[MUD-Dev] Re: darkness/visibility

[Adam Wiggins]

On Thu, 11 Jun 1998, Chris Gray wrote:
> [Michael.Willey at abnamro.com:]
>  >On a graphic mud, this seems like a non-problem - since the players are
>  >interpreting their surroundings with the human eye already, simply turning
>  >down the lights causes the same effect as it would in RL.  Assuming a
>  >text-based mud, how could you present the same effect?
> 
> Not having played a lot of games much, the only one I remember that
> tried to make use of darkness in the images was "Faery Tale
> Adventure" on an Amiga. Our solution to not being able to see very
> well was to turn up the brightness on the monitor. So, I wouldn't
> suggest going to a lot of work to do something that the player can
> easily defeat. Just modifying your colourmaps won't do - you'll have
> to actually fuzz things or something.

Yeah, I recall a similar effect in one of those old Star Trek games.  When
enemy ships "cloaked", they actually just drew themselves with all pixels
set to use a color value of very dark grey (against black space, of
course).  This rendered them invisible on any normal monitor, but just
turning the brightness up as far as it would go made them very easy to
see, and sitting ducks since they couldn't fire while cloaked...

Adam