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[Harmonica]

I like the hatches, and I like the shape/size of the stairs but I think they need to be a bit dirtier ala the ones in the set already. Those ones look a bit too 'clean.

[ginsweater]

The only reason I'm hesitant to say "Hell yeah keep working on it!" is that it may not play nice with whatever Baughn is doing?

Yeah, I assume I'll need to reintegrate with whatever shader infrastructure Baughn is doing if I pass this code on to him - I don't know how far along he is on that stuff.

It's a fullscreen effect, though, so it should be mostly independent from any changes to the tile rendering. Next step would probably be keying off per-tile height maps instead of the current stupid hack (tiles 176, 177, and 178 are hardcoded to cast shadows.) But that's more likely to conflict with any changes to tile loading, so I haven't done anything like that.

[McBeer]

What do you guys think? Is this at all worth pursuing?

Excellent, if you could add netcf gui for shader edit/change(something like MGE for Morrowind, if i remember right) when idea consolidates.
---
How i see it now:
You are very near to adding visual candy like torch light ambient areas, if only (1 of)shader(s) would work for exact(set) tile on given world area...omg.
Extraploating idea - you are close to make night/day OUTSIDE possible(if you could hook time lapse in some way + above about light sources), are you aware of that?

[Maldevious]

The only issue with day/night outside I could see is that, well the days and nights would literally be seconds each. It'd be like those seizure-causing Pokemon cartoons.

[Baughn]

Sounds like a cute effect. What's a seizure or two between friends?

And I'll have the "standard" shader up and working tomorrow, once I sort out the texture arrays, so you can see how it's all supposed to work. I'll just paste the code here, it's not all that many lines.

(Feel free to suggest improvements, too. I'm not all that good with shaders yet.)

[McBeer]

The only issue with day/night outside I could see is that, well the days and nights would literally be seconds each. It'd be like those seizure-causing Pokemon cartoons.

Not really.
There are methods for make real DATE and just night/day cycle independent(and it would be only way, thus tolerable, if set properly).
I would like to tell you how i see it in my mind:
if it's night, dwarves outside have visibility radius determined by shader(lets name it torchshader..), which trigger is determined by [light][outside] together + day/night cycle clock, so inside is still bright.
Imagine winter night and walk for fish.
Adittionaly, by adding object(workshop) "torch" being hooked to "torcheffect" we could make ...exactly what torch is made for(hheh).

I am just dreaming about far future, maybe impossible future, but i am finding fun in thinking about that.

One more thing - i just realized about possibilities, if such shader effects could be hooked to position of EVENT(i.e small flash over fight tiles, etc etc).
Tell me, is it possible to monitor/capture events data in some way?
i mean - getting output what is happening + coords + details?

[Baughn]

Well, there's always the "read gamelog.txt" option...

Hmm.

[McBeer]

Well, there's always the "read gamelog.txt" option...

Hmm.

...ok, so can i log everything what is happening on map, literally?
any switches for changing logging levels?
i am just not familiar, but it interests me suddenly.

[Baughn]

Sorry. What you see in that file is what we get.

I could parse it before writing strings out (the gamelog-writing function is in libgraphics), which at least cuts out the filesystem. I'd want to check with Toady first, though.

[WormSlayer]

Since light and the absence thereof have no actual effect in-game we could have an arbitrary day/night cycle that just looks nice?

Assuming we can figure out some way to tell which tiles should be lit up... But we could do things like put little torches on smoothed walls every few tiles? (Like DK )

Also more than walls casting shadows, I wanted to do this:

Well, there's always the "read gamelog.txt" option...

Hmm.

So we could check for events that happened since the last frame was rendered?

[Harmonica]

Assuming we can figure out some way to tell which tiles should be lit up... But we could do things like put little torches on smoothed walls every few tiles? (Like DK )

Also more than walls casting shadows, I wanted to do this:

My DK loving self salutes you.

[WormSlayer]

Depending on how close DF mechanics would let you get, a DK mod could be ultimate win?

*slap*slap*slap* work faster imps!

[Harmonica]

I would settle for Good Old Games doing up DK so it actually ran on modern PCs

I think though that DF has to be heavily inspired by it (never checked what Toady says his inspirations are), and it does a fair job of standing up to some of the mechanics (like the AI, which is arguably the most impressive aspect of DF - the so-called 'imp logic' in DK would hold up to modern standards of AI), and obviously in terms of dungeon crafting its miles more advanced. The things it's not quite up there with are probably the combat, until we get proper seiges and stuff - even though DK was never a masterful game when it came to the fighty bits (largely zerg rush tactics), it was incredibly satisfying.

[WormSlayer]

It's possible to get DK2 working on quite a lot of systems. Sadly it hates my shiny new main, but it runs fine on other win7 boxes that arnt quite so pimped.

On newer video cards the trick is to disable hardware rendering and play it in software mode - It looks almost the same.

[Harmonica]

Can't be doing with DK2, never liked it. It wasn't 'official' Bullfrog, all the talent had left. It lost all the charm of the original and with the newer 3D graphics ended up looking much uglier somehow.

DK is the only one for me, and it's a trial to run it - badly - on XP, and impossible on later OSs. It basically only runs perfectly on Win95, even Win98 doesn't handle it properly.