Of Dark Rooms & Interpolative Fading:

[ShadowTiger]

One of the few things I've never really done in any ZC Quest of mine, is setting up a dark room. Aside from never seeing the point in doing so, and how I'll assume most people tend not to like doing it, as it's much slower than in 1.90, (Which I just bugged the developers about, and hopefully they'll do something about it now. :P ) I just don't do these things. ... Still, the quest for knowledge tugs at my shirt and whines my name, even as I attend my daily classes in College. I can either throw a bag of candy across the street and it'll run to it while I hide behind a tree, or I can pacify it with the knowledge gained from some helpful person here. :) ... Now, I must inform you, that these questions aren't so much based on ignorance, but on relative confusion. Something which works so well for others doesn't work for me, etc. Thanks.


Alright, after reading Freedom's tutorial on Dark / Dim rooms, I was still reasonably perplexed. (But don't get me wrong, he wrote a wonderful tutorial. ;) ) Here, take a look at THIS (http://storm.prohosting.com/~mfreedom/ZC/palette/dark_dim.htm) page. (EDIT: Thanks, Freedom. ;) ) You can see in the darker "2" at neat grayscale color set, while in the lower Color Cycle area 5, there is the darkened version of the red Color Set.

My question is threefold.

1) Why is the darker dungeon color set not in the 2 area?
2) Why does the darkened dungeon Color Set go in the 5 area?
3) Is Interpolative Fading turned on or off for this exercise? ... And I know that Dark rooms are affected when it's turned on, as that makes Color Cycling work. But why does it have its effects that it does (I.e. the screen turns only slightly darker, even without the influence of a darkened set of colors as a reference to what colors it should turn.) when it's on? What does that?


Thank you for taking the time to answer these questions. :)

[Freedom]

My question is threefold.

1) Why is the darker dungeon color set not in the 2 area?
2) Why does the darkened dungeon Color Set go in the 5 area?
3) Is Interpolative Fading turned on or off for this exercise? ... And I know that Dark rooms are affected when it's turned on, as that makes Color Cycling work. But why does it have its effects that it does (I.e. the screen turns only slightly darker, even without the influence of a darkened set of colors as a reference to what colors it should turn.) when it's on? What does that?


1) the #2 area seems to be the colors it fades through when going from light to dark, I assume that's why it is gray, like the gray numbers in the "dark" palette window.

2) I placed it there because it correlates to the same cset it would be in if it was a dark palette window, instead of a cycle window palette.

3) interpolinated fading is on, that was the whole purpose of testing this, to see how darkrooms where effected when using the cycle palette window, since it seems most tilesets out there seem to have it checked for palette cycling.
The room turns slightly darker, because the cset I placed in 5 is slightly darker, so there is a "reference" there.

4) you can't link to gifs on the server that hosts my pages, they don't permit it, so your "This" link above is a dead link.

[ShadowTiger]

1) the #2 area seems to be the colors it fades through when going from light to dark, I assume that's why it is gray, like the gray numbers in the "dark" palette window.
And what do you mean by "fades through?" This particular response is very unclear. There could be lots of things by which it could "Fade through." By "fade through," I would suspect it would imply the sets of colors in between the original color when the screen BECOMES dark, to the colors it ends up as WHEN dark. Because this is all gray, it becomes very confusing. These gray colors seem to have nothing to do with any of the colors involved in the transition. So how can they fade through a grayscale color set, when they're not even the same colors? ... And there are other colors besides red there, like brown, and some very light grays and blue's. :shrug: How do you respond to this? It's quite perplexing. You seem to know a lot about it, Freedom, and I'm quite grateful for the assistance. :)

2) I placed it there because it correlates to the same cset it would be in if it was a dark palette window, instead of a cycle window palette.
So that's just something you did, for preference/convenience, rather than a ZQuest Necessity? The way you phrased it makes it sound like it is. (I'm just making sure, here.)


3) interpolinated fading is on, that was the whole purpose of testing this, to see how darkrooms where effected when using the cycle palette window, since it seems most tilesets out there seem to have it checked for palette cycling.
The room turns slightly darker, because the cset I placed in 5 is slightly darker, so there is a "reference" there.
Interesting. My question here, is that the colors the screen would fade to would be the exact same colors, no matter how dark or light I made them, if Interpolative Fading were on. When off, the color in the Darker 2 would seem to be the color the screen would fade to. ... It's really weird, I know. I'll keep running tests. Weird stuff like this always happens to me. >_<**********************
(10 char limit)

[Freedom]

What I did was to compare the "dark" and "Cycle" type palette windows to see if using the cycle palette windows then had an effect on the darkrooms.
I did this because when I whipped together the Basic 1st and Basic 2nd quests there seemed to be some problems with a smooth transition from dark to light in those darkrooms.
I had simply grabbed the palettes from pure to make those two quests, so I wanted to know why the pure palettes had that effect, and the first thing I noticed was they were set up to cycle, where the originals were set up to "Dark"

That made me want to know if darkrooms could still be used effectively with the cycle palette windows, so I did that little experiment which pretty showed me that they could.
I didn't try to use that same palette to also cycle colors, so if you took it that extra step I'm not sure if it would work or not, I figured I probably wouldn't ever run in to that situation, and if I did would just use another palette.

When looking at all of that, don't forget to look at the originals at the top and see how they were used, and what is placed where and what shows up in light and dark situations.

NOW as for the grayscale colors in the gray #2 cset slot, I'm "assuming" that it is what is displayed between light and dark, because it's in the stot designated to do that according to the text file explaination, but I could be wrong, but the tranformation from dark to light happens so fast it's really hard to know for certain.

All I can say for sure is, the way that the tutorial page shows it, it works perfectly.