Particularly interesting in that the Saturn had known problems with transparencies.
this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2024
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I'm not sure I would call it "problems", but doing transparencies on the Saturn required leveraging VDP2 and most developers just didn't bother.
Yup. Sega had it figured out and enabled Fishbowl Head in Virtua Fighter Kids, but it was out of the reach of 3rd party developers.
Is that transparency? Looks like the same dithering/alternating empty pixels that all Saturn ports are plagued with.
Yea, that's specifically not transparency. Megaman X 4 had actual transparencies, which you can see here with the glass tube, next to a spotlight using the dithering method.
Oh, but it's what passes for transparency on the Saturn. :)
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Just from the screenshots in the tweet/article:
I would argue that is less transparency and more overlaying the skybox texture. In the city map with the Pinky you can't actually see anything behind that wall, you just see the skybox.
Could just be "bad" examples but this makes sense. My understanding is that PC DOOM tended to use additive geometry in these cases so that the skybox is literally just a bigass box around the map. Whereas I assume the Saturn version had to do some magic to fit everything and may have used a different technique. Hence the ability to just overlay that texture over everything.
IIRC Doom didn't have a skybox per se, just parallax ceiling textures. You could put that texture on floors or ceilings and it would show the sky texture that would not be attached to the walls.
The texture was definitely funky and I want to say was used as the ground portal in a lot of Ep3 levels.
But I THINK that was still applied to a giant box on the edges of the map. Which is how a lot of games still do that.
As an old school doom mapper from the 90s, it absolutely isn't. You build a room, apply F_SKY1 to the ceiling, and that's it. The engine renders it more like a wall, but it's not a traditional skybox in that it doesn't exist in the level geometry outside of the room it's applied to.