Amit’s note: this is an article I saved from Usenet that includes both a post from Joseph Hall and improvements from Andy McFadden. The original Usenet thread is here[1].
From fadden@uts.amdahl.com Wed May 11 20:44:14 CDT 1994
Article: 22875 of rec.games.programmer
Newsgroups: rec.games.programmer
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From: fadden@uts.amdahl.com (Andy McFadden)
Subject: Re: Line of Sight algorithm
Message-ID: <1994May9.205814.28187@uts.amdahl.com>
Organization: Amdahl Corporation, Sunnyvale CA
References: <dkennett.767980076@sfu.ca>
<CpDJ9u.24z@koko.csustan.edu>
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Date: Mon, 9 May 1994 20:58:14 GMT
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In article <67056@sdcc12.ucsd.edu> awiggins@sdcc5.ucsd.edu (Adam Wiggins) writes:
>>myself, I've noticed a problem. If the viewer is close to a wall, it will
>>not be able to see down the wall's length (when it should be able to).
>>So we want to check to see if 'b' is visible from 'a'. The path the
>>bresenham algorithm would take is:
>>......
>>...34.
>>.12...
>>......
>>
>>The problem is then that when it reaches '3', it detects a wall and
>>returns an invisible result.
Here's a couple of items that may be of help. The first is jnh's original
table-driven line-of-sight scheme, which works for most things but fails
for cases like you describe above. The second is a description of some
stuff I was playing with a little while back, which works around the
problem to give "correct" shading. It can also be used for line-of-sight
calculations.
(This is kinda long.)
**********
From: jnh@ecemwl.ncsu.edu (Joseph N. Hall)
Newsgroups: rec.games.programmer
Subject: Shading and line-of-sight calculation _en_masse_...
Date: 25 Sep 89 17:10:09 GMT
Here is a rough presentation of the technique for calculating shading and
visibility that I had mentioned earlier.
...
(summary)
A Fast Algorithm for Calculating Shading and Visibility in a
Two-Dimensional Field
By Joseph Hall
Applications Programmer, North Carolina State University
This document copyright 1989 by Joseph Hall. It may be reproduced in
entirety for distribution for any purpose, so long as no fee whatsoever
is charged for its distribution and no attempt is made to restrict its
distribution. No other use is allowed without permission from the author.
Permission from the author must be obtained if a substantial portion of
this document is to be included in another copyrighted work.
As the author of this document, I hereby release the ALGORITHMS described
herein into the public domain. This release does not apply to the actual
text of this document.
---
Interactive terminal-based "rogue-like" games such as Hack, Moria, Omega,
and, of course, the original Rogue, feature a player character traveling
through a maze. The maze usually comprises several levels and is usually
laid out on a grid of squares or "tiles." Each tile contains one of several
distinct features, e.g., a piece of wall, floor, door, etc., and may also
contain objects and/or creatures, if it is not solid.
Hack and Rogue handle lighting and visibility quite simply. All corridors
and walls are "visible" once they have been seen. Rooms are square and are
either "lit" or "dark." A player carrying a lamp can see with a radius of
1 tile if he is in a corridor (which is always dark) or in a dark room.
A player cannot see the occupants of a room until he steps into that room.
These conditions eliminate the possible complexity of line-of-sight and
shading computations, but detract somewhat from the "realism" of the game.
Moria, on the other hand, allows for line-of-sight considerations. A player
can see whatever is standing or resting on a tile is it is both lit and
can be seen from his current location, i.e., if there are no "solid" tiles,
such as walls or closed doors, intervening. Thus a player can see some of
the contents of a room as he approaches its entrance, and more as he gets
closer. Moria does not, however, allow for lights of radius greater than
one tile, and only the player is allowed to carry a light. Again, all rooms
are either lit or not lit, and corridors are dark, although certain player
actions can permanently light portions of corridors and permanently light
or darken portions of rooms.
One can see the desirability of a more complex scheme, where the player
is allowed a lamp of variable radius, other creatures can carry lamps, and
rooms are lit by lamps with finite radius. Such a scheme is not trivial to
implement, at least from the standpoint of the bookkeeping required, but the
greatest difficulty is the amount of calculation required, which can easily
take long enough on a microcomputer to remove the interactive feel of
the game.
Consider:
Whenever the player moves, and thus his viewpoint changes, the visibility
of the entire area surrounding him must be recalculated. This area will be
either the visible area on the screen or the portion of it within a limited
"sight radius" of the player. A sight radius of at least 25 tiles is
desirable, and this could entail calculations for pi * 25 * 25 tiles, or
about 2000 tiles.
