Wall Transparency "Secret" Revealed

[jetaman]

Hello everyone. For the last few weeks I was trying to figure out one thing that was shrouded in mystery despite 10+ years of D2 modding. I’m talking about the wall transparency, or in other words wall fading. This happens when the character is behind a high wall and the wall goes a little bit transparent so that you can see you char behind it. For a majority of D2 modders this may seem irrelevant and unnecessary feature, but for those who work intensively with maps and especially for those who want to create brand new tile sets (like myself) this is crucial. Also, it’s very easy to miss a treasure chest or monster, and if you’re going hardcore it may be very dangerous.
So, now the mystery itself – was pretty obvious. I’m surprised that no one discovered this before; I asked many people and no one could help me.

So, I will explain how this works. I will use “Inner Cloister” map as an example. First, to be able to understand how the transparency works you have to know what “Orientation” is in DT1 settings. I will not explain it here, but I will show a picture from the DT1 documentation.




The “secret” of transparency
The whole secret was in the fact that transparency happens when the walls are connected in one “chain”. It means that all the wall tiles must be joined together.



If you delete one element the transparency will be broken. So, from now on I will call this chain of walls – a box.




Here are some more discoveries:
• You can resize your box to whatever you want.
• You can have many boxes - a regular map is a box itself.
• Wall of Orientation 7 are not necessary for the box.
• Order of sub-indexes is not important in the box
• You can use different main indexes.
• “Logicals” column in Lvlprest.txt turn on and off the transparency.

So, I hope this will be interesting to some people after all these years. Good luck!

[Ogodei]

Very nice discovery indeed! as you know I'm into implementing the whole Diablo 1 into Diablo 2, so this definitely comes in handy!
By the way, inspired by your discovery I investigated further and discovered that you also need to have the "Tile Sound" setting in your ini set to 0. If you have it to something other than 0, your walls won't fade.

Also, one of the major thorn in the side for us map makers is the northen corner of the walls: it needs to be split in two frames (frame can be set at 0, the left side must have orientation 4, the right side must have orientation 3).

If you haven't set and cut the corners as Blizzard wanted, you can always create a "Fake Wall" consisting in orientation 3 + orientation 4 walls and place it as the first layer wall, then hide it with the ds1 editor.
You can use the same trick to make walls fading even if the "box" is not enclosed, by placing fake and fully walkable (hidden) walls

In the end, from my investigation it turns out that the orientation of a wall, apart from 3 and 4 of course, are completely irrelevant. Can you confirm this?


Thanks again and keep up with the good work!

[corp6x]

The “secret” of transparency
The whole secret was in the fact that transparency happens when the walls are connected in one “chain”. It means that all the wall tiles must be joined together.

Здравствуй, можешь объяснить подробнее , что значит соединить стены в цепь? Скриншоты не работают(