Make the sky visible

So, the sky used to be clear back when knights could actually bounce up into it. Ever since that was changed, the sky has been pitch black. However, projectiles still get to go into the sky - such as arrows and ballista bolts. It is intensely annoying to get killed in one hit by something you couldn't even see coming. There needs to be some other way to show the map border if projectiles can still go past it, such as the red dotted line that was in past builds. This seems like it would be an easy fix, considering it was the way things were in past builds. Alternatively, make it so arrows and ballista bolts cannot pass the border either.

#MakeTheSkyClearAgain

 

So will this mean the player will be able to go past this line or will their vertical speed be stopped once they reach it (if they bomb jump)? If they can go past, skilled players would use double or triple bomb jumps to get over any wall since you wouldn't be able to build past a certain point. I'm not saying this isn't a current issue but it's more difficult since you get stopped at the border.

If you're on the top of your tower you would want to slightly lob your arrows to gain distance so not allowing arrows/ballista bolts to pass the border would be annoying.

 

Yeah, just making the sky visible and doing nothing else is pretty much the best way to fix it.

 

eeeeeh. I'll consider making it less opaque. I agree that it looks like arse but I also think seeing the map bounds is pretty important. I've tossed up widening the fade a few times though, tbh. The one-tile "and now its black" definitely looks janky.

 

For me, it's less about the look and more about the explosive bomb bolts emerging suddenly from the darkness. Wasn't there some kind of dotted red line business a while back, or am I remembering that wrong? I think maybe it was only there when you ran into it or tried to build past it - if you just made it always appear, that seems like it would be fine to me

 

I dont think there was ever some dotted red line - there's a semitransparent red zone in the middle of the map at the start of the game, but that hasn't changed for a while? As said I'd be happy to have the sky "black zone" be semitransparent (I might just make the colours totally configurable and do it in kag.as) so that it was properly delineated but you could still see hell about to rain down.

 

Oh, that sounds great too!

 

Next build:

Still looks janky but I don't have more time to kill on it today I'm afraid :)

 

Then what would be the point of the border if you can go past it? If it is only there to stop you from building past a point I don't think it would be needed.

Does this mean it is possible to make other textures transparent or is this transparency value hard-coded? I've always wanted to make bushes slightly transparent in order to see hidden mines but transparent textures don't work. I feel like I'm just dumb and don't understand how transparent textures work in games.

 

Sidenote: the semitransparent sky area is ONLY used for maps that dont have solid tiles in their top layer. For tiles that do, the old, totally black sky is used, which prevents the appearance of weird "hanging" terrain.

None of this is hardcoded and the interested parties can check out KAG.as for the logic next build.

@NeoTheOne players still collide with the edges as usual, to prevent "unstoppably" bomb jumping over structures and the like. Making ballista bolts and arrows collide with the top caused desync issues, so we disabled it.

@eps0003 Basically, the general blended case requires sorting instead of z-buffering, which is slow. It'd be doable with a less ancient/terrible rendering system than the one we have in KAG, for KAG sized workloads, but with what we have, sorting everything is a cost we're not willing to take (that'd be more burden on the CPU)

The reason this works for the borders, is that they are guaranteed to be rendered after everything else on the playing field. They are, in effect, already "sorted".

It's the kind of thing that "should" be simple but isn't.

I'd suggest you go read up on alpha blending vs testing in games if you want more info, as well as depth buffering and how it allows rendering geometry in arbitrary order. I started writing something but even a simple overview requires either a lot of prior knowledge, or a "simple overview" of that prior knowledge. You kind of have to understand how a lot of the graphics pipelines works to really grok why this is such a sticking point.

 

It would still be nice to see a transparent border on the sides but being able to walk past it would mean the map would need to go on for ages in case someone tries to walk past before getting killed.

 

Extending the edge borders isn't going to happen I'm afraid - it'd require something to render the map edges repeatedly and people would expect physics to continue out there. Neither of those are trivial and I'm not going to put that time in for a feature that encourages people to literally walk out of the game.