Large explosions visible around doors
Posted: Thu Aug 10, 2006 4:50 am
Explosions from wizard's eye lightning are large enough that a few red pixels are visible above the top of closed doors.
Just wait until you get deeper - the more powerful fireball explosions go much higher over!
Seriously though, this is something that has been noticed before, but theres very little that can be done without severe performance restrictions (or by changing the explosion graphics to be smaller).
What's happening, as I'm sure you realise, is that the explosion is drawn and then the door is drawn on top of it, but the explosion graphic is larger than the door graphic so the latter doesn't fully cover the former up. From the point of view of the engine (which has just been told to draw two graphics, which it's then done), everything is correct - but I agree from a human interpretation it looks wrong.
Of course, the explosion could be clipped to reduce it's size below that of the door; but if you think about it, that's extremely hard to do. For example, if the door frame wasn't snug to the wall at the edges, but instead free-standing with a small gap to the wall, then you *wouldn't* want to clip the explosion as it genuinely should be displayed around the edges. The difference between the two sets of door frame graphics (one snug to a wall, and one free standing) would be very hard for a computer to work out as it relies on human 3D perception of a 2D image.
To take a less extreme example, consider an explosion against the doors in the DM-II thicket (which are only 3/4 height). Again, whilst as a human it's easy to determine which bits of the explosion should be drawn and which bits shouldn't, it's much harder to do by computer using only 2D information.
Anyway, all that rambling means is that whilst I agree it looks wrong, I don't think I can easily fix it (without adversely affecting performance). As it's only a cosmetic issue (rather than it affecting gameplay in any way), I'm therefore inclined not to fix it.
