The look

Warcraft III has a recognisable picture: textures at almost full brightness, a warm sun, dark cliff shadows, and nothing brighter than its own colours. Aqua IV can draw exactly that. It can also draw a more modern version of it. Which one you get is a look, a small set of numbers, not a different engine.

Two looks ship:

• Warcraft III (exact): the game's own sun, ambient light and rules, for side-by-side comparison with the original.
• Aqua IV (the default): the same sun and the same palette, with a few upgrades the old engine could not do.

Both are set per map in the editor's Shaders module, and both are cheap: they cost nothing per unit.

What the exact look does

These are the rules Warcraft III uses, read from the game's data and from the open OpenWCIII project. Aqua IV writes its own code for them.

• Light is a sum, then a clamp. A surface gets a sun term plus ambient light, clamped to 1, and its texture is multiplied by that. Nothing is ever brighter than its picture.
• One sun and one ambient colour. The sun is the same for every outdoor tileset: about 38 degrees above the horizon, from the west-south-west. Only the colours change with the time of day.
• Ground and units have different ambient light. Units get a little more than the terrain.
• Gamma. The game multiplies colours directly on the screen. Aqua IV works in linear light, so it converts the light first; otherwise every mid-tone would come out too bright.
• Unshaded layers skip the light, and team colour, geoset colour and layer alpha multiply in before it.
• Fog is a linear ramp from a start to an end distance.

At noon on Lordaeron ground the result is a light of about 0.99, 0.97, 0.97: the picture at almost full brightness with a faint warm tint. A slope facing away from the sun gets only the dim ambient, which is why Warcraft III terrain reads as texture colours with cliff shadows.

What the Aqua IV look adds

Built today: the sun and ambient light, gamma-correct lighting, separate model and ground ambient, fog in the shader, the hemisphere ambient, the fill light, saturation and ground variation.

Your own shaders

The editor's Shaders module has two slots, one for units and one for terrain. They hold the engine's default until your map brings its own. A map's shader is a WGSL file. Make my own writes a full copy of the default, which you then edit. The editor watches the folder, so a save shows in the 3D view within half a second. A file that fails to compile is refused with the compiler's message and the default is drawn instead. See Shaders and the custom look tutorial.

The look numbers themselves (sun, ambient, fog) are data, not shader text, so you can change the mood of a map without touching a shader. A map with its own shaders in a game, not only in the editor, is still to come.

Not built yet

These are decided and not done. They are not in the game today.

• Time-of-day colours from the day and night cycle, and cliff edge normals.
• Water: animated, depth-coloured, and later with reflection and refraction.
• Shadows: Aqua IV already has a real-time sun shadow map for the existing map. Soft contact shadows, cascades and ambient occlusion under units and trees are to come.
• Local lights from models, such as torches.
• Fog for additive effects, so glows do not brighten in fog; height and aerial-perspective fog.
• Bloom and tone mapping as a final pass, for glow on bright screens.
• Quality tiers, Low to Ultra. Low is meant to cost about what the exact look costs, with the heavier effects switching on above it.

Checked against the game

The exact look is built from numbers in Warcraft III's own files. A full side-by-side comparison with the game at 4K is still on the list, so treat "exact" as "built from the game's rules", not yet as "proven identical".

See also Warcraft III models for the model features that feed this look, and rendering.