Confirmed Recent mounts / familiars and use of overly reflective textures

Shaders are very fun to code, they can do a lot more than tint the screen blue.

When will this get fixed?

Really would like to buy some bunny mounts but want them to look right not all messed up.

and @Covic Covic Covic (trying to beetlejuice summon him also).

Let me first say, what everyone will tell you. The models and textures you both do are fantastic! This is why I, for one, am deeply depressed by the lack of QA on these things. I am not paying money for something that I know I want, if it didn't shine like the top of the Chrysler building (Annie reference).

So many issues, this will be a long one. Long story short, you seem to need to thoroughly review how you bring assets from EQ2 into EQ1.

TTobey:
-You mentioned once upon a time you liked EQ1 lighting. I said to you then, ? it washes out the normal and way over burns white and yellow. I fear now more than ever, you guys are using some tool to view an emulation of EQ1 lighting to review your assets, and then calling it a day. And please please tell me that tool is not the PlayerStudio.exe we were given. That is nowhere near an accurate representation of any lighting scenario any player sees in the game, on any settings. Bottom line, somebody needs to review what these things look like before release, and have the authority to send it back to you (or Covic) to be fixed.

-Higher level players all have a vision spell on their helm, and there are different races with different vision options. These all affect lighting. One question that leaps to mind, is the render pipeline having an additive effect with these different lighting alterations? Where it should have more of a 'best lighting scenario wins' render.

-There is a well known issue with transparency being rendered in the wrong order. Mainly due to old assets and (I believe) all environment geometry is one-sided, and backface culling gets thrown off where it sees more than one transparent surface in the stack at any one pixel. I wonder if the Specular channel is getting reversed or messed up based on the direction of the normal (in the model not texture). I would review old assets that work, sort of ok (ha), and compare with new models as far as 'one sided', normals facing, and backface culling.

-Several mounts in past years have had problems with the attachment point. You had to fix the duck after release, so you know what I mean. Couple of years back there were some that had the rider sideways on the mount, only for certain races. Race/Gender combos mean 32 attachment points need to be checked before release (in an ideal world). I would also review any differences, and thus export settings that need to be right, between Maya (?) and EQ1's standard of which direction -Z is.

Covic:
-What format textures are you bringing from EQ2? DDS supports mipmap, does EQ1? 24bit TGA (no alpha channel) still works great, no mipmap support. Are you bringing over something with 'embedded' data, like mipmaps, that isn't supported by EQ1 (in all lighting scenarios).

-See above where I mention to TTobey the many different race/spell/gear/environment/graphics-settings lighting possibilities. Bottom line, you need to review the most common settings used, and bare minimum check with an un-geared low level of various races with different vision, and corresponding high level geared with current helm, in the Guild Lobby zone (where things are light background and a touch over-lit). If you care what your fantastic textures look like here, as you seem to care but be unaware of.

-Surely you're not adding a Fresnel texture, which EQ1 doesn't support to my knowledge, but EQ2 does.

-The Specular channel is pretty finicky, and everything is over-lit in general. For one thing, I would suggest just leaving the Spec texture out entirely, on these rabbits specifically, the belt buckle near the midsection is the only thing that should be metallic shiny anyway. It's a great patchwork cloth texture, it doesn't need Spec at all.

-If you wanted to be thorough, you could go back years and review all the Spec maps for things you've added from EQ2, and just delete the ones that don't absolutely need it, save a little space. But I wouldn't think that's worth the effort. Everybody has gotten used to the way they look.

QA: 100% serious here...
HOW do you not see the brightly shining mess made of these wonderful items and not send them back for review? HOW?!!!

There's a bug. They're working on it. It's been in there for a long time.

It sure has been there a long time. We appreciate it getting looked at. It's a darn shame for so much great stuff, to look so poor, for so long.

-Several mounts in past years have had problems with the attachment point. You had to fix the duck after release, so you know what I mean. Couple of years back there were some that had the rider sideways on the mount, only for certain races. Race/Gender combos mean 32 attachment points need to be checked before release (in an ideal world). I would also review any differences, and thus export settings that need to be right, between Maya (?) and EQ1's standard of which direction -Z is.





There's ways to attach players in EQ2 that are different in EQ1. To check the side to side motion in EQ1 really means not animating the mount. The player inherits the mount movement. There's ways to alleviate this in EQ2 which don't exit in EQ1, but the duck moved a LOT side to side. I haven't had time to go back and fix every mount and I don't see that happening anytime in the foreseeable future, but thanks for your feedback.

Makes total sense. Thanks for explaining further!

New mounts going forward though, I'll take care of it before it goes.

I remember when I put the first drogmor in, the first animation made everyone totally seasick. Geez that was 21 years ago now!

I still remember, so does my stomach.

I think that you need to adjust something about the Clothwork Bunny mounts, they are glowing white with their features indistinct. They certainly cannot be as you intended them to look. I am including screen shots of mine, and I saw someone on the Periwinkle one that had the same issue. These bunnies have a ton of potential and I would like to buy a couple more for two of the other servers I play on and one for maybe one or both of my other accounts on the Rathe along with my husband wanting to possibly buy one for his account on the Rathe as well but we really want them to look right not all strange and glowing white without the graphics as they should be for them. I have included some screen shots of me on my bunny from some different angles. My husband and stepson get the strange look for my mount that I do on their computers as well. Clearly, you all couldn't have intended it to look like this. Please, please fix them, I love bunnies and I really want the mount to look great. The snowbunny mount that came with the CoV friends and family expansion purchase is absolutely terrific looking and I love having it on all 3 of my accounts on the Cazic server as well as my stepson and husband having that one there too. I was thrilled to see these 4 clothwork bunny mounts available but PLEASE fix their appearance. You have priced them at twice the price of the other mounts and I don't think that you want to disappoint the people who have spent their stationcash or money on them. For example, I will have to purchase some sationcash for me to buy one on my other 2 accounts. I had been saying to my family and others that if you all made more bunny mounts that they would be of great interest, I thought maybe you might make a black, brown, grey or dutch (black and white) bunny mount for example. Daily on Cazic, where I have my snowbunny mounts, I get compliments on them and people asking me how I got such a cute mount. Thank you for your attention regarding this and I hope to find that you have fixed the graphics for these Clothwork Bunny mounts soon. Thank you very much.

