pendingMsaaSamples_ flag, applied in beginFrame() before any GPU state.
Also add +180° to M2 game object orientation to fix facing direction.
Replace all glGenTextures/glTexImage2D calls in UI code with Vulkan texture
uploads via new VkContext::uploadImGuiTexture() helper. This fixes segfaults
from calling OpenGL functions without a GL context (null GLEW function pointers).
- Add uploadImGuiTexture() to VkContext with staging buffer upload pattern
- Convert game_screen, inventory_screen, spellbook_screen, talent_screen
from GLuint/GL calls to VkDescriptorSet/Vulkan uploads
- Fix loading_screen clearValueCount (was 1, needs 2 or 3 for MSAA)
Skybox: replace sphere-mesh approach with a fullscreen triangle that
reconstructs the world-space ray direction analytically via inverse
projection/view matrices. Eliminates clip.w=0 degeneracy at the horizon
and correctly maps altitude to dir.z in the Z-up coordinate system.
Clouds: hemisphere mesh was storing altitude in aPos.y (Y-up convention);
the Z-up view matrix projected this sideways, making clouds appear
vertical. Store altitude in aPos.z and update the fragment shader to
read dir.z as altitude and dir.xy as the horizontal UV plane.
- renderWorld() now calls wmoRenderer, characterRenderer, m2Renderer (+smoke,
particles) in the correct opaque→transparent order; water moved after all
opaques; per-subsystem timing active in live path
- Deleted the 310-line #if 0 GL stub block and removed #include <GL/glew.h>
(last GL reference in renderer.cpp)
- Full-screen overlay pipeline (postprocess.vert + overlay.frag, alpha blend,
no depth test/write) for underwater tint; lazily initialized, renders a blue
tint when camera is meaningfully below the water surface; canal vs open-water
tint colours preserved from original design
- overlay.frag.glsl / overlay.frag.spv added
- render sun with alpha blend while keeping moon additive glow
- add dedicated always-running sun haze timer (decoupled from moon phase cycling)
- constrain sun sprite with radial alpha mask and low-alpha discard to remove square artifact
- tune sun tint warmer without over-yellowing
- replace noisy/pulsing haze with slower flow-warp turbulence and lower amplitude
- add one-time warning caches for missing CreatureDisplayInfo and missing model path lookups
- log each missing displayId/model-path only once instead of every spawn retry/frame
- remove duplicate empty-model-path warning in spawnOnlineCreature (already reported by lookup path)
This cuts high-frequency log I/O and string formatting in hotspots when server sends unknown displayIds, while preserving first-occurrence diagnostics.
- ensure player transform sync is not gated by third-person so player shadow stays consistent
- hold shadow projection center during movement and snap once on stop to remove delayed catch-up
- smooth foliage caster transitions using blended phase-shifted UV samples
- tune foliage motion frequencies/amplitudes for less popping
- increase shadow map resolution to 2048 and retune terrain PCF texel scale
- increase global shadow strength from 0.62 to 0.68 for stronger, clearer shadows
