Re: [Adonthell-devel] See-through walls

[Kai Sterker]

On Sun, May 1, 2011 at 6:59 PM, James Nash <address@hidden> wrote:

> That sounds like an neat idea. Certainly in an outdoor environment like a
> forest that would look pretty cool.
>
> However, I think it would have to be an area larger than your mock-up.
> Otherwise players can't see enough of their character's surroundings.

Sure. The sample picture was just to demonstrate the general idea. The
final size, form and level of transparency would have to be determined
yet. Something not too big, but big enough to see more than just the
character.


> How this would look in a building? If the character stands in the front
> corner of a room, does it mean that part of the wall in the neighbouring
> room would become transparent too?

Yes. With the most simple approach, we'd have the "overlay" centered
on the character and it would affect anything between itself and the
camera. There's no easy way to tell where one room ends and the next
one begins. Otherwise we could apply an offset to the overlay, to that
it does not go further than the edge.

It might also look odd if you had a doorway in a vertical wall. Or
maybe not. It's not so easy to imagine how it will look in any
possible situation.

There will definitely be issues when the character is outside, behind
a building. In that case, you could actually see inside the building,
and all floors at once, too. Perhaps we'd have to reserve the effect
for interiors, or when there's something above the character's head,
like the forest canopy. Or design maps in a way that the area directly
behind buildings is not reachable.


> In any case, I can see a need for making scenery exempt from this effect
> too. What if there's a piece of furniture behind the wall - we might want to
> make sure it appears solid even if the wall doesn't since otherwise, smaller
> things might disappear completely and the player will be left wondering
> what's obstructing his character as he walks around.
>
> Could we perhaps have a flag for map objects that can enable/disable fading
> when it obscures the character so that level designers can control this?

If we had a flag for that, we could exempt roofs or vertical walls
from the effect, so this might be a good idea. That'd be something
that would be set once for the model, so it wouldn't be too much
effort.


I still think I'll concentrate on the tools first, and give that idea
some time to develop. Maybe we do have to implement it, just to get a
feel for how it would work out. But there's not much sense in doing it
now, when there's little to test it.

Kai