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This is my original post that was under the Player Support Category and it was pointed out to me under that post that I posted it to the wrong spot.

I want to know that this is actually getting fixed and when that fix can be expected, mostly what I seem to see is a lot of double talk without actual answers.

That's is being addressed in several threads now.

I'm so sorry I wasted this Tera person's time I don't even want to direct quote them.

But re-reading this just made me upset with myself.

It is a bunch of double talk and nonsense. I'm so used to raising a fuss to get attention to an issue, and then sugar coating it when they arrive, because we get so precious few communications with them.

They're working on it, is the only useful thing there.
We know it's a bug already, that's why it's in the bug thread. Several threads were merged here, because a number of people have already discussed it being a bug.
We know it's been there for YEARS, I told you that.

Also, they usually mark a bug "IN PROGRESS" when they are ACTUALLY WORKING ON IT.

We appreciate this was marked as CONFIRMED, at least now YOU ARE AWARE OF WHAT YOUR ITEM LOOKS LIKE FOR THE FIRST TIME apparently.

None of us will be holding our breath for an actual fix though.

And I've got to say.

Promising NOW, to start reviewing the attachment point issue before adding them for sale, and then telling us a story about how you've known this issue from 20 years ago. You have to re-do animations for EQ1 mounts, and you don't subsequently CHECK THAT? in-game? But you will now?

I still just don't get it. And I'm tired of acting like, "Yeah ....that's greeeeaaaat."

So not to be too annoyed. But I thought it was said "Going forward I will check new mounts before putting them in" or something along those lines.

Well, I just bought the new Regal Tree Squirrel Saddle and guess what.........Same thing! Pixel shaders 2.0 white washes it.
What happened to NOT putting new mounts in before they are checked?
It is a bit annoying you guys say one thing and then don't do it. Please fix it asap, its too much now

I am so annoyed, but let me clarify. I might have muddled the issue/s by adding several problems we regularly see in EQ2 items brought into EQ.

TTobey does animation, Covic does modeling and textures. Both of them are ART department from EQ2 and spend about 60% of their time on EQ2 work (per TTobey).

Issues I raised here:
-Glare/brightness: Textures (Covic)
-Mount attachment points: Animation (TTobey)

TTobey promised to check Mount Attachment Points, on future additions to the marketplace. So I wonder if any race/gender characters are facing the wrong way, or the camera is off to the side but facing forward at a weird angle, on the new mount.

TTobey made a statement "They're working on it." pertaining to Glare/brightness on textures and PixelShader 2.0 being the culprit Covic points at. I'm not sure that it's true anyone is actually working on it now, or was ever. But TTobey, and Covic would not be the ones working on pure code or shader coding, thus his reference to 'they'.

With the upcoming DX11 update on their 2023 schedule, I'm not sure it would even be prudent to work on PixelShader 2.0 or whatever before then.

Bottom line, maybe mounts will have the rider attached properly and the camera not all wonky. The textures are going to be glaring bright for the foreseeable future. Look at the UI update and tell me how much you want them mucking about in the visual render pipeline code.

Tbh, that all sounds like palming the problem off on other people which makes me even more annoyed now.

12th of April this was posted by TTobey - New mounts going forward though, I'll take care of it before it goes.

So just want to know. Where was that ensurance? No where, Regal Tree Squirrel has the same problem........

It's been stated that the washed out issue is due to having coloring that's "very close to white", which causes the reflectivity.

Seeing as most squirrels are brown or black, the path of least resistance would be to avoid the use of white coloring, so that the reflective issue doesn't continue to present itself.

I'm hopeful the DX upgrade coming later this year means they can revisit all of the shaders and get them fixed up.

Not quite, really.

Their statement was "Whites and Yellows wash out under 'bright lighting scenarios'." Which matches exactly what we were told for our Player Studio items (to avoid pure-ish whites and yellows).

You can see this isn't the same issue when you look at a robe with white or yellow. It does wash out the color a little (diffuse texture) and the normal (surface detail texture). But it doesn't 'shine' over-bright like these EQ2 items do.

That's because our Player Studio robes only have Color and Normal Map. No Specular map on robes.

Our (PS) weapons and shields have Color, Normal, and Specular.

The Specular texture is used to create 'shine' from light sources, emulating metal. I'm pretty sure the problem is from the Specular texture, and probably the shader combining all the different vision effects (which have to do with lighting) instead of choosing one single 'lighting scenario' to represent/render.

Also you can see the EQ2 items shine over-bright across the entire thing uniformly, it doesn't vary along with the color, and so isn't a function of the underlying color.

I brought this up last June on Discord when I noticed the issue with the pride lions. I was paraphrasing ttobey's response. The issue, then, was accredited to white-ish colors.

I would guess the reason it's not fixed is a lack of expertise in-house to work on shaders -- that work probably needs to be done by a contractor and hasn't been prioritized to make the work list. It's been ages since any kind of graphical code has been touched and with the DX upgrade coming later this year, it may not even make sense to fix it now, as much as I'd absolutely love to see it happen.