lummox:

Basically using overlays, plane masters, alpha, and adding plane masters to client.screen, you can do per player invisibility channels, rather than have to manage a fuck ton of client images and login/logout events.

celt's FR is about expanding that to infrared invisibility.
You can make things invisible with planes easily mrstonedone, visibility itself is difficult though. That's mostly the reason I requested this http://www.byond.com/forum/?post=2127915
Visibility isn't difficult if you mess around with it, but the ways to do it are counter-intuitive.

1. You can make everyone have an invisible matrix and give the people who see it a visible matrix
2. You can use a transform matrix on it and make it impossibly small then size it back up.
I would seriously like to see this, because it allows us to fix a very annoying graphical error we have with our layered pipes on our SS13 codebase.

Basically, we have 5 layers of pipes per tile, to prevent needing a million sprites (layers also work on all pipe-connected machinery), the pipes are just pixel-shifted per layer.

This works, it works well, except for 1 thing:


What's happening here is that the airlock is obviously blocking the line of sight. The airlock has a red pipe under it, which is, of course, pixel shifted. The problem is as follows:

Because of the way opacity works, everything on the tile still gets "rendered", including the pipe under it. The pipe is pixel shifted, so part of the pipe is being rendered above the "void" or invisible area.

If we could have this option to render a darkness plane somewhere, like plane 0, this would make fixing this very easy. The pipe's plane would just be below 0. We already neatly organized all our planes so layers are correct, doing this layer fumbling is literally changing some define directives.

With the darkness mask, and the pipe's plane correctly set, the pipe would still be pixel shifted and render correctly, but the slight notch peeking out into the "void" would be obscured and not be an issue.

Hopefully this provides some insight on why I would really love this feature. It would open the door to a lot of cool graphical effects and such. And while this is pure speculation; it doesn't sound like the hardest thing in the world to code, especially because SEE_PIXELS already has semi-similar behaviour.

And for the record, I'm not sure whether fixing this bug would be possible without doing some extremely conveluted, per client image juggling which would be the biggest can of worms ever, not to mention how incredibly expensive it would be server side, while this suggestion would fix this issue easily, client side.
In response to PJB3005
The problem I'm having is that I don't see how your suggestion differs at all from SEE_PIXELS, except perhaps that you might want some things like wall-mounted objects with pixel offsets not to be subject to it. SEE_PIXELS however, while it renders dark tiles, also automatically turns on sight flags for all atoms out of necessity.
Because doing it with planes gives more control, and lets you do fuckary with planemasters that see_pixels wouldn't have because sight isn't something you can attach to a plane master.
If darkness is a physical object that can be plane'd, the difference is that no matter what see_ mode you're in, this allows a great deal of flexibility, like MSO said.
An example of what such flexibility would allow: You could add a transform to the darkness and animate it to create a sort of "wobble" effect, or you could scale and skew it to make the darkness move, etc...
So basically, a new flag that renders darkness as SEE_PIXELS does but does not activate other flags. I guess I can see some use for this, although I'm not getting the big-picture vision, but it's clear the SS13 community wants it. I'll give it some thought.

Seems like I should implement it in the webclient too if I do, which would also mean finally implementing SEE_PIXELS there too (which it needs anyway).
Lummox JR resolved issue with message:
A new SEE_BLACKNESS sight flag has been added, to render dark tiles to plane 0. (SEE_PIXELS does so also, but virtually turns on SEE_TURFS/OBJS/MOBS which may not be desirable.) This only applies to topdown map modes.
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