BOOM translucent flats trick; help?

You know the BOOM translucent flats trick, whereby 260-type linedefs are aligned into the ceiling or floor; did anybody actually find a creative way to make it look like there's. say, a "floor" at the bottom of the linedef - you see, I'm kind of stuck with my use of them; I can make some VERY FINE looking areas with the effect, but the use of mouselook (Or any other kind of vertical "looking") destroys the illusion completely.

What can I do, except for the naive notion that people won't use mouselook if I state that a .wad isn't designed for it? :p

You can't do anything. This effect is just a rendering bug and as such has very limited use. And don't forget that anyone using an OpenGL port won't see anything of it.

Jayextee-there are no translucent flats in Boom, but You CAN FAKE THEM. Place some linedefs near the walls of Your room. Then set them a texture and lower unpegged, plus they must be translucent linedefs.
Now sunk them into the floor, by giving them a negative Y offset equal to the height of the textures. Try it.

I think that's what he did - judging from his description!

Create a line 1 pixel in front of the type 260 linedef, make that type 260 as well and offset the texture by an additional 128 (or whatever) units. Repeat as many times as neccessary :).

Hmmm... yeah, but I wanted the illusion of a floor. I have an idea, though, but I've no idea how well it'll work, so I won't say anything till I test it (Or maybe even leave it till the release of whichever wad I put it in, muahahahahaaaaah!).

And I _know_ it's a rendering "bug"*, but it looks really good, and IMO can really step up the appearance of BOOM wads designed for shitty older low-spec computers, such as my own creaky P200, which is why I'm adopting the effect.

[*; As are all the fakes, really -- nobody ever _used_ to comlpain... ]

It also depends heavily on your gamma settings, monitor and on the customisable translucency percentage setting in order to look good.

Yeah, as well as the light level in the sectors affacted. I did a test to see if I could fake a metal grille that player would "walk" on, with some edited TEKGREN# textures that faded to black at the bottom, and the effect is quite nice in small doses, but onlt really at light levels lower than 144 -- otherwise it shows up too much where the translucent linedefs aren't visible.

Rest assured, I'll be playing with this quite a bit, until I can find a *really* good-looking way to implement the effect -- the metal grille, as I've stated, only looks good in limited doses, although I may actually work a "steel mill" type map around the effect; the fact that it requires darkness to look anywhere near convincing would make for some *great* contrast with bright lava in places.

However, I have an idea; Where the 260-linedefs stop "bleeding" into the floor/ceiling (Ceiling in this example...), the flat generally appears a lot brighter, so I thought, if you used an animated flat (Although it would require a lot of frames) with a *subtle* scrolling cloud over it (So it wouldn't really be noticable where the linedefs bleed), could you make a convincing enough sky window?

Just a thought, and I doubt it, but won't rule out the possibility; I have not the patience nor resources to test it though, else I would.

This is the first I have ever heard of such a trick, and I would actually like to learn it. Could someone provide an example wad, or give a better, less confusing explination of how to do it?

Phobos:Anomaly Reborn uses it in E1M6.

But this trick only works for the software renderer. OpenGL ports can not emulate it properly. You should keep that in mind when creating your level. Furthermore some people don't think this is a cool effect because they find it quite irritating.

MasterOFDeath said:

This is the first I have ever heard of such a trick, and I would actually like to learn it. Could someone provide an example wad, or give a better, less confusing explination of how to do it?

In boom, or any non-gl port that allows translucent textures, create a sector with a flat such as F_WATER (although I find the brown sludgy flat looks best. Cant remember its name though). Anyway, make a line in that sector with any middle texture you like, and make the line translucent (check your port's documentation on how to do that). Finally, change the texture's Y offset so that it sticks into the floor.

Given the right flat/texture combination, the right translucency setting, and the right lighting, you can create the appearance of translucent water by placing this line very close to a nearby wall. Unfortunately, mouselook ruins the effect.