Bars in doors

Discuss Daggerfall Unity and Daggerfall Tools for Unity.
Post Reply
User avatar
jayhova
Posts: 923
Joined: Wed Jul 19, 2017 7:54 pm
Contact:

Bars in doors

Post 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?

Image Image
Remember always 'What would Julian Do?'.

User avatar
pango
Posts: 3347
Joined: Wed Jul 18, 2018 6:14 pm
Location: France
Contact:

Re: Bars in doors

Post 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.
Mastodon: @pango@fosstodon.org
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
-- Charles Goodhart

User avatar
jayhova
Posts: 923
Joined: Wed Jul 19, 2017 7:54 pm
Contact:

Re: Bars in doors

Post 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.
Remember always 'What would Julian Do?'.

User avatar
billyloist
Posts: 48
Joined: Thu Jul 30, 2020 2:07 am

Re: Bars in doors

Post 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.

User avatar
MrFlibble
Posts: 410
Joined: Sat Jan 27, 2018 10:43 am

Re: Bars in doors

Post 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.

User avatar
jayhova
Posts: 923
Joined: Wed Jul 19, 2017 7:54 pm
Contact:

Re: Bars in doors

Post 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.

Image
Remember always 'What would Julian Do?'.

Post Reply