Miscellaneous: You could see all of NToV with no fog in your way in classic (in-era image proof)

[CrazyPro]

Was dinkin' around on the gallery of the old Legacy of Steel site, specifically the images from January of 2001, and I stumbled upon these:

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Currently on P99 there is red fog that prevents you from seeing anywhere near this far in ToV, yet in these classic screenshots they can see the entirety of NToV from Aary? Get ridda dat fog!

Edit: found another screenshot from August of 2001

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[Baugi]

In-era video with some NToV ring shots. It has several pixels -

https://web.archive.org/web/20011117...lismanToVN.wmv

[CrazyPro]

Originally Posted by Baugi [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

In-era video with some NToV ring shots. It has several pixels -

https://web.archive.org/web/20011117...lismanToVN.wmv

Oh yeah you can see all the way across right here.

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Can see Vulak's lair hanging from the ceiling from here.

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[Baugi]

Came across some shots with fog -

north13.jpg

north12.jpg

src: https://web.archive.org/web/20010627.../northwing.cfm

[CrazyPro]

They could have just had their far clip plane set to lower than maximum? It seems that way with there being conflicting screenshots, unless the view distance was raised at some point midway through Velious?

[CrazyPro]

Found another in-era video with zero fog.

https://web.archive.org/web/20011214...om/Wipeout.wmv

[CrazyPro]

Well I just spent 10 million years getting the Aug 2001 trilogy client to connect to a locally hosted server just to demonstrate that the trilogy client's far clip plane went super far, which also explains why some of the in-era screenshots have much closer fog than others, it was most certainly their clip plane setting.

The reason my fog tint is blue and you can see the sky before I disable it is probably because the nightmare DLL with 24,000 lines of awful slop code only translates enough of the packets to the client to simply allow me to get into the game and see my inventory, the sky and fog colors are set correctly on the server side, I can go in on a normal client and lower my far clip plane to the minimum and it looks just like p99, it's just that I don't think that's actually being communicated to my client because I only have the bare necessities to be able to get in game and walk around in my magic little DLL.

[Baugi]

Originally Posted by CrazyPro [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Well I just spent 10 million years getting the Aug 2001 trilogy client to connect to a locally hosted server just to demonstrate that the trilogy client's far clip plane went super far, which also explains why some of the in-era screenshots have much closer fog than others, it was most certainly their clip plane setting.

The reason my fog tint is blue and you can see the sky before I disable it is probably because the nightmare DLL with 24,000 lines of awful slop code only translates enough of the packets to the client to simply allow me to get into the game and see my inventory, the sky and fog colors are set correctly on the server side, I can go in on a normal client and lower my far clip plane to the minimum and it looks just like p99, it's just that I don't think that's actually being communicated to my client because I only have the bare necessities to be able to get in game and walk around in my magic little DLL.

Very cool, but I'm not sure you can say anything definitive using only the client. Several related zone-specific variables were passed directly from the server, e.g. in the "NewZone_Struct" (using EQEmu naming) you get from the server while zoning, you get passed -

/*0388*/ float fog_minclip[4];
/*0404*/ float fog_maxclip[4];
...
/*0512*/ float minclip; // Minimum View Distance
/*0516*/ float maxclip; // Maximum View DIstance
...
/*0700*/ float fog_density;

src: https://github.com/EQEmu/EQEmu/blob/...cket_structs.h

fog_minclip and fog_maxclip were also determined by time of day and weather. The four different values are: day, night, day+weather, night+weather (I think anyway, haven't played with this stuff personally). Is there any reason to think the screenshot differences aren't just due to ToD/weather?

I suspect fog rendering also would have been fairly dependent on the libraries? For example, here's a DirectX 7 era document that describes fog features that are different even from DirectX 6. -

https://developer.download.nvidia.co.../docs/Fog2.pdf