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Submitted by iryan on Sat, 2016-08-20 01:18

Araknuum wrote:
brkopac wrote:
Quote:
Is being Dead in Multiplayer, as a ghost, a game mechanic that can be used to complete quests or puzzles?
Depends what game mechanics you want to do while the actor is dead.
I'd like to have doors/switches/chests/NPC's that only activate for ghosts, I think this is the only possible use. Monsters, spells, items, all that being available to a ghost is probably more than I'd need anyway.

Depends if there's a global state name for ghosts that the game can recognised for doors/switches/chests & npcs. Certainly it can recognize ghosts for activating respawning mechanisms like the necromancer.

Araknuum wrote:

brkopac wrote:
Quote:
Is it possible to put a globe around a map that displays sky and distant landscape?
Elaborate?
This is tricky, I was thinking about how the "globe of fog" works in DS to only show you what has been rendered in a sphere around your character. Could this fog be replaced by a sphere that shows a background image, or a sky? This idea is actually not well thought out, but I wanted to project the surrounding terrain onto a sphere surrounding the character and the rendered terrain to simulate distance... Just describing the lay term version makes me think it isn't possible in DS.

Yes this is not only possible but implemented in the DS1 Legendary Mod for certain areas, mostly NIS sequences though the final dungeon area in Kingdom of Ehb uses it for the battle against Gom.

You activate it by specifying a skybox in a mood. GPG also activated it for NIS sequences by a gizmo in the region itself but I had limited success using that approach.

The main drawback is that it centers on the player and the boundary of the skybox is whatever frustrum width is used in the mood. In most areas this creates weird popups of scenery (cliffs, trees, houses, etc.) as the mood reaches them as the fog settings are suspended when a skybox is active. Very disconcerting when you are moving around the game but not so much when used in a NIS sequence where the player is anchored to the ground and can't move until the NIS sequence has finished, whereby the original mood of the region is restored, fog and all.

However if used in a very small region, like the arena for the final battle against Gom, it could be very effective. If you made quite small regions surrounded by barriers like walls, cliffs, impenetrable forests, etc., which were smaller than the frustrum width set for the mood with the skybox, then I imagine it would look quite fabulous. This is something I'm planning to investigate one day in making a small map with such true outdoor regions.

Other maps, mainly FPS games, use a sphere covering the entire region in order to generate a skybox. No matter where you move around the region the skybox would look realistic.

Araknuum wrote:

brkopac wrote:
Quote:
And can today's hardware and DS's software now dispense with The Fog in open areas
From a hardware perspective they absolute could. From a software perspective probably not. None of the current implementation would take advantage of modern GPU features. I don't believe you'd see very fluid loading - it would look very blocky and the world would come in chunks.
Setting the fog way out, and view distance low, you can see the world load with the camera mod I'm using. It's fast enough, but there is a definite and jagged edge that loads node by node.

I don't think it's essential to get rid of the fog, it's just important to create moods and lighting with an eye for immersion, believability.


The main purpose of the fog is to cover up the edges of the world. Plus the default camera angle restricts you to a 32 degree angle at best so to help hide the fact that fog is being employed in the first place. However with camera mods being so popular, the restricted viewing angle can be easily overcome. You can see more of the world but also can see things that the developers wanted to hide from you, such as pieces of the world popping into view and the infamous edge of the world (where map nodes weren't placed because they never expected you to ever be able to see them through all the fog).

So generally a compromise is the best solution, a relaxation of the camera angles but only a moderate increase in viewing distances. Try using the maximum settings of Elys AllSaves Launcher to demonstrate the point.

Again creating small outdoor regions (smaller than the frustrum being employed in the moods) could allow a mapper to overcome these limitations. Incidentally these limitations don't apply as much to indoor regions as black fog is used for those areas and few indoor areas are big enough to trouble the frustrum (except possibly that huge area in Wesrin Cross).
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