The interesting thing about fog effects in the late 90s and early 2000s is they were often implemented to hide the fact that an engine couldn't render too many polygons or else the framerate would die. In real life, unless the weather itself is foggy, fog doesn't take effect until VERY far into the distance, and even then you may still be able to see things several miles away if they're big enough, such as mountains.

As game engines got better, fog effects eventually stopped being a necessity and started becoming a design decision for sake of the environment. Part of the reason is because early fog effects are not dynamic, thus if you implement them at all, sooner or later all 3D elements of the scene would need to turn into the fog colour. This meant backgrounds had to be plain colours to match the fog colour, otherwise you'd end up with bright solid white or deep solid black overtop of a colourful background, which doesn't make sense visually.

Essentially, early fog effects and background textures don't match up very nicely. :P

In terms of NFS3, I don't know if there's any hidden fog options or anything, but every screenshot I've seen of it has no fog effects, so I doubt there are any, and it was probably built that way on purpose to provide a maximal draw distance and to allow for backgrounds to mesh in with the rest of the graphics.

NFS3 with glide2x renderers (voodooa.dll, unpatched voodoo2a.dll, Banshee patch voodoo2a.dll) - fogging is ok.
NFS3 with glide3x/d3d renderers (d3da.dll, Voodoo3 patch voodoo2a.dll) - no fog.
Tested with a real Voodoo2. Maybe Voodoo3 results are different but I doubt it.
P.S. You must run the Banshee patch, not unpack it. It replaces voodoo2a.dll.

Gamecollector wrote:

NFS3 with glide2x renderers (voodooa.dll, unpatched voodoo2a.dll, Banshee patch voodoo2a.dll) - fogging is ok. NFS3 with glide3x […]
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NFS3 with glide2x renderers (voodooa.dll, unpatched voodoo2a.dll, Banshee patch voodoo2a.dll) - fogging is ok.
NFS3 with glide3x/d3d renderers (d3da.dll, Voodoo3 patch voodoo2a.dll) - no fog.
Tested with a real Voodoo2. Maybe Voodoo3 results are different but I doubt it.
P.S. You must run the Banshee patch, not unpack it. It replaces voodoo2a.dll.

Gamecollector FTW. Pretty sure this has been asked and answered on the forum in the past, but thanks.

Gamecollector wrote:

NFS3 with glide2x renderers (voodooa.dll, unpatched voodoo2a.dll, Banshee patch voodoo2a.dll) - fogging is ok.
NFS3 with glide3x/d3d renderers (d3da.dll, Voodoo3 patch voodoo2a.dll) - no fog.

Aha! I suspected as much! Needing to install a patch for the Voodoo3 was a big red flag.

I wonder if the Banshee patch works with the Voodoo3? I'd go test it, but my Voodoo3 is not set up at the moment.

Gemini000 wrote:

The interesting thing about fog effects in the late 90s and early 2000s is they were often implemented to hide the fact that an engine couldn't render too many polygons or else the framerate would die. In real life, unless the weather itself is foggy, fog doesn't take effect until VERY far into the distance, and even then you may still be able to see things several miles away if they're big enough, such as mountains.

As game engines got better, fog effects eventually stopped being a necessity and started becoming a design decision for sake of the environment. Part of the reason is because early fog effects are not dynamic, thus if you implement them at all, sooner or later all 3D elements of the scene would need to turn into the fog colour. This meant backgrounds had to be plain colours to match the fog colour, otherwise you'd end up with bright solid white or deep solid black overtop of a colourful background, which doesn't make sense visually.

Essentially, early fog effects and background textures don't match up very nicely.

I agree that table fog is an imperfect technique, and I've often seen it used to hide short draw distances. However, some of the Need for Speed games use it to real artistic effect (High Stakes especially), so it does seem missing in Hot Pursuit. This is especially true when weather is enabled (rain and snow falling from clear skies is not very realistic 😜).

Well, the Voodoo3 NFS4 patch is manual. You replace 3ddata.exe/3ddata.dat. As the result - the Voodoo3 entry is added in the registry and 3dsetup.exe correctly detects/initializes a Voodoo3. The second thing - you must manually replace voodoo2a.dll.
So - install the Banshee patch then not copy Voodoo3 voodoo2a.dll... Just update 3ddata.exe/dat.

Hoping these games make it to GOG.com or Steam one day. Or Origin.

philscomputerlab wrote:

Hoping these games make it to GOG.com or Steam one day. Or Origin.

Huh? The CDs are dirt cheap and DRM-free...

I know. It's a hobby of mine to get Steam and GOG.com games to run on my Retro PCs 😀

NFS4 with specifically the D3D7 d3da.dll has working fog. I haven't messed with NFS3 in awhile....

swaaye wrote:

I haven't messed with NFS3 in awhile....

I don't play it much either, to be honest. I mostly use Hot Pursuit as a High Stakes substitute on systems that can't quite handle the newer game. Even though the two games are based on the same engine, there's quite a large difference in terms of system requirements.