Im having a debate with a person on another forum he says the saturn cant do true transparncy, he says even sonic R uses a very fine mesh effect for diamond level as well as the forground so its no true transparncy are there any games that show that the saturn can do real transparencys in 3d.
Games that Use True Transparency
- Thread starter Quakester2000
- Start date
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It seems that Myersxxx did some research on Saturn and Genesis :
http://www.geocities.com/myersxxx/other.html
(sorry to be off topic 
) Was going to say... I have never seen anything in the Genesis docs that would lead me to believe there is real transparency. If you could read the pal ram for a given plane, you might be able to program your own alpha blending... as horrible as that might be. I'm pretty sure there isn't any hardware powered transparency.
) Was going to say... I have never seen anything in the Genesis docs that would lead me to believe there is real transparency. If you could read the pal ram for a given plane, you might be able to program your own alpha blending... as horrible as that might be. I'm pretty sure there isn't any hardware powered transparency.BigRed667 said:
That link does work
Sonic R which i found out doesnt use true tranparencies but a really fine mesh effect, their has to be a 3d game on the saturn that doesnt use any of that.
Sonic R has true transparency in the diamond level. The player shadows are meshes though. Burning Rangers also has true transparency. The Saturn cannot handle a transparant object behind another transparant object. It works by rendering the half-transparant objects and a mask for the objects covering those, and copying it to a background layer. The background layer is then turned half-transparant and placed above the rest of the screen.
A fuckton of games use transparencies, but many do for some minimal thing so they are not too noticable (for ex. the explosions in Saturn Bomberman are transparent too I think).
Try playing Cotton Boomerang, the game has a lot of (true) transparency effects.
For 3d the most the Saturn can do is clever manipulation of the backgrounds. The Saturn can't do transparent polygons. The best it can do is either a transparent ground field (using the VDP2 RBG), or to mix up 2d transparent sprites into a field of 3d polygonal graphics. The ground effect was done in Panzer Dragoon Zwei and probably Saga too (been a while since I played it), the sprite thing was used in Burning Rangers for the explosion effects mostly.
Even for 2d, transparency effects needed a lot of cpu cycles so few games could implement them in an impressive way.
I think Cotton Boomerang is the most impressive example I can think of. See:
http://evilboris.sonic-cult.net/SSF/Cotton_Boomerang_(J)/00000268.png
That's 2 backgrounds (the clock and the mists), a sprite layer (the flames, the witch), and another background (the clouds) - placed on top of the whole thing. All transparent.
Could be just shadow/highlight effect. Which is transparency, in some primitive way.
Try playing Cotton Boomerang, the game has a lot of (true) transparency effects.
For 3d the most the Saturn can do is clever manipulation of the backgrounds. The Saturn can't do transparent polygons. The best it can do is either a transparent ground field (using the VDP2 RBG), or to mix up 2d transparent sprites into a field of 3d polygonal graphics. The ground effect was done in Panzer Dragoon Zwei and probably Saga too (been a while since I played it), the sprite thing was used in Burning Rangers for the explosion effects mostly.
Even for 2d, transparency effects needed a lot of cpu cycles so few games could implement them in an impressive way.
I think Cotton Boomerang is the most impressive example I can think of. See:
That's 2 backgrounds (the clock and the mists), a sprite layer (the flames, the witch), and another background (the clouds) - placed on top of the whole thing. All transparent.
ExCyber said:
Could be just shadow/highlight effect. Which is transparency, in some primitive way.
