Doom
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File: Transparent.zip (5 KB)
Downloaded 929 times.
License: Other
From: Unspecified

I've been using similar mod since JtRH was released but after the great system that allows replacing only part of the tiles I made an improved version of the transparency mod.

Unzip the zip file into your data/bitmaps directory. Then do the changes described here.

Basically your drod.ini should look something like this:

[Graphics]
General=GeneralTiles
General=transparent
Style1=Style1
Style2=Style2
Style3=Style3

... (other stuff)

If you have some time to spend, this thread contains plenty of other variations that offer the same functionality with improved looks. Newer mods also add transparency for gel!

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[Last edited by Doom at 04-22-2008 06:14 PM]

StuartK
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File: transparent.png (3.5 KB)
Downloaded 374 times.
License: Other
From: Unspecified

That's incredibly useful, but it's something of a shame the dithering used isn't really very attractive.

I went and had an experiment with Alefbets shiny tar art, using alpha channel transparency (since the game uses .png as standard) and discovered something unfortunate - the alpha layer is ignored. I'm guessing this must be a speed optimisation. Now I'm wondering, does the same apply to all ingame art?

I've attached the png since I made it, but of course it won't look any different to 'normal' shiny tar at the moment. Just incase the rendering engine is ever modified...

[Edited by StuartK at Local Time:06-05-2005 at 04:08 AM]

mrimer
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StuartK wrote:
I...discovered something unfortunate - the alpha layer is ignored. I'm guessing this must be a speed optimisation. Now I'm wondering, does the same apply to all ingame art?

Currently, sprite tiles only use (192,192,192) as the transparent color key. It's possible this might be changed someday, but there are no specific plans for this at present. However, some other images take advantage of the alpha channel, like pit sides.

[Edited by mrimer at Local Time:06-05-2005 at 04:30 AM]

____________________________
Gandalf? Yes... That's what they used to call me.
Gandalf the Grey. That was my name.
I am Gandalf the White.
And I come back to you now at the turn of the tide.

AlefBet
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I believe at one time we had enabled transparency for these sprite tiles, but discovered that as a result of some internal handling of SDL's transparent images, it was causing the 192,192,192 color key to shift off of that value so the color key transparency wasn't working anymore. If that were ever to be fixed in SDL, I expect there's a good chance we would switch back to the transparency in PNGs. I know I can think of a few fun things to do with it, if we can use it.

____________________________
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++Adam H. Peterson

larrymurk
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This transparent tar/mud is superb!

I highly recommend it to everyone and hope it will become a standard feature at some point.

AlefBet
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File: transparent.tgz (9.2 KB)
Downloaded 210 times.
License: Other
From: Unspecified

Here's another take on transparent tar. Let me know what you think.

____________________________
I was charged with conspiracy to commit jay-walking, and accessory to changing lanes without signaling after the fact .

++Adam H. Peterson

AlefBet
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File: tarmod.png (8.8 KB)
Downloaded 356 times.
License: Other
From: Unspecified

Actually, this image is a bit more polished.

____________________________
I was charged with conspiracy to commit jay-walking, and accessory to changing lanes without signaling after the fact .

++Adam H. Peterson

AlefBet
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File: tarmod.png (10.4 KB)
Downloaded 342 times.
License: Other
From: Unspecified

And this one is a bit nicer in the editor.

____________________________
I was charged with conspiracy to commit jay-walking, and accessory to changing lanes without signaling after the fact .

++Adam H. Peterson

StuartK
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Pretty good, but IMO needs to be a bit denser, I'd say denser than Dooms original art - it just needs to be enough to be able to provide a hint and no more. The more see-through, the stranger tar babies and mothers look in comparison.


It might be cool to have tar patterns in the future, variable thickness - high surface tension should after all should mean it doesn't smooth out so well in the middle.

And with transparency we could have hints of stuff floating in the tar, old boots, ex-delvers and so on

[Edited by StuartK at Local Time:06-07-2005 at 12:05 PM]

eytanz
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For those who prefer their tar more solid, but still informative, I present:

Swiss tar/mud.

It's really ugly at the moment, but I'm sure someone can improve it if there's interest.

