2010-09-12, 02:18 AM
Here is some good news.
I've noticed that the little sprites like the lamp flames and the flames that appear in the hands of the skeleton magi are not displayed via the same interface as the map/object graphics. I'd assumed the alphafog extension would fog out those sprites but I guess I never actually payed attention to that in game.
I actually did not want them fogged just because it seemed really haunting to me to approach a field of of those skeletons for example and see all their lights flickering in the distance despite everything else being black. Of course on the other hand it's not "realistic" for the lights to just appear out of nowhere, but if it's your fancy you can just pretend the lights popping up are the monsters acknowledging the presence of the player. And it does make sense for the lights to peek thru the fog a bit more.
So anyway I reckon the way to go is to just add a multiplier setting for the sprite fog. So you can set it to 0 to disable it, or 1 to make it the same, or somewhere in between to make the sprites catch less fog but eventually fog out also (more or less)
Also I've noticed numerous cases where the stuff in game gets cutoff (not disappears) before it's consumed by fog. I'm not sure why this happens. I don't think I see it in DoM, but I definitely see it in DD. It might have something to do with how far your draw distance is or whether or not sky is turned on. It might help to add a setting so fog can be pulled forward by some amount so your game doesn't suffer from that. You would then want to make your draw distance a little further. And if everything worked out you would never see hard edges where stuff is clipped against the back pane of the viewport. Whether it would fog out the sky I dunno. The alphafog extension doesn't seem to effect the sky (which is a good thing)
UPDATE: It's hard to tell for certain but if I had to make a bet I'd guessing the clipping is the sky being drawn over the background rather than vice versa. If I could isolate the sky it might even be possible to artificially push back its depth in the zbuffer so it would only get drawn onto pixels that have not had anything drawn on them, which might look better, especially indoors.
I've noticed that the little sprites like the lamp flames and the flames that appear in the hands of the skeleton magi are not displayed via the same interface as the map/object graphics. I'd assumed the alphafog extension would fog out those sprites but I guess I never actually payed attention to that in game.
I actually did not want them fogged just because it seemed really haunting to me to approach a field of of those skeletons for example and see all their lights flickering in the distance despite everything else being black. Of course on the other hand it's not "realistic" for the lights to just appear out of nowhere, but if it's your fancy you can just pretend the lights popping up are the monsters acknowledging the presence of the player. And it does make sense for the lights to peek thru the fog a bit more.
So anyway I reckon the way to go is to just add a multiplier setting for the sprite fog. So you can set it to 0 to disable it, or 1 to make it the same, or somewhere in between to make the sprites catch less fog but eventually fog out also (more or less)
Also I've noticed numerous cases where the stuff in game gets cutoff (not disappears) before it's consumed by fog. I'm not sure why this happens. I don't think I see it in DoM, but I definitely see it in DD. It might have something to do with how far your draw distance is or whether or not sky is turned on. It might help to add a setting so fog can be pulled forward by some amount so your game doesn't suffer from that. You would then want to make your draw distance a little further. And if everything worked out you would never see hard edges where stuff is clipped against the back pane of the viewport. Whether it would fog out the sky I dunno. The alphafog extension doesn't seem to effect the sky (which is a good thing)
UPDATE: It's hard to tell for certain but if I had to make a bet I'd guessing the clipping is the sky being drawn over the background rather than vice versa. If I could isolate the sky it might even be possible to artificially push back its depth in the zbuffer so it would only get drawn onto pixels that have not had anything drawn on them, which might look better, especially indoors.