Supermodel Forum

Any luck with the transparency effects on the stingray and the umi bozo boss or whatever u call it?

No it's currently unemulated.
In fact I think it's the only thing that isn't emulated.
I know roughly how to make it work. But there in lies the problem, I don't know the exact formula they used to calculate model transparency. And that's pretty hard to work out by guess work.

Ian wrote:No it's currently unemulated.
In fact I think it's the only thing that isn't emulated.
I know roughly how to make it work. But there in lies the problem, I don't know the exact formula they used to calculate model transparency. And that's pretty hard to work out by guess work.

What is the effect?

Basically they are abusing the LOD tables to do per model transparency. I think it was basically a hack to add transparency dynamically to ROM models. Emergency call ambulance does this too.
Each viewport has an LOD table of like blend in / blend out values. Then the culling nodes have each have an index into this table.
The problem is I can't really make the numbers work. I know the transparency is effected by the viewport angle. Maybe the relationship is 1/angle or something. I'm not sure, I could never make it work.

The model3 isn't the only thing to do transparency like this. Many games blend out models when they reach a certain distance.

Ah, the LOD blending. Now this is probably something we could test once I can transfer code directly from my PC rather than burning EPROMs each time.

So are they blending with an empty model to create a translucency effect?

If we could test on hardware I might be able to figure it out
I have a rough idea how it works.