Improved Shaders: Another WIP Improvement
Still working on my rewrites of shaders, my eyes look vampiric... Currently fixed issues with depth so that curved pools and light snow work as intended (no flickering) and reworked lighting; got rid of light maps on lot skirts (lot light map has to be used for lot tiles only) and used diffuse lighting with light point position corrected through attenuated coefficient. It can't give us 146% consistent lighting unfortunately (diffuse lights and light map are completely different lighting models, I'm not crying, no worries) but anyway it's better; no darkened surroundings on sloped lots. Thus, I also had to remove bump maps from heavy snow (lot and lot skirt) and now it uses light map for lighting on lot and diffuse lights for lot skirt. Maxis heavy snow looks poor, so I guess default replacement creators will be to come up with their defaults for heavy snow (I'm gonna too).
While fixing some troubles with light map for light snow (it was glitchy on the above floors, this has also been fixed), I had some idea about creating so-called LotEdgeBlend (seen on Castaway Stories) - a mask for lot edges that covers it with alpha blending and lot skirt texture so that it creates smooth transition between lot skirt and lot terrain. It is an additional plane mesh in TSCS, it means that it is impossible to be ported to regular TS2. I attempted to recreate such functionality but through shaders using and additional layer, and it actually works!
Look at the screenshot, there's lot skirt terrain smoothly turns into lot terrain:
And it's possible to draw terrain paint and it will also have smooth transition into lot skirt:
It's a wip functionality, not sure if it'll be in release as lot shaders can't get lot size parameters, and now alpha mask has incorrect placing on different lot sizes. But It's possible anyway!