Additionally, whenever a light source moves (when carried by the player or
by another creature), the lighting status of the area within the effective
radius of the light source must be recalculated. Although a radius of 1-5
tiles is probably optimum for players and other creatures, there may be a
number of these light sources on screen at the same time, and larger radii
also have some application.
Finally, considerable recalculation is required whenever the solidity of a
visible tile changes, e.g., when a door opens or closes.
The obvious approach to all of the above situations is to calculate both
visibility and lighting status on a tile-by-tile basis using an ordinary
"line-of-sight" routine. That is, for each light source on screen, calculate
whether it lights a tile within its radius by seeing whether a line of sight
exists between it and the tile; similarly, once the lighting status of all
tiles on screen is known, calculate whether the player can see them by
checking the line of sight from the player to each of the surrounding tiles.
The difficulty here is that the line-of-sight routine must check each of the
tiles intervening between the player/light source and destination. This
makes the calculations described above roughly O(n^3), which is generally
unsuitable.
A previous posting on USENET suggested using "rays" emanating from the player
or light source, one ray to each screen border tile or each tile of limiting
circumference. The algorithm involves checking the solidity of tiles along
each ray, beginning at the player or light source, and marking them visible
until a solid object is encountered. While this is fast and efficient, it
is incorrect. To wit:
. | . | |
. . | . . | . |
. . . | . . . * * * * . . .
@ . x . | @ . x * * @ . x * * @ . . . . @ . .
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5)
Here, @ is the center of a light source, x is a solid object, '*' represents
a shaded tile, '.' is a lit tile, and '|' is a boundary. (1) shows the system
without shading. (2) is the correct shading. (3) is the shading generated
by the above algorithm. (4) and (5) are the lines of sight to the border that
cause the incorrect shading to be generated. The correct shading will be
generated only for the border tiles, and there will be some inaccuracies in
the remaining shading.
The author has, however, found an efficient technique that relies on
tables of pre-calculated, rasterized shading.
Consider this situation:
. . . *
. . . . . . * *
. . . . . . . . * * * *
. 3 . . . . . . . . * * . 3 * .
. . 2 . . . . . . . . . 2 * * . . . . .
@ . . 1 . . @ . . 1 * * @ . . . . . @ . . . . .
(6) (7) (8) (9)
'1,' '2,' and '3' represent solid objects. (7), (8) and (9) are the shading
generated by the individual objects. The total shading can be generated by
overlaying (7), (8) and (9):
*
* *
* * *
. 3 * *
. . 2 * *
@ . . 1 * *
(10)
Thus the problem of calculating shading for an area can be reduced to one of
"summing" the shadows that its individual tiles create. This procedure is
straightforward and won't be detailed in this short report.
HOW TO STORE the pre-calculated shadows is a matter to consider, however.
One might expect a full set of shadows, say, out to a radius of 32, to
occupy an inordinate amount of space, or, if tightly compressed, to present
problems in retrieval. But this turns out to be not nearly so bad.
Symmetry considerations, first, reduce the number of shadows that must be
stored by a factor of 8, since only one "octant" (45-degree slice), as
shown above, need be calculated.
The shadows can be stored as a series of "rasters," using the following
representation for each shadow:
byte
1 # of rasters in this shadow
2 #1 start
3 #1 end
4 #2 start
5 #2 end
...
(7), (8) and (9) can be translated as follows:
(7) 1 4-5
(8) 3 4-5 4-5 5-5
(9) 4 4-4 3-5 4-5 5-5
The full set of radius-32 shadows can, in fact, be stored in a readily-
accessible table of LESS THAN 9000 BYTES.
...
I have written a prototype that uses this shading technique. Missing
certain optimizations in its current version, it still calculates a 32 x 32
area in a relatively-constant 50 milliseconds on an 8MHz 68000. The
most efficient conventional LOS-based version that I have been able to write
takes about 800 milliseconds. (!)
I am working on a cleaner version of the prototype and table generator and
will present them and a detailed report later (a couple of weeks?) in
rec.games.programmer.
v v sssss|| joseph hall || 4116 Brewster Drive
v v s s || jnh@ecemwl.ncsu.edu (Internet) || Raleigh, NC 27606
v sss || SP Software/CAD Tool Developer, Mac Hacker and Keyboardist
-----------|| Disclaimer: NCSU may not share my views, but is welcome to.
