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Bars in doors

Posted: Mon Sep 26, 2022 10:08 pm
by jayhova
I posted something a little while ago that got moved over to the mods section which is fine. I did however wish to get an idea of what people thought. For that reason, I am posting here.

The original Arena had, in the starting dungeon, a series of iron gates as doors. Clearly, in the earlier version Arena The doors were transparent between the bars. Why not so in Daggerfall? Is it like the spinning wheel, just a thing they ran out of time to fix or was it on purpose? How would dungeons change if one could see through the door grate?

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Re: Bars in doors

Posted: Mon Sep 26, 2022 11:15 pm
by pango
I suspect transparency didn't look good enough for objects that now had some thickness, and fixing that would have required adding polygons that were too costly to render vs. visual improvement (cf furniture with back face manually culled off for example; when running 3D rendering on 486s, any way to save cpu cycles was worth considering).
But it's hard to tell for sure, running out of time is always a possibility.

Re: Bars in doors

Posted: Tue Sep 27, 2022 7:21 am
by jayhova
The general store spinning wheel gives me the notion that at least some of the flats just didn't get finished. The iron gates in the first game were flats and looked okay. I don't imagine the bars would look bad as you would never see them completely side on. A simple 4-sided poly would also be fine. I hardly think anyone would have really worried about that when all the people in the game were 2d flats.

Re: Bars in doors

Posted: Tue Sep 27, 2022 2:10 pm
by billyloist
Can you explain the spinning wheel in detail please? I seem to have missed the thread with that discussion. I know it had a very poor model with low detail, but still.

Re: Bars in doors

Posted: Tue Sep 27, 2022 7:32 pm
by MrFlibble
I wonder if the spinning wheel can be fixed by editing the corresponding texture? I'm not sure if DF models use textures from TEXTURE.xxx files though. If yes, there's a possibility that the black parts are just mistakenly using the real black colour instead of the "transparent" black, which has a different index in the palette.

Edit: The other option, of course, is that the devs intended the black parts to be transparent (i.e. the transparent colour is in the texture where it is intended to be), but failed to code in the part where it would work with models, or perhaps it did not work with models at all in the first place.

Re: Bars in doors

Posted: Tue Sep 27, 2022 9:29 pm
by jayhova
billyloist wrote: Tue Sep 27, 2022 2:10 pm Can you explain the spinning wheel in detail please? I seem to have missed the thread with that discussion. I know it had a very poor model with low detail, but still.
The original spinning wheel in Daggerfall did not have transparent color between the spokes. The 2D portion of the object was immersion breaking due to this flaw. My thought is the bars on the viewports of the doors might have the same problem that was simply never addressed.

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