Essentially, I'm having a problem where 3dos with transparent surfaces end up rendering strangely when seen where a seperate 3do is located behind them.

Example:


(both the ground and the shrubbery are 3dos; in the top image, they are two seperate 3dos; in the bottom image, they are the same 3do)

I've had this problem before, but I've never taken the time to ask about it. Anyone have a solution?

JK sucks

What Zan means is that you can't render more than one transparency in JK, it doesn't render another behind the first.

JediKirby

nevermind, set LEC on fire

There's definitely a way to do this. Get Friend14 in here.

Friend14 claims that flagging your 3DO surfaces (or maybe the level surfaces) with "blocks light" fixes this problem and possibly others. I tested it with translucencies, where it did nothing. As I expected, since it's a flag for JED last I checked...

He can fiddle with the architecture flag, but will only work for so many (two) "layers" of transparency.

Is the ground a 3do? FLAG IT!

For it to work, ALL 3do surfaces must use the 'Blocks Light' flag. And no, it's not an end all - be all fix, but it does work correctly about 80% of the time or so (that percentage seems to be proportional to the users CPU and GPU processing power, how many objects there are, etc.). And yes, the architecture flag helps with this as well. The _walkstruct template, additionally, seems to be the most effective (according to my research).

I will say, however, there are some cases where you don't want to use it. An example of this is with skydomes. What you want to do is set up your world box with a green (massassi green) solid color texture. What this will do is allow the leaves, grass, and such to 'clip' the sky and render the green background along that transparent edge.

'Blocks Light' does nothing. It's merely a fantasy. Use it if you want, you're just wasting your time. I've done dozens of tests. It does NOT affect 3dos in any manner. But beyond that, it's now open for anyone to see, via the Jed source code. 'Blocks light' only affects the CalcLighting(level, scs) and CalcLightingNew(level, scs) functions.

This conclusively evidences that Jedi Knight thoroughly and completely sucks.

But that's what makes it so damn fun to edit, I guess. :p

The blocks light flag is for Adjoins only. If you want a adjoin to block the glith instead of it passing through it, say for a secret wall or a tinted window, the light won't go through it. It does frig all to the 3do's.

Is there even an adjoin flags value on surfaces in a 3do file?

Here's what I found out about the architecture flag (thingflags=0x8)
0x8 viewed through NON-0x8 ....... works
0x8 viewed through 0x8 ....... DOES NOT RENDER
NON-0x8 viewed through 0x8 ....... DOES NOT RENDER
NON-0x8 viewed through NON-0x8 ....... DOES NOT RENDER
Both on transluceny and transparent texture pixels getting filtered (the blurry diamonds, you know)

ingame, random triangles on the surface seem to get rendered through, though.

is the grass texture 256x256? you need as little pixel width as possible, the space between the edge of the texture and 1 pixel of black around this edge WONT allow for renders behind the surface. Making the grass model/face smaller or increasing texture resolution will reduce this problem

if(getThingFlags(source) & 0x8){
  do her}
elseif(getThingFlags(source) & 0x4){
  do other babe}
else{
  do a dude}