Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[WormSlayer]

So, if we are going to have the ability to overlay tiles, would it be possible to overlay weapons on a dwarf?

No way to tell what equipment a dwarf has so we will have the same system as now.

You know.. on the whole dragon thing..
You could in theory draw the wing tile over the dwarf/ground/whatever tile since you are just adding the wing and not reading it directly from DF.

You could also swap the actual dragon tile to have the wings folded when there are walls on either side...

Heck, you could get a flying animation going when the dragon has nothing but open space around him 

I know right? Dragons are going to be awesome!

I'm pretty sure tile drawing will just be iterated through from the top left to bottom right, so wing or dwarf graphic on top would be determined by which side of the dragon he was standing?

Maybe it would be possible to draw the whole screen then do a second pass adding overlays and effects?

[Ironhand]

The way I understand it right now,
when it's on the dwarf's tile, it'll be like
"oh, there's a dragon to my left. Draw a wing over me."

Which seems kinda convoluted to me.
I'd kinda rather draw all the parts of the dragon from the dragon's tile.
But maybe that is harder to do. Or maybe I'm not understanding it correctly.

[WormSlayer]

Yeah we will be drawing the parts based on the dragon body, but if we want to get the draw order to stay consistent we will have to do extra checking otherwise it will change depending on what order the tiles get processed in:

☺D = wing on top of dwarf
D☺ = dwarf on top of wing

But if we limit the multi-tile thing to just dragons at first maybe it wont be too much of a pain.

[Setharnas]

when it's on the dwarf's tile, it'll be like
"oh, there's a dragon to my left. Draw a wing over me."

This sounds like asking for the dreaded combinatoric explosion to be taken to supernova levels... 

But if we limit the multi-tile thing to just dragons at first maybe it wont be too much of a pain.

Maybe it would be helpful if Baughn could implement the neighbor tile lookup as a second pass, laid over the standard drawing and thus only coming into effect after all information on the current draw frame is already collected?

[Baughn]

Well, basically you just want layers, right? Dragon wings should overlay dwarves, not the other way around?

That's easy.

This is OpenGL.


It's a 3D engine.



All you need to do is alter the Z-value of the dragon tile in the vertex shader, putting it "above" the rest of the tileset.

(To clarify, instead of drawing a dragon-wing when processing the dwarf tile, you'd extend the dragon-tile's coordinates to overlay its surroundings. Somewhat literally - wider than ordinary tiles, and also above the other tiles. *Then* draw.)

[Baughn]

Counting it up.. you'd need three tiles for a dragon, assuming you want it to be able to fold its wings separately.

- A center tile for its body
- A tile for folded wing
- A tile for unfolded wing

All the combinations you need in-game can be made from combinations and rotations of those, inside the shaders. So, not that much of a combinatorial explosion at all, really.

[WormSlayer]

All you need to do is alter the Z-value of the dragon tile in the vertex shader, putting it "above" the rest of the tileset.

Now you mention it thats blindingly obvious... even more possibilities now occur to me... O.o

Also I made a flower

[Baughn]

Did I mention you can also specify the Z-value per-pixel in the fragment shader? And that of course all of this supports alpha blending (or any other kind of blending you care to program)?

[Artanis00]

I've never worked with openGL shaders, so if I'm absolutely, completely wrong you can just say so...

Can you link against C/C++ libraries? If that is possible it should be possible to steal the rest of a tile's info with DFHack.

[Baughn]

You're absolutely, horribly wrong.
(Shaders run on the GPU. They have no access to CPU memory, or ability to run dfhack even if they did.)

[Bloogonis]

Pertty Flowers

[Artanis00]

You're absolutely, horribly wrong.
(Shaders run on the GPU. They have no access to CPU memory, or ability to run dfhack even if they did.)

That's what I thought, but the question was intriguing enough to be asked anyhow. Thanks.

[Ironhand]

Excellent!
I'm looking forward to drawing this dragon!

And I'm still trying to decide exactly how I'm going to do so.
The mock-ups we've been discussing so far suggest a top-down view,
but upon mentally visualizing it, it does not seem to fit with the perspective
that I have been utilizing for my dwarves and creatures up until this point.

So I think I may just go with a great big dragon tile, sort of like I said I wanted
to do at the beginning of this whole project, that just extends a little bit from his tile.
And by a little bit, I mean I'm gonna paint, like, a 50 pixel dragon. Mwahahahahaa!  = D

I still might do something with his wings, though. And I'll definitely play around with his tail.

I'm looking forward to making megabeasts now. They are gonna be AWESOME!

[WormSlayer]

Better flowers:

Dont forget you still need to draw several hundred other critters like humies and all the missing dorf castes - You can bang those out tomorrow yeah?

[Deon]

Awesome flowers. They are great now!

I can bang all dwarf castes!