I've been playing around with 3d floors, and have managed to pull off a (in-my-opinion) pretty good looking "floor fog".
You could also call it dust clouds or whatever. I took three screenshots of it with depth fog, without, and with bright sector mode. (other two is dark sector light mode)
It is GL renderer only.
Spoiler: Depth fog on, dark sector lightning mode
Spoiler: Depth fog off, dark sector lightning mode
Spoiler: Depth fog on, bright sector lightning modeMy story:
When I first saw the map GVH08 - The hunting grounds from Ghouls vs Humans, I saw the fog made up of transparent sprites. I thought - Hey, that looks kinda cool, although it looks kind of strange if you look at it from far above (cyborg flying up for example) Or if you look at it from the edge of the foggy area. I figured i should make a test map for better effect, which I tried to make look like a crypt of some sort. Although i was short on proper textures and didn't want to spend much time on the architecture, I drew what I had in mind and made my attempts.
At first I only tried using one layer or 3d floor, with a texture preferably. I chose "ZIMMER8" and it turned out to be a perfect fit. Unfortunately it looked a bit too static so I made another 3Dfloor overlap the existing one, and make the two scroll against eachother. I was simply amazed of how good it turned out to be. Finally I decided to do IT. I made 31 3Dfloors and found a good enough alpha value. I made a quick script to randomize all of the layers' scrolling, and got this.
http://www.speedyshare.com/files/21743923/crypt2.wad (size 42,4 kb)
Includes an ambient sound file from Doom3 IIRC, and a mapinfo lump to change that jumpy D_RUNNIN for best effect
The trick:
Multiple 3D floor effects are drawn with additive translucency, with a low alpha value. This way, the several layers of fog adds up into this effect. For additional detail, you could make the 3d floors scroll the texture in some random way so the fog doesn't look too static.
The effect in the screenshots use 31 layers of 3d floors,
Flags: 64
Type: non-solid
Alpha: 6 (which adds up to 186 if you multiply by 31, since it is additive translucency
Every sector was given depth fog, with each color value being 108.
Software compatible floor fog concept:
Portal tricks. One could make the upper sector's floor clip the player in like water does in hexen, as deep as tall the lower sector is. Give the lower sector a depth fog and voila? Might make a test map later on for this.
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Tell me what you think. Actually, I might not be the first one to make such an effect, let me know about it. Feel free to discuss.
