Stupid *Bleep*ing Transparent Textures!

Well, I'm trying to make a sink. You know, with a faucet and everything. Of course, as we all know a faucet juts out over the sink. And as we all also know, you can't have two things share the same z-coordinate (unless there's been some huge breakthrough that I don't know about). So, the way I decided to get around this was to make a texture where the top half was normal and the bottom half was transparent; that way it could give the illusion of a faucet over the sink. Problem is, it won't work. As I understand, cyan is the color that doom recognizes as transparent. So I made my texture's lower half cyan. But when I load up the map (or 3d mode, since I'm using doom builder), I just get these black and pinkish stripes where the transparency should be. Even if I copy the color directly from one of doom's normal transparent textures (such as a window), it still refuses to work. This is especially odd because I made a copy of one of doom's transparent textures and went through the normal motions of image importing (to make sure I was importing it correctly) and it's transparency effect worked fine. the exact same color it was using for the transparency was the color I was using for my half-transparent texture, so why the heck would it work for one and not the other?!

I'm using paint and image analyzer for the image editing, and XWE for the importing, if it helps.

This is called the tutti frutti bug. It happens for a few different reasons, but it's hard to pinpoint without knowing how you're building this.

Here are the possible reasons:

1. You used a short texture (less than 128 high) on a taller 1s line, or a transparency on a 1s line
2. You used a transparent texture on an Upper or Lower surface.
3. You accidentally set an X offset greater than the width of the texture applied (your editor should account for this).

My question is why you're bothering with a transparent area at all. A quick way to make an overhang like the one you describe is to simply have a really short texture (say 2-4 pixels) applied to a series of 2s lines which form the shape of the faucet and then offset them as necessary.

Didn't know you could do that. I was under the impression that if a texture didn't fit the area it was assigned to that it would "tile" to fill the area. Guess I was wrong.

So, for clarification's sake, I just need to make a texture that is smaller than the area I'm going to use it with? And if the area is, say, 64 pixels high, I need to apply a texture that is less than 64 pixels high?

reaper with no name said:

As I understand, cyan is the color that doom recognizes as transparent.

Cyan is not the colour Doom recognises as transparent. Doom does not recognise any colour as transparent. Doom does not even have cyan in its palette. Doom has a graphics format that allows "no colour" in parts of the image. Cyan is merely a convention used by editing tools to mark areas of more normal file formats that will be transparent when transferred to the doom format. It does not have to be cyan and not all tools use the cyan convention.

Wintex can also use black or magenta IIRC. Magenta is in fact a sort of widespread de facto standard for background colors -- tons of game engines use it for this.

Didn't know you could do that. I was under the impression that if a texture didn't fit the area it was assigned to that it would "tile" to fill the area. Guess I was wrong.

So, for clarification's sake, I just need to make a texture that is smaller than the area I'm going to use it with? And if the area is, say, 64 pixels high, I need to apply a texture that is less than 64 pixels high?

Texture on a double-sided linedef do not tile, so you could make a tiny two-pixel high texture and then apply it to the sides of a tiny rectangle and offset it accordingly. Handy for small details like this, or pipes in industrial maps, not so handy for having huge windows in impressive skyscraper/spaceport maps, in which you need to use a semi-transparent 'block' of 3D floor (well hats what i do anyway)

A lot of the ports I've used have problems with textures shorter than 8 pixels high though. What I do in those instances is make the 2 or 4-pixel texture, but make the actual patch 8 pixels high and color the bottom 6 or 4 pixels cyan. Makes it easier to offset/peg/unpeg too.

Ok, now I've got another problem. I tried the whole "short texture with offsets" thing, and it got me some puzzling and frustrating results.

Here's an image of what the sink looks like in 3d mode:

http://img404.imageshack.us/img404/2693/sinkpicproblemia9.png

I don't know how to take screenshots in-game, so I can't show you what what it looks like, but the area where there isn't a texture has an effect to it during gameplay that looks a lot like HOM (although I don't believe it is; because this one was static without any "flickering").

Maybe I'm just doing this stuff all wrong all need to be walked through it step by step. At this point I'm willing to try just about anything.

http://www.wackyhq.com/wadworld/sink.wad

A quick wad I whipped up which does what you want.. you can take a look at it and see what I did, sometimes thats easier.

Read the Shimmering effect section. That might explain the lack of flickering.

insertwackynamehere said:

http://wwww.wackyhq.com/wadworld/sink.wad

A quick wad I whipped up which does what you want.. you can take a look at it and see what I did, sometimes thats easier.

Link = broken. Either that or it's my computer.

There's 4 w's instead of 3.

Lüt said:

There's 4 w's instead of 3.

dammit :/ thanks lut :)

here it is:
http://www.wackyhq.com/wadworld/sink.wad

Oh, THAT's what I was doing wrong. I didn't think you were supposed to have the overhang be the same height as the "floor". Thanks.

But I don't suppose there's a way to actually put a texture on top of the overhang? A sink faucet who's top you can see through would look pretty silly.

Yes, place a sector inside it whose floor height is the height of the top of hanging structure. Move the lines of this sector as close as possible to the linedefs that make up your sink facet. Make sure this sector does not have any textures assigned to it's sides, so that the flat texture bleeds out until it encounters the floating middle textures of your sink facet.

You might see some gaps around the edges of the inside of the facet, but it's better than nothing. To help remedy this a bit, give the inside of the facet the same texture you used on the outside (remember to offset them like you did on the front sides).

Hmmm...It just gives me the tutti-frutti bug again, so I must be doing something wrong. It appears that I suck at following verbal directions. Anyone got a 10-second WAD utilizing this that I can reverse-engineer like the last one? I'm probably making another stupid mistake like last time.

Check out this WAD, DoomGuy's Pimp Ventures II. Apart from the (perhaps questionable content), the authors used some cool transparency tricks to make a 3D basketball basket + "panel", I thought it might interest you. They also have a "guardrail" transparent texture. The trick they use is, for some of the textures, to make it as tall as possible and pre-aligning it as a patch.

Hmmm...I've looked through it top to bottom, but it doesn't seem like that one has any actual overhangs in it (just illusions of them). Anyone else got any ideas? I'm just about ready to believe that the existence of overhangs with tops and no HOM/tutti-frutti is a myth/conspiracy.