Eric WagonerandClaude Fable 5
cdfae39398
Entertainment polish for the instant replay, all through one wizard's eyes. Doors now slide open along their own edge — Wolf3D style — when anyone steps through in a reel, hold for the crossing, and swing shut; the raycaster takes a per-edge openness map and doors carry their texture with them, leaving a sliver of jamb at the far post. A wall that dies bursts into stone and shakes the camera, then leaves a mound of rubble at the fallen edge for the rest of the reel (a tenth paintable sprite, drawn opaque — debris, not light). Jammed locks seethe: a rusty pulse across the wood, keyed off the view's own door states. Walking THROUGH a wall shimmers on both faces and washes the walker's own screen stone-gray. And every home base wears its owner's emblem on the flagstones — a near-white paintable overlay tinted by wizard color per cell in the floor cast. Testing surfaced a real ghost: a body standing near a far warp mouth also rendered at its virtual position, which can overlap real corridors — the depth buffer alone cannot clip it. Every column now remembers whether its ray bent, and a sprite draws only where its warp side matches the column's; projectile legs carry the same flag. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
61 lines
3.6 KiB
Markdown
61 lines
3.6 KiB
Markdown
# The conjuration sprites — a spec for the artist
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The first-person view (`/?fpv`, and the replay's "your eyes" mode) throws
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spell moments through the air as **billboard sprites**: flat images that
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always face the camera, drawn glowing in mid-air, occluded by walls, and
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scaled by distance. Nine sprites cover every spell moment in the game.
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Each lives at `packages/web/public/textures/../fx3d/<name>.png` — replace
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the file, refresh, done. The current files are placeholder radial glows;
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all nine are shown side by side at `/?tokens` under "The conjurations."
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## Technical requirements
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- **Format:** PNG with a transparent background. The transparent area is
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essential — whatever is opaque is what flies.
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- **Size:** square, any resolution; 128×128 or 256×256 recommended. The
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renderer scales freely and pixelates on magnification (the whole view
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is deliberately chunky, like the wall textures).
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- **Drawn additively:** sprites are composited in "lighter" (additive)
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mode over a dark dungeon, so dark pixels vanish and bright pixels glow.
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Paint light-on-transparent; pure black will be invisible. Midtones read
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as translucent light.
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- **No animation frames.** Each sprite is a single still. Motion comes
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from the renderer: projectiles streak across the room, impacts swell
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from small to large while fading out. Radially symmetric (or nearly so)
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designs work best since the image does not rotate.
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- **Fills most of the canvas.** Leave only a small transparent margin;
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the renderer sizes the sprite by its canvas, not its painted extent.
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## The nine sprites and where they appear
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| file | flies as | moment |
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| --- | --- | --- |
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| `fireball.png` | projectile | Fireball, Sudden Death, Blaster Wand — a ball of fire streaking caster → target |
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| `bolt.png` | projectile | Lightning Blast, Power Drain — a crackling bolt |
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| `waterbolt.png` | projectile | Waterbolt — a hurled gout of water |
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| `spark.png` | projectile | anything else that travels: thrown objects, bodies knocked back, dragged things — a neutral streak of force |
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| `burst.png` | impact | a fireball landing; victory fireworks — swells and fades |
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| `splash.png` | impact | waterbolt landing, stone turned to water |
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| `hit.png` | impact | damage landing on someone you can see; punches, claws |
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| `shimmer.png` | impact | teleports, warps, illusions, minds touched — the general "magic happened here" glimmer, violet by tradition |
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| `shield.png` | impact | an attack fully stopped; absorbed spells |
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| `rubble.png` | prop | a destroyed wall's remains: bursts on the kill, then stands as a mound at the fallen edge for the rest of the reel. Unlike the others this is drawn OPAQUE (normal compositing) — paint it as solid debris, not light |
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Projectiles hold their size in flight (about a third of a wizard's
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height). Impacts start small and swell to roughly double while fading —
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so an impact painted as a ring or burst reads especially well.
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What the sprites do NOT need to carry: screen-wide flashes when YOU are
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hit (red), healed (green), or teleported (violet), the camera shake, the
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door slide (doors animate by sliding `door.png` along its own edge — no
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separate art), and the jammed-lock seethe (a pulsing rust glow the
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renderer lays over the door) — those are renderer effects, not images.
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## One more paintable surface: the home tile
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`public/textures/home.png` is a floor overlay for home-base cells,
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drawn over the flagstones and TINTED by the owning wizard's color at
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draw time. Paint it near-white/neutral with transparency wherever the
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plain floor should show through; the tint does the rest. Square, any
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size, same as the other textures.
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