Hows it going Joe?

[Holy_Diver]

Hi all, First of all I am no quitter, and thank you Ben for all your kindness............. I have been so busy with that thing called life and family , that som sorta fell on the wayside......(No pun intended)...... But I love modeling, And I still LOVE SOM........ So I still am working, and working on ways to make it more fun, if only to a select few......... Anyway I have a quick item for ben, we were talking last night, on the phone, and he asked me a questrion....... At the time I had forgot the answer, now I remember, so Ben to answer your question, to have tranparetcy in map pieces it is simple....... Have a sky selected, any sky....... I notice most of your screens are black (with out a sky) turn on any sky, and BAM, the black becomes transparent......... I think it has something to do with the fact that the sky itself, is an object, and ALL objects are like that so when the sky is engaged , the map acts like an object.................. Anyway I had to play with it for a few and then I remembered...............Any way I will be here way more now so , get ready for some fun times to had by all.............. ps I made this for a friend with a local production company over the holidays........ never mind the theme or anything else, just wanted you all to know that I always am modeling and working, even if it's not all for SOM, sorry you have to see this after the holidays, but you should still get major giggles from this all the same........ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cuk8FgokdG0 ‎  ‎  Love ML

I'm pretty sure that the map pieces will always be transparent after you build your game (ie. run it via som_rt.exe) ... som_db.exe (one of them anyway) just has a bug which prevents it, which is possibly rectified by the changes to the D3D render states which come along with the sky. Anyway, with Ex you don't have to worry about this. But now that you mentioned it's related to the sky, that might make it easier for Ex to correct for this if I don't forget.

Transparency like with the water objects may not be possible... I can't say for sure though without playing around with whatever tools you guys use to make map tiles. Anyway I've never seen a semitransparent map tile. Many pre-patch map tiles (and other textures) have holes in them under som_rt.exe. One of the final patches seems to have corrected their textures. Though there are still a number of objects and stuff with holes that were missed (possibly map tiles as well, though I've never seen any)

With Ex you could make a map tile with transparent elements. You'd just need to make sure the transparent parts have unique textures which Ex can recognize and apply your transparency wishes to. Though map tiles are not z-sorted so if the transparent part is concave it could come out wrong depending on the order Som actually draws it (which is remarkably reliable actually) ... once Ex starts rendering the map tiles so to prevent the tiles from disappearing in widescreen this won't be a problem.