Laser problem

SuperJoe · Commander **Joined**: 03 Sep 2009

Have a small visual problem with the laser effect.

On the left side, the laser effect is drawn behind the top part of the obelisk. I'm trying to make the laser always appear over the obelisk as seen on the right side. Any way to do this?

Already tried lowering the height of the obelisk in art.ini but it didn't make any difference. Also put the ActiveAnimZAdjust and TurretAnimZAdjust as high a possible (-30). Anything higher like -25 and part of the anim starts to disappear. Infact I even disabled both the active and turret anims and the laser still appears behind the obelisk, so the issue is with the building not with the animations. Tried NormalZAdjust on the building itself, but that key is simply bugged and makes the lower part of the building disappear.

Is there any way to fix this? Seems like the laser doesn't want to be drawn over tall buildings. The obelisk height is close to 3. The original Cabal Obelisk has this same issue.

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Bittah Commander · Posted: Sat Jun 09, 2012 5:30 pm Post subject:

What happens when you remove the entire upper part of the obelisk from its SHP and make that part of the building into a 1-frame ActiveAnim? That should give you a little more freedom when messing with the ZAdjust settings.

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SuperJoe · Commander **Joined**: 03 Sep 2009

A high NormalZAdjust (60) does fix the laser issue, but as I mentioned it completely screws up the lower part of the building. Tried to get around this by making the obelisk SHP canvas alot larger (so there are more empty grids below the building), but this doesn't seem to have any affect.

Bittah Commander wrote:

What happens when you remove the entire upper part of the obelisk from its SHP and make that part of the building into a 1-frame ActiveAnim? That should give you a little more freedom when messing with the ZAdjust settings.

Would making the top half active anim have any problems? When you place the structure it would momentarily flash at full brightness. Would there be problems if the structure is damaged and then repaired? Would it flash in and out or something like that.

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Bittah Commander · Posted: Sat Jun 09, 2012 5:42 pm Post subject:

No, it shouldn't cause any problems like that. DTA also has several buildings where a big chunk of the building itself is actually only a part of the active anim, but ingame it's impossible to tell.

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Lin Kuei Ominae · Seth **Joined**: 16 Aug 2006 **Location**: Germany

I noticed that too and came to the result that the laser seems to be hardcoded to be rendered correct only for 1 cell high buildings.

I doubt there is a way to fix this, because if you lower that drastically the buildings ZAdjust to get the laser in front of it, you will get issues with other buildings placed behind the obelisk but rendered in front of it.

To get the foundation back in your NormalZAdjust=60 test, you can use the bibshape. This is iirc always visible, even with a very low renderheight.

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