RPGDX > Forums > Design and programming > Fun little effects.

RuneLancer · Mage Joined: 17 Jun 2005 Posts: 441

We've all done this. Written some code, had a suddent inspiration, and tweaked bits of it to do something you know you won't use but still wanted to see in action. Well, who knows, maybe your little ventures into experimentation land will be of use to someone, so share 'em here.

While working on a system to make object edges have outlines for Endless Saga, I came up with a cool effect. Essentially, I rendered my textured scene, then wanted to render a wireframe version over it. I enabled blending, set the color to have an alpha channel of 0.5f, disabled textures, and... disabled depth testing. What came out of it was a very interesting mesh overlaid over the scene, making things look transluscent even though they were solid. A very interesting illusion.

Another thing I've experimented with and kept is the inclusion of a pixel-wide border around my sprites. The sprite itself has a black border, but then I added a black border to that border and made it 25% transluscent. The effect was a slight "aura" around the character that made the sprite blend in with the background smoothly instead of standing out like someone copy-pasted it from MSPaint into the scene. Very nice effect I'm keeping in the game.
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DeveloperX · Posted: Sun Apr 08, 2007 1:46 am Post subject:

Don't know if you still have this, but if you do, I would really like to see a screenshot of the effect, and maybe you could share a little code to show how you did it.
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Terry · Posted: Mon Apr 09, 2007 11:06 pm Post subject:

Heh, wonder what happened to RuneLancer? I saw him causing a bit of drama over on the Cave Story mod forums, but nothing since. Pity, too. Endless Saga looked like it might be a pretty decent game.
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Terry · Posted: Mon Apr 09, 2007 11:09 pm Post subject:

Ewww......

Ninkazu · Posted: Tue Apr 10, 2007 12:52 am Post subject:

Yay, James' and my domain was popular enough to get parked by assholes!

DeveloperX · Posted: Tue Apr 10, 2007 6:11 am Post subject:

Ninkazu · Posted: Tue Apr 10, 2007 2:06 pm Post subject:

James was paying for the domain and hosting after the first year or so I paid. Since he's been in the NAVY for three years now, he hasn't had time to put into Venosoft, the group was becoming less organized, and we just decided to disband. The site died shorted after, but I still get mail as "Co-founder of Venosoft" for free subscriptions to Game Developer Magazine, which is pretty cool, heh.

DeveloperX · Posted: Wed Apr 11, 2007 4:04 am Post subject: