Castle Paradox

Mike Caron · Posted: Thu Apr 06, 2006 8:25 am Post subject:

Yes, I doctored that screen shot. But, I am seriously working on it. However, I need to re-think this all through, for the following reason:

What defines transparency in a tile? The general standard is colour 0, generally defined (by far) as black. And, if we draw black as the background colour, then it's not a big deal for compatability, right?

Not quite. Overhead tiles, currently, pose a problem. In Wandering Hamster, you know the lab in Flannat with the teleporter that leads to that outhouse? And, you know how the secret passage in said outhouse is "covered up" by solid black tiles?

Right. Not so with this system. Of course, if the tiles were redesigned to use another of the multiple blacks in the palette, it wouldn't be an issue. But, I can't expect everyone to modifiy all their old games, that's not compatability.

Perhaps the bottom-most layer should not be drawn transparent. But, then, that would cause a problem with trying to support a backdrop-background/paralaxing type thing (i.e. a backdrop drawn underneath all the tiles, and possibly scrolling at a different rate than the tiles themselves).

-----

Anyway, I concede that this was a stupid joke. I think it would have gone better had I gotten more reaction off the bat. Oh well. I wish I coulda done the joke I had planned...
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Battleblaze · Posted: Thu Apr 06, 2006 5:32 pm Post subject:

Damnit, I never think of the dates. Jeez I'm a dupe.

Mike ur a dirty penis.

Maybe for a transparent color you can just have a special black thats off in the corner somewhere. Besides in the map editor theres like 3 shades of black, make one of them transparent.
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Joe Man · Posted: Thu Apr 06, 2006 7:13 pm Post subject:

You're forgetting, palettes can be changed by the user, so that doesn't quite work.

Out of curiosity, how do overhead tiles currently work?

Inferior Minion · Posted: Thu Apr 06, 2006 9:10 pm Post subject:

Currently, Overhead tiles are just drawn over everything else. There is no transparency involved.
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Leonhart · Joined: 25 Feb 2004 Posts: 383 Location: Philippines

aww...
A little hint of suspicion actually crossed my mind, but I still posted anyway, then, I completely forgot about it.
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Mike Caron · Posted: Fri Apr 07, 2006 2:11 pm Post subject:

Oh, the UI is easy. I'm thinking that in the tilemap editor, you hit Alt 1-3 to switch between the layers. And, in a corner (I think the top-right corner is free), it says "Layer 2 (middle)" or something.

"Hold the phone... three layers?" Yes, three layers. My reasoning:

Layer 1 (bottom) will be intended for terrain.
Layer 2 (middle) will be for stuff (signs, trees, etc.)
Layer 2.5 (above-middle) will be the sprite layer.
Layer 3 (top) will be for overhead stuff (tree-tops, roofs, etc.)

This is the format used in RPG Maker, and it seems fairly solid to me.

"Woah, wait a tick. What if I want stuff like, umm.... clouds. What if I want clouds?" In phase one, you won't be able to do clouds, true. But, I plan on solving that with background/foreground layers, which will be backdrops drawn underneath the map, and on above the map. They will be able to be configured to scroll at different rates than the map (say, the background scrolls at half the speed, whereas the foreground can scroll at twice the speed)

"Hold your horses! Why not just use more tile layers?!" First off, stop freaking out. "Ok." Because of the paralaxing (scrolling at different rates) I just described. If a layer scrolls at half the speed of the rest of the map, it needs half as many tiles (since 1 scrolling pixel = 2 non-scrolling pixels). And, if it scrolls at twice the speed, it needs twice the tiles, in each dimension. So, it's not really practical. It would be better to use a backdrop, since it can be repeated to fill the space.

"Weren't you talking about the UI before?" Oh, right. I'm thinking that if we use Shift-1-3 in the tile-map editor, you could disable those layers (just disable displaying them). This would allow you to look at only one layer at a time (or two layers, or whatever).

"Are there any other tile-related issues you haven't thought of yet?" Actually, I just thought of something. Right now, tiles are stored with only one byte, i.e. 0 - 255. These correspond to tiles on the tileset (0 - 159) or animated tiles (160 - 207, 208 - 255). The problem is that the higher layers will likely be filled with mostly emptiness, which would normally correspond to tile #0. Unfortunately, on some tilesets, this is not all black/transparent.

So, I'm thinking that we should redo the way maps are stored. That would also allow for other stuff, like allowing the whole tileset to be animated, etc.
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TMC · Posted: Fri Apr 07, 2006 7:07 pm Post subject:

I thought the layers were obviously a prank. Why else would you announce them on April the 1st? :P It was pretty funny (to me) that so few people even suspected anything.

Joe Man · Posted: Fri Apr 07, 2006 7:38 pm Post subject:

Alpha blending still sounds interesting if it can ever be implemented.

Mike Caron · Posted: Fri Apr 07, 2006 7:38 pm Post subject:

Alpha? Who said anything about alpha?

Anyway, I disagree about tiles being faster than backdrops. Every time we blit something, it takes a fixed amount of overhead. Thus, drawing 320x200 in 4 steps would be faster than drawing 320x200 in ~180 steps.

Either way, the only problem I see with making tile 0 universally transparent is that, as I said, tile 0 is meaningful in some tilesets.

As for Overhead tiles, I think they should only be active if layers are not. If you want layers and overhead tiles, just use layer 3.
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Joe Man · Posted: Sat Apr 08, 2006 7:01 am Post subject:

I mentioned alpha. That's what blending colors on two or more layers is called, right? I think that'd be nice to have for shadows, windows, rays of light, etc. I brought it up since you were talking about transparency.

FyreWulff · Posted: Sat Apr 08, 2006 10:24 am Post subject:

unless windows OHR is re-programmed to work in 3D mode, alpha will be extremely slow, since most video cards only have accelerated alpha transparency for 3D.

Mike Caron · Posted: Sat Apr 08, 2006 10:42 am Post subject:

Allegro has features to do alpha in paletted mode, although I supsect that it would look... off. It would be fast, though, since it would be a lookup table.

Anyway, Joe man, I doubt we'll support alpha for a while, if ever. We're talking about "1-bit" transparency (aka, it's either completely opaque, or completely transparent).
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I stand corrected. No rivers ran blood today. At least, none that were caused by us.

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