Based on Adam's tileset.

(note - use in conjunction with Doom's .tim file, which you need to rename swisstar.tim)

[Edited by eytanz at Local Time:06-07-2005 at 12:54 PM]

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eytanz
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Here's a more refined version of the swiss tar/mud. Less, better looking holes that are properly aligned with each other. It's still pretty ugly, but not nearly as bad as the last version.

Note - inner corners are buggy. I couldn't figure out how to do them right, so I have two versions - tar and mud act differently. Both wrong, but differently. If anyone figures out how to fix this, please go ahead and post your own version.

[Edited by eytanz at Local Time:06-07-2005 at 03:25 PM]

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AlefBet
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File: tarmod.png (10.7 KB)
Downloaded 320 times.
License: Other
From: Unspecified

Here's a version that has more density to it.

____________________________
I was charged with conspiracy to commit jay-walking, and accessory to changing lanes without signaling after the fact .

++Adam H. Peterson

eytanz
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Note - I moved the swiss tar/mud to their own thread.

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StuartK
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File: tar - dithered darker.png (9.9 KB)
Downloaded 401 times.
License: Other
From: Unspecified

AlefBet wrote:
Here's a version that has more density to it.

And here's a revision of that with the highlight removed, and some attempt at making the dithering match between the individual tile edges, without there being unsightly blocks of colour or transparency. It's not perfect - I went through about 20 revisions before I got bored with the process (quitting and restarting the game for each test)

It might be nice to be able to adjust graphics, and have some kind of in-game option to reload the new ones (as happened in DROD:AE when moving from the menu to the game and back) so they can be tested more easily.

---

[Last edited by StuartK at 06-17-2005 05:15 AM : Fixed transparency issues with attached file]

mrimer
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StuartK wrote:
It might be nice to be able to adjust graphics, and have some kind of in-game option to reload the new ones (as happened in DROD:AE when moving from the menu to the game and back) so they can be tested more easily.

Barring that, changing the room's style in the level editor should reload the General tiles set.

[Edited by mrimer at Local Time:06-08-2005 at 01:56 PM]

____________________________
Gandalf? Yes... That's what they used to call me.
Gandalf the Grey. That was my name.
I am Gandalf the White.
And I come back to you now at the turn of the tide.

StuartK
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mrimer wrote:
Barring that, changing the room's style in the level editor should reload the General tiles set.

It reloads the style tilesets, but not the general tileset. Is that a bug?

mrimer
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StuartK wrote:
It reloads the style tilesets, but not the general tileset. Is that a bug?

Oh, hmm....my mistake. I guess that's more of an optimization.

____________________________
Gandalf? Yes... That's what they used to call me.
Gandalf the Grey. That was my name.
I am Gandalf the White.
And I come back to you now at the turn of the tide.

Banjooie
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Doom, I love you. Seriously. o_o This is perfect.

Doom
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StuartK's latest attachment looks nice but it doesn't work completely. Did anyone else notice that there are some tiles in-game that won't be transparent. About half of the tar-edges tiles, to be precise.

---

[Last edited by Doom at 06-17-2005 05:15 AM]

eytanz
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That's probably because the transparency won't work unless at least one corner pixel is transparent.

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StuartK
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Arg. Making a real meal of this...

Fixed & reattached above

http://www.drod.net/forum/getattachment.php?id=11118

---

[Last edited by StuartK at 06-17-2005 05:15 AM]

StuartK
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File: tar - ordered dither 3.png (4.9 KB)
Downloaded 304 times.
License: Other
From: Unspecified

Here's another one. An ordered dither similar in style to Dooms original, but less transparent again. I left the shine in Alefbets original art intact as it's more visible this time.

When scaled, this one looks wierd on the restore/demo screens, and in the editor. Also, rather than disrupt the patterns neatness, and in order to make the art transparent, I chose to removed the edges, which means there is now a small gap around the outside of any tar.

---

[Last edited by StuartK at 06-17-2005 05:41 AM]

larrymurk
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I recommend you follow the entire instructions listed at the top of the thread. It worked for me and it is well worth the effort. Good luck.

Rabscuttle
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What's the problem?

