by Zippy » Mon Dec 06, 2010 5:38 pm
koverhbarc wrote:I said, to allow this feature (only) for upper parts as well as lower and middle. I can't see why that should be hard.
I think this would be why:
koverhbarc wrote:I barely know how to program, and have no idea about the Doom source code.
I can understand why, in that position, you might say, "This
might be a bug," or, "Well
maybe this wouldn't be to difficult to do," but the real case here just isn't so simple. Now, I'm not terribly up to snuff on the exact workings of the renderer, having only familiarized myself with the principles behind it and the general function of vanilla Doom's, so I might not be on the best ground to speak about certain renderer "enhancements" from ZDoom either. But Doom's renderer was built for the very specific purpose of getting a lot of speed for the low power of 1993 machines, and in doing so didn't quite give it the expandability some would hope for. So Graf's use of the word
hack is quite consciously chosen. It's not really a solution to add new powers to the engine, it's a
trick to take advantage of the engine's design to get a certain visual quirk to work. It's inherently limited. I think with Transfer_Heights it functions, in part, by basically
lying to the renderer about the actual heights of the sectors, which should tell you something about how the feature itself had to be designed.
[quote="koverhbarc"]I said, to allow this feature (only) for upper parts as well as lower and middle. I can't see why that should be hard.[/quote]I think this would be why:[quote="koverhbarc"]I barely know how to program, and have no idea about the Doom source code.[/quote]
I can understand why, in that position, you might say, "This [u]might[/u] be a bug," or, "Well [u]maybe[/u] this wouldn't be to difficult to do," but the real case here just isn't so simple. Now, I'm not terribly up to snuff on the exact workings of the renderer, having only familiarized myself with the principles behind it and the general function of vanilla Doom's, so I might not be on the best ground to speak about certain renderer "enhancements" from ZDoom either. But Doom's renderer was built for the very specific purpose of getting a lot of speed for the low power of 1993 machines, and in doing so didn't quite give it the expandability some would hope for. So Graf's use of the word [i]hack[/i] is quite consciously chosen. It's not really a solution to add new powers to the engine, it's a [i]trick to take advantage of the engine's design[/i] to get a certain visual quirk to work. It's inherently limited. I think with Transfer_Heights it functions, in part, by basically [i]lying[/i] to the renderer about the actual heights of the sectors, which should tell you something about how the feature itself had to be designed.