Help needed - Crysis sandbox draw distance

@ Vilham,

Here's the official documentation in case you're unaware of it. Very good for getting familiar with SB2:

http://doc.crymod.com/

And obviously the Crymod wiki is another great resource.

@Paul,

This is indeed strange. If you look at the island level in the editor, the hill trees have sprites enabled with their 'ViewDistRatio' at '1' and the 'MaxViewDistRatio' at '2'. Those settings allow you to see them from a pretty large distance and you really shouldn't need to tweak anything else. What's the 'Config Spec' set to? Turning it to 'Very High' may solve the problem, though judging by the screens it looks like it's already at that setting.

That Use on Terrain Layer is basically to do procedural vegetation, so you don't have to paint a grass model manually 2000 times. In general I think you should stay away from it with trees, use that feature only for grass/small bushes/ferns and whatnot. The stuff that can be random and doesn't change much if it is. Good to know that you found a fix though!

guys, seriously. Fucking bravo on the tools. They are amazing.

thought i might aswell ask in here. What does the surface type do? Is that for things like audio/decals and the texture is for the visuals?

Exactly, the surface type determines the particles/sound/decal when you shoot at it, walk on it, throw an object at it, etc.

ive got a similar issue to paul. I have painted on grass in the editor, but can only see about 10m from my camera before it disappears. Ive tried tweaking SpriteDistRatio and MaxViewDistRatio on the grass in the vegitation editor, both of which seem to be maxed at 1 and approaching 0 reduce the distance even further. I tried some of those console commands but it says unknown command. Any ideas what im doing wrong here.

Fixed - had use sprites ticked, grass doesnt like that im guessing coz they have no sprite versions.

Also there appear to be seams on my terrain any idea how to fix that?

The MaxViewDistRatio can actually go up to 255. At 255, it will be visible from anywhere. Type the number instead of using the slider. 2 or 3 should be enough. The SpriteDistanceRation works like this: 0 = won't use sprites at all because the sprite shows up when the element disappears altogether; 0.5 = the sprites will show up only twice as far away than by default; 2 or more = the higher the value, the closer the models will turn into sprites.

Anyway, about that second issue, without seeing exactly what kind of seams you're talking about, it's hard to help.

It is common that the exact border between two tiles of terrain can be a bit hacky: procedural vegetation may not be spawned automatically right around that border, painting the terrain gets trickier because of those slight seams that appear along the edge, etc. If that is your problem (if your seams are very long and form a checkerboard), you can work around this by painting vegetation manually on top, or placing decals, etc. It's usually not that big of a deal.

If you haven't painted anything yet on your terrain though, this might be normal, it happens that when you create a new level only one of the tiles is properly textured so you have to paint it by hand everywhere to remove the seams (although you will paint by hand most of the playable area anyway).

Another thing you can do that usually helps is increase the resolution of the tiles (which makes painting materials on your terrain much more precise). To do so, I think you open the Layer Painting tab and there should be a button at the bottom, something like Change Tile Resolution. Click it, and you should see the borders between those terrain tiles now. Click on any of the tiles and it will prompt you for a new resolution. The higher the value, the more precise it'll be to paint, but the more it'll suck memory too. Usually just doubling the original value is enough (1024 instead of 512 for instance.) That makes it easier to paint details without being overkill.

I hope there's something in there that'll help. Otherwise, post a pic of that problem

Heres an example. Ive got 2 issues here, first is that blatent seam (which isn't on one of the tilemap seams, ive upped them to 1024x1024 but it hasn't changed these seams every 50m or so. Then ive also got my textures not blending very well, that's probably a different issue though.

[attachment=1]seams.jpg[/attachment]

Heres one of the seams every 50m or so.

[attachment=0]seams2.jpg[/attachment]

There's not much you can do about the bad blending between some of the materials. That is, it's not really an error per se but rather, the textures themselves. Trust me though, once you add decals around the area, foliage, rocks, and everything else, you wont be able to see them.

You second shot might be resolved by upping the hardness of your brush and painting away the lighter areas. This could also be because you haven't regenerated your terrain textures. SB2 is super finicky when it comes to the terrain textures and at times, when you start painting, everything can looked borked. So alway make sure to regenerate your terrain textures if you want to see what they actually look like. You may need to re-generate, export to engine, save and restart the editor in order for the changes to take effect. Annoying, yes, hopefully SB3 wont have similar issues.

Might as well post this here, Ive fixed that texture issue by copying the settings on some official maps, they blend correctly now. However Ive got this issue:

[attachment=0]grass.gif[/attachment]

As you can see ive painted the sand on with hardness 1 but I still have the grass pattern underneath it. Any ideas?

Did you get the terrain textures by exporting a library from one of the maps? Make sure the detail layer is set to the correct material, possibly regenerate your textures > export to engine > save > restart the editor, check if the detail layer is still correct. Un-checking "Mask by Layer Altitude and Slope might be the problem as well, though that's usually more obvious as the layer is either painted onto the terrain or it isn't when that's checked.

yeah they are exported from an official map, its the only way I could properly copy the settings to get the blending right. found out what it was, the textures were exported but it removed the surface types, adding them back in fixed it.

Yes, I meant surface type not detail texture :embarrassed: . I experience those same issues when I export the textures from another map.

did you generate surface texture?

Are you using the Wars Editor? Because that's a common problem with that Editor, among many others. Some experience it, some don't. That's one of the main reasons for why I'm still using the original Editor for Crysis. It also has SP rules by default, unlike the Wars Editor which was made for MP.

Ive decided this is now the defacto crysis help thread

So when I place geom entitys like a house when i bump into them they basically float across the ground. Its the same with the towers, they just fall over if bumped. What am i doing wrong here. I can't find a single tutorial online about placing props correctly

Have you tried placing them as brushes instead? It should really be as simple as dragging them from the list and onto the map.

After I posted I tried loading them into the database and then placing them with the archtype entity tool, it seemed to work, the house no longer slid about. Having said that im not sure if that is the correct way to place stuff though.

The cheapest way to place static geometry is opening the Brush tab, choosing what you wanna place, and dragging it in the viewport.