Merge skyplanes with different light levels

Another rendering request from me.

Normally, sectors with a sky ceiling lower than the surrounding sectors will sort of override everything behind it. While it'd be a good idea to keep this behavior for compatibility with maps that may exploit this, it's generally annoying when making maps.

ZDoom has alternate behavior, where it will let you see through it instead.

EDIT: Different thread title to better reflect the issue.

EDIT: My bad, thought this was for ZDoom :P

Sodaholic said:

ZDoom has alternate behavior, where it will let you see through it instead.

It does?


Doom 64 certainly does, however (this effect is used to create pseudo 3D effects, including one right at the start of Staging Area).

Gez said:

It does? Doom 64 certainly does, however (this effect is used to create pseudo 3D effects, including one right at the start of Staging Area).

Yes, ZDoom handles sky sectors slightly differently than other software renderers. Doom 64's acts differently and is more powerful.

ZDoom sort of "trims" the sky area to the lowest possible size, so if you tried something like Staging Area's intro, you'd still end up seeing a column of sky. It's just that you can see past the column just outside of the area necessary to display the floating bits, rather than being blocked by the entirety of the sky sector.

Try something like Staging Area in another port, and your view of the rest of the level will be even more obscured by the sky.

I'll take some screenshots soon to visually demonstrate what I'm talking about in case my explanation isn't clear.

Sodaholic said:

Normally, sectors with a sky ceiling lower than the surrounding sectors will sort of override everything behind it.

Not always. Sometimes the sky sectors will be merged into one visplane, and they'll work as one high sky that won't override anything. Different light levels will keep them as different visplanes, and a low sky ceiling may obstruct the view.

Perhaps ZDoom modifies the sky rendering to merge sky planes no matter what.

Da Werecat is right on the nose. ZDoom has a very permissive sky-visplane-merge scheme, while vanilla (and EE, by extension) won't merge skyplanes with different light levels, leading to the behavior described.

Frankly, I'd love to see an option for this in EE since that'd simplify a few areas in Hacx 2.0.