Lost Souls: Translucent, why?

[Gez]

Looking back on Engoo, maybe I should have done that as there's been feedback of "whats the point, this changes nothing" before, since I intended to default it to the vanillaest state I could, making all the crufty "pretty" graphics doodads strictly opt-in (and tried to make it easier to switch these on and off with built-in presets)

Make the default setting something where it displays the Wolfenstein 3D "Demo" box on the top and it switches preset every five seconds with a message "now using <whatever> preset!"

[Rachael]

I don't think we need more than a simple flag here. There is no other fallback than rendering it opaque.

Is that true for Heretic, as well? That is why I proposed the extra stuff. Heretic had, as far as I remember, 3 levels of opaqueness, 2 of which were created by alternating the TRANTABL (?) lookup.

[Graf Zahl]

All things that were translucent in Heretic by default still use the exact same settings. It was only the opaque projectiles that got additive render style attached to them.
Same for Hexen and Strife. The only exception is that originally the IronLich's shots were non-bright but that looked like crap in maps where it was used in dark areas.

[Chris]

From what my memory tells me, Lost Souls were made translucent because a large part of their sprite is fire. Translucency was a new feature to the engine for Doom to use, having been brought in with Heretic/Hexen support, it was added to enemy fireballs, and there was debate about whether it should apply to Lost Souls as well. So an option was made to satisfy both camps. This was in the days before additive blending (let alone per-pixel alpha) was a possibility.

[leileilol]

Another issue with the "fire=additive" logic is neglecting the smoke element of flames that can play a deal with the opaqueness. Doom's explosions also convey smoke.

[KJV]

Well, the original palette makes no deliberate provision for translucency, so it's only natural for these sprites not to look their best when rendered this way, and even then I'm perfectly ok with it, though I lean towards opaque.

I ran an experiment years ago and managed to get a decent looking translucency effect by flashing the sprites for only half the time they're supposed to remain on screen (using dehacked); I wonder what it would have been like to have that as a feature in ZDoom, had it been at all practical.

[Caligari87]

Would be pretty easy to whip up an equivalent in ZScript. Just toggle the actor's renderstyle between "None" and "Normal" every Tick().

[Rachael]

Let's not and say we did?

For starters you can guarantee that on 60Hz monitors the flashing will be highly inconsistent - going one frame to the next will take different refresh time lengths (sometimes 1 frame, sometimes 2).

Secondly, and especially with Windows 10 and Optimus-enabled laptops, there may be sync issues anyhow, causing one half of the screen to show a visible lost soul and the other half not.

Thirdly - I don't consider myself epilepsy-prone but that sort of thing seems to be really seizure-inducing.

(If you want to do that on your own, go for it - but I think that would be treading dangerously close to terrywad territory if it were ever made public)

[Arctangent]

I was kinda confused by the how it would be that big of an epileptic threat, but then I remembered "None" and "Normal" weren't "Normal" and "Translucent".

[Caligari87]

I have no intention of making serious use of such an abomination I was merely pointing out how such a poor-mans "transparency hack" may be achieved if anyone were curious to see how it looks.

[KJV]

Looking back it used to work mighty well for Amiga demos, but we're talking very tight code running on top of much simpler hardware.

My guess is that it could be made to look ok if you could get it all to sync properly on the right system, which may not be as easy as one would make it seem

Definitely not seizure-inducing, but then again, my brain's on the slow side so I don't even notice flicker at 48hz.

Thanks for the hint, though.

[Graf Zahl]

Looking back it used to work mighty well for Amiga demos,

That was on very different displays. These effects were ok on old CRT monitors and TVs that were made for low refresh rates but look like crap on modern displays.