Coloured fogging

[Gambit37]

Goodness me, my apologies GG. Different coloured fogging is already possible, and from v0.31 onwards. I had never noticed this before! It works pretty well.

There is a discrepancy between the use of this feature on scalable items and those objects that require pre-drawn scalings (which is partly what this thread is about).

For example: pillars,pits,pads,puddles,grates,floor moss etc -- all these require hand-drawn alternatives for every position. The fogging colour is not applied to theseitems.

This means that the designer would have to manually draw fogged variations for all these items for any level that required them. It's a huge amount of work and would drastically bloat a RTC file when it's not really necessary. It would also mean very careful management on the behalf of the designer when placing correctly "pre-fogged" clones of these items into the correct level.

Is it possible to add fogging to these items too, or somehow bind the fogging to the wallset (and by inference, all other items placed within a level using that wallset)?

[Gambit37]

Fogging uses a 1 pixel square image of any colour and makes it semi-transparent at different levels of opacity depending on distance of object.

Some thoughts:

1) If you specify the bitmap as having transparency, is this combined with the fogging transparency values? So a bitmap with 50% transparency would make the fogging half as pronounced?

2) Would it be possible to specify the levels of transparency applied to items as they are fogged? E.g, extend the definition of the bitmap so that you can say somthing like "Distance 1=10%, Distance 2=15%" etc....

[Gambit37]

Update to the above: (1) -- the extra transparency isn't taken into account in v.034

[George Gilbert]

Yep - this particular bitmap isn't treated as a bitmap (which is why the transparency flag is ignored). Instead the engine just looks at the pixel colour and uses that the shade the other bitmaps.

I'll have a look to see if I can do something more customisable to allow you to change the degree of fogging.

[George Gilbert]

Actually, that's really easy to change. For V0.35, I've now added a new number parameter to the WALL_BK entry in the text file which specifies the percentage fogging.

[Gambit37]

Woohoo, you are too cool. Thanks George.

We'll still have to manually fog [ie, in Photoshop or similar] floor/pillar items though, right?

@Linflas, you'll now be able to easily create your desert levels and customise the amount of fogging... sweet.

[linflas]

yes this is a good enhancement, but as you said above, the biggest problem still there : manual fog under photoshop...

[linflas]

bumping for more feature
could WALL_BK be evolutive, depending on time of "day" ? from black/dark blue at midnight to white/light blue at noon.
a "day" in RTC could last 1 hour in real time for example.

secondly, some nice effect could be added for dawns and twilights : something purpleish from 6am to 7am and red/orange from 7pm to 8pm...