Ringman wrote:I have a weird one that's possible with some simple art tricks. Reflective floors! I've actually played around with this at one point. What you do make all the textures in the area a bit shorter at the bottom, like cut off 10 pixels. Then copy the bottom section of the texture (that's left) flip it upside down and place it at the bottom underneath the original. Now use a program like Photoshop to have it fade to the floor color. Do the same for sprites, by moving them up a tad from the floor copying there bottom sections, flipping them, and placing them directly underneath and fading it to the floor color. This gives a very shiny wet floor look.
Indeed this is a cool original idea that might work - I can really see it happening...
Though 10 pixels is ALOT in terms of 64 sprite.
You can combine this with a water that comes up partway by making the floor color higher and cutting off the bottoms of the sprites and walls and adding a little ripple graphic at the bottom, to give an idea of a level partially submerged in water that's reflective!
This one I've actually seen in a mod... was it DHWTC?
AFAIR yes
Loooooved it, really wowed me with originality
A similar idea would be misty floors.
Oh, I love mist in general - and in games in particular.
Instead of cutting off the bottom of the texture and replacing it with a mirror image just take the bottom half and have it fade to a light grey, (color of the floor) and do the same for sprites. Instant low level fog, like you'd get from dry ice.
While this is a cool idea - IMO when we have already working fog implementations via fade-to-bright shading - we can't can "more foggy" than that.
You're idea is good for "classical" wolf3D mods though, that use no shading. If combined with "Hexen-type" "moving sprite clouds" - it can work really well actually.
Lots of other crazy things you can do with this idea, like having walls and sprites fade into blackness at the tops with a black ceiling for a unknowingly high ceiling, or really tall objects you can only see the bottoms of.
You could do knee high grass, deep snow, underwater areas, etc. The Catacomb Trilogy employed these affects a bit.
Lot's of crazy ideas to play with.
Indeed... this opens up a whole bunch of creative options to increases the "mood" of the mod.
Skycrappers, tall forests etc...etc......
Though underwater(or frozen) areas are better done by just strong blue shading - at least for "non-classical look" mods.
The only downside is that you have to have separate sprites and doors for these areas, and those won't look good in any other areas, plus you'd pretty much have to make the entire level like this, unless you employed teleporters, because areas like this don't merge well with areas not employing these effects.
Indeed. Doubles the objnums and complicates the mapping work for mapper.
But this can be easily solved with "smart objects(objnums)/actors" - same objnum that changes the sprite they load off the VSWAP depending if the area is outside, or a "dark/fog" floorcode it's standing on, or if the areas has invisible "dark/fog" object number inserted into it. This way we have the same "barrel" objnums to look foggy on some "dark" or "fog" floorcode - and have the "usual" look on other floorcodes.
This will actually prevent fog and darkness from indoor areas, not to ruin the realism.