#18 Transparency masks for non-ground tiles

[Dreamberry Ice Cream]

The Dragon Engine, an engine similar to Ultima 4/5, has
1-bit transparency. You can download it here:
http://reconstruction.voyd.net/index.php?page=project&type=engines

One way of adding this feature to xu4 would be to make
the black pixels of non-ground tiles fully transparent.
However, since some monsters (e.g. Gazers in the VGA
upgrade) contain black pixels, a better solution would
be to create a transparency mask for each tile (1 bit
per pixel).
There'd have to be two sets of transparency masks: one
for the original CGA graphics and one for the VGA upgrade.

[Nobody/Anonymous]

Logged In: NO

Would the monsters look very good with the background
transparent? I mean they're meant to be viewed on a black
background and might look kind of kruddy against a forest tile

[Doug Day]

Logged In: YES
user_id=806507

That would definately work -- really the only problem with
implementing that right now is that the design of xu4 only
really counts on displaying 1 tile per spot. So, displaying the
avatar on top of, say, a treasure chest would require altering
the main graphics engine so as to allow as many objects as
you want, and then sort them, etc. Not a HUGE change, but
a substantial one nonetheless. I would enjoy this feature as
well, but it will probably need to wait for other things.
Bummer, too, I wanted to implement that soon. ;)

[Dreamberry Ice Cream]

Logged In: YES
user_id=292034

> I mean they're meant to be viewed on a black
> background

I don't know if this would look good, but you could leave a
black outline (1 pixel thick) around each monsters when
creating the transparency masks.

[Karl Robillard]

This was implemented sometime before the 1.0beta4 release.