Put the graphics file and the .tim file in the Data/Bitmaps directory.

Open drod.ini in the Data directory and edit the bit under [Graphics] so it looks like what's in the top post. Specifically, the "General=transparent" line.

I think it's case-sensitive, so you need to make sure that the files are exactly the same.

Mouse
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I've tried downloading the BMP in the first message of this thread but have a small problem.

Problem is that with the transparent tar in place I have no sound.
I'm running JtRH Demo 2.0.10

Should this be on the bug board or here?

---

[Last edited by Mouse at 11-11-2005 02:56 AM : added JtRH version]

mrimer
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Mouse wrote:
I've tried downloading the BMP in the first message of this thread but have a small problem.

Problem is that with the transparent tar in place I have no sound.
I'm running JtRH Demo 2.0.10

My first impression is that this is not a bug, but that you are incorrectly modifying your drod.ini. If sound doesn't work, then there should be a drod.err file in JtRH's subdirectory. Would you post it please?

____________________________
Gandalf? Yes... That's what they used to call me.
Gandalf the Grey. That was my name.
I am Gandalf the White.
And I come back to you now at the turn of the tide.

Chaco
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I've just tried to install the transparent tar/mud. I've put the files in the bitmaps directory, added the line in drod.ini, and it didn't work.

Is this because I haven't registered JtRH?

____________________________
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Mouse
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Mrimer:
-It only happened the very first time I ran JtRH after changing the DROD.INI
-There were no messages in the .err file with that time and date.

Maybe it was a fluke?

mrimer wrote:

Mouse wrote:
I've tried downloading the BMP in the first message of this thread but have a small problem.

Problem is that with the transparent tar in place I have no sound.
I'm running JtRH Demo 2.0.10

My first impression is that this is not a bug, but that you are incorrectly modifying your drod.ini. If sound doesn't work, then there should be a drod.err file in JtRH's subdirectory. Would you post it please?

jbluestein
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Does the transparent tar and mud mod work on Linux? I have it working on my Windows machine, but not my Linux machine. (And unfortunately, I've hit a room that really wants transparent tar, deep into a hold that I've been playing on a Linux box.)

I put in all the bits, but it's as if I've done nothing at all -- same old opaque tar.

(Using 2.0.15.1)

One thing I noticed was that the files I downloaded had different capitalization: Transparent.bmp and transparent.tim. So one of the things I tried was lowercaseing Transparent.bmp and making sure that the line in drod.ini was lowercase also.

I have also tried modifying drod.ini in drod-kdd/Data and .caravel/drod-kdd-2_0

Hmmm...interestingly enough, I note that the drod.ini in .caravel/drod-kdd-2_0 gets rewritten whenever I start DROD, and the General=transparent line is getting removed.

Any ideas?

Josh

[EDIT: Never mind...I figured it out. User error.]

____________________________
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[Last edited by jbluestein at 03-08-2007 03:31 PM]

AlefBet
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jbluestein wrote:
Does the transparent tar and mud mod work on Linux? I have it working on my Windows machine, but not my Linux machine. (And unfortunately, I've hit a room that really wants transparent tar, deep into a hold that I've been playing on a Linux box.)

Yes, it does. In fact, I made my tar mod on Linux.

One thing I noticed was that the files I downloaded had different capitalization: Transparent.bmp and transparent.tim. So one of the things I tried was lowercaseing Transparent.bmp and making sure that the line in drod.ini was lowercase also.

That is significant. It probably would not work with a case problem like that. (Most file systems used under Linux are case sensitive.)

Hmmm...interestingly enough, I note that the drod.ini in .caravel/drod-kdd-2_0 gets rewritten whenever I start DROD, and the General=transparent line is getting removed.

Yes the .ini file is rewritten whenever you run DROD. The fact that the line is removed suggests that it's not understanding your modification for some reason. I suggest checking little things....

[EDIT: Never mind...I figured it out. User error.]

Oh, well. Looks like this response is a day late and a dollar short. I guess I'll post it anyway. Maybe someone else will find it useful.

____________________________
I was charged with conspiracy to commit jay-walking, and accessory to changing lanes without signaling after the fact .

++Adam H. Peterson