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. 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? 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? - James On 30 April 2011 21:24, Kai Sterker <kai.ster...@gmail.com> wrote: > When chatting with cirrus two days ago, the topic of the character > disappearing behind walls came up again. In v0.3, we had extra "front" > wall pieces that where transparent, but in v0.3, where we don't have a > map per single room, this would look more than strange. Something more > automatic is needed. > > So far, I was thinking in the direction of making complete wall > sections transparent, either just one or two wall pieces in front of > the player, or the complete stretch of wall. The problem here is that > it leaves hard edges and detecting which pieces to make transparent > and which not would be tricky. It also fails when the character enters > a forest and suddenly the tree tops hide the character. > > Yesterday, I had a different idea. Like the character shadow, we could > have an "overlay" that is projected not at the ground, but at objects > between the player controlled character and the camera. The overlay > would have to be applied to all those objects alpha channel, thus > making them transparent where the player is located. If the overlay is > created with smooth gradients, the effect should look fairly > unobtrusive and blend nicely with the rest of the view. With my measly > artistic skills, I've fabricated a little sample of what it might look > like. > > Implementation-wise, it could be a property like the shadow, but only > set on the player-controlled character. During movement, it would be > applied to all objects that obscure the view onto the player. Here we > probably have to create a copy of the image and change its alpha > channel in software, but since it will affect only few objects and the > area won't be too big, that shouldn't slow things down a lot. > > I'd limit the effect to scenery only, so that items or characters in > front of the player would not be affected. We could also add a > threshold, so that items would have to have a certain hight to get the > effect. So a table or chair would remain solid, while a wall or tree > would allow to see the player character behind. > > As for the shape of the "overlay".I went with an ellipse in the > example, with the most transparency in the center, but we'd be > completely free in that. > > What do you think? Sounds like something that might work, from visual > and game-play perspectives? > > Kai > > _______________________________________________ > Adonthell-devel mailing list > Adonthell-devel@nongnu.org > https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/adonthell-devel > > -- Personal site: http://cirrus.twiddles.com
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