03.04.2010, 23:34, written by Mario Donick

Displaying Field of View -- 1.5.2 versus upcoming 1.5.3 -- Which one do you prefer?

When playing LR: The Book of Stars in graphical mode, something about the Field of View (FOV) always disturbed me. Not the algorithm, I am content with that. I speak of the visual representation itself, and now I found the reasons for my irritation:

1. Although the areas outside the FOV are shown darker than the areas inside the FOV, they seem still too bright to me, regardless of the monitor type and modes I'm using.
2. There is no fade between areas inside FOV and areas outside FOV; it's a hard break between brightness and darkness.

Now I added a quick hack to my current 1.5.3 development version to add the fade mentioned in 2. I also adjusted the brightness of the tiles used for darkening out something.

So please compare a screenshot of the current release 1.5.2 with a screenshot of the dev version 1.5.3 and tell me which one do you prefer? Should I stick with the current approach, or do you like the changes? 

FOV in 1.5.2

View in original size

FOV in 1.5.3

View in original size

What do you think?

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Comments

mingos schrieb am 04.04.2010, 01:13
meaningful fade

I'm a fan of eye candy, so I vote for the new look. But I need to ask this: how meaningful is the fading? Are you less likely to identify monsters? Or maybe you only see monsters, but no items on the ground? Or is it a just-for-fun piece of eye candy?

(No, I'm not against the latter. Just asking.)

Mario Donick schrieb am 04.04.2010, 01:28
not meaningful, just eye candy

The latter -- it is only meant to be a visual improvement, and as this I could achieve it by only 6 new lines of code in about 2 hours of hacking, testing, picture editing.

The relevant code is inside the function that draws one single SDL tile at a given position. Now it simply draws a semitransparent darkening tile (1 resp. 2 times) at the same position, after the actual tile has been drawn.

To give it meaning, I had to extend and probably partly rewrite the entire dungeon display function, which is already complicated enough. This then would also affect the console display mode.

 

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