Fix for transparency/black splotches

[trevius]

That is some interesting information. Thanks for sharing, Nilbog!

I haven't done much testing on that, but I am certain I have seen that issue in a few places (specifically the evil eye for sure). Do you know if that is just an issue with the specific client that is Titanium? If the issue is purely client-side, then I would assume it would have been fixed at some point, so it may not exist in the newer SoF+ clients, though I would need to test to verify. If it isn't client specific, and doesn't happen on Live as well, then it seems like it could possibly be an unknown field in the spawn struct for toggling transparencies or something. Again, I haven't done any research on this, so I may be completely off, but I can definitely imagine a field like Helm Texture that is used for turning transparencies on or off. I recall seeing a post some time in the past year about setting models in newer clients to be all black, but I don't recall the details, though it sounds like it could be related. Let me see if I can find it.

Edit - Found it:
http://www.peqtgc.com/phpBB2/viewtop...ighlight=black

Not quite the same thing being referred to there, but it is still stuff that could possibly be related to unknowns in the spawn struct.

[nilbog]

Originally Posted by trevius

Do you know if that is just an issue with the specific client that is Titanium? If the issue is purely client-side, then I would assume it would have been fixed at some point, so it may not exist in the newer SoF+ clients, though I would need to test to verify.

It existed on live until like last month, afaik. They just started fixing these themselves. Whether problems still exist for both types of transparencies, (black/magic pink), I am uncertain.

9/11/12 patch
soe test patch
- Corrected an issue where pre-Luclin human and half elf helmets no longer had transparencies on their visors.
- Corrected an issue where a number of pre-Luclin character models were incorrectly displaying black textures or splotches of black on their otherwise working textures. This was most noticeable on dark elf and halfling breastplates, and on nearly every model's boots.
- Corrected an issue where the Eye of Zomm had been changed from white to black.

Here is a quote from Ropethunder discussing the original issue and is a bit of a history lesson in graphics.

The legacy issue is the result of the method of evaluating transparent pixels being changed over and over until the first (and very old, at which point) version no longer functions.

The first release of EverQuest was based off of a OpenGL/Glide engine and most likely did not use any form of texture clamping. This would be the basis for how textures and their transparent color would be handled.

All legacy .bmp textures used the first index in their 8-bit color palette to denote the transparent color within the texture. This color also matches a large portion of the texture which suggests that the original engine would bleed neighboring pixels into the visible area. This is most likely why no single color was chosen to be transparent across all textures.

By the time Kunark was released, the EverQuest engine had transitioned from OpenGL to DirectX and advances in rendering technology had solved the texture clamping problem. Magic pink (0xff00ff) now become a common theme to denote transparent pixels.

I don't know if texture transparency broke when the engine was transitioned to DirectX or later when .dds become the new format of choice. Regardless, I hope you enjoyed learning a little bit about EQ's history and why things are the way they are.

One thing I was curious to try was to run -rt and -mp versus the entire client's s3ds. This problem likely expanded to individual .bmp files that I have grown accustomed to seeing since Luclin. That's when all of these were broken.