**********
Improvements to a Fast Algorithm for Calculating Shading and Visibility in a
Two-Dimensional Field
By Andy McFadden
Based on ideas by Joseph N. Hall (jnh@ecemwl.ncsu.edu)
(This assumes you have read and understood the original posting by jnh.)
INTRODUCTION
The line-of-sight (LOS) algorithm used in Moria (written by jnh) does
a fast integer computation from the center of the player to the center of
the object in question. This works great for something like Moria, where
all you're interested in is whether or not you can see a particular object.
Small irregularities either won't be noticed or will be accepted as part
of the way the game works.
However, I wanted to use his fast visibility algorithm to compute light
patterns from multiple sources and visibility updated on every turn. In
Moria, you don't stop seeing nearby walls when you move away from them;
the LOS rules are only for monsters. What I wanted to do was more like
Ultima, where you'd see only what's around you.
The problem is best explained with a picture:
......... .XXXXXXXX
......... ..XXXXXXX
......... --> ...XXXXXX
....###.. ....##XXX
....O.... ....O....
Here, the "O" is the observer's position, the "."s are visible squares, the
"#"s are obstacles, and the "X"s are areas in shadow.
In this example, the rightmost obstacle is invisible, because a line from
the middle of the observer to a position in the middle of the obstacle
passes through the obstacle above and to the right of the observer.
For a monster, that's fine; maybe he was hiding around a corner out of
sight. For a wall, it makes no sense at all. We can see the FACE of the
wall from where we are, so we should be able to see the wall itself. So,
what we need is a different table that uses middle-to-face computations
instead.
ISSUES
It would appear from this that all we need to do is rewrite the LOS
algorithm. Life, unfortunately, is not so simple. For example, the
original middle-to-middle algorithm would draw this:
.XXXXXXXX
..XXXXXXX
...####X.
.........
....O....
However, an algorithm that allows visibility if *any* of the faces is visible
creates a map that looks like this:
.XX.X.XXX
..X.X.XXX
...####..
.........
....O....
Some areas that should be obscured aren't. The problem is that one block
obstructs one side of the area, while an adjacent block obstructs the
*other* side of the area. Both sides of the area are obscured, but by
*different* blocks. So to implement middle-to-face LOS we need to obscure
areas for which both faces are obscured, taking into account that different
obstacles block different lines of sight.
The obvious implementation uses different sets of light maps for different
faces (i.e. one map that shows which of the left faces is obscured, one that
shows which of the bottom faces, etc), but we can do better than that. More
later.
Another issue is corners. If we want to have this:
..XX.
..#.X
..O#X
instead of this:
..XXX
..#XX
..O#X
we either need to go from the middle to the corner or repeat the earlier
middle-to-middle LOS computation. Doing middle-to-corner isn't so great,
since there are situations where there might be only a small part of the
corner visible, which we don't want to allow. Allowing middle-to-middle
enables the player to see through the small crack in the wall without
exposing the entire room. If this is undesirable, just put another block
into the corner.
This also allows the player to see the block in the corner, but only when
he's on an exact diagonal... so the diagonal blocks will appear and
disappear. Ultima IV handled this in a nice way, but sometimes you're
allowed to see things that you clearly should not.
One way to resolve this is to treat blocks as occupying less of the square
than they actually do... this allows more lenient visibility, but raises
the possibility of somebody peeking through "gaps" in a solid wall. I
suspect the best way to deal with this problem is to do a second "clean up"
pass through the map that identifies corners and un-shadows the corner
blocks. I don't know if Ultima IV did this, but it only had a radius 6
display (11x11), so it would not have been very expensive.
If doing middle-to-corner is desirable, it can be added to the shadow map
with a minimum of effort. (In fact, the policy could be chosen at runtime.)
IMPLEMENTATION
We need to trace the shadows for each object three times, once for the
left edge, bottom edge, and middle. Since we're only computing an octant
(or, for speed, a quarter; if we want the whole thing we can compute an
octant and use reflection to generate the silly table), we don't need the
top or right edges.
By using the low three bits of the byte as flags, we can still OR the
shadows cast by all of the obstacles together to get the final shadow in
one pass. However, only those squares for which all three bits are set are
considered to be invisible.
The previous algorithm stored shadows like this:
byte
1 # of rasters in this shadow
2 #1 start
3 #1 end
4 #2 start
5 #2 end
...
The new rasters will be stored like this:
byte
1 # of raster segments in this shadow
2 #1 value (low three bits) + "move over" flag (high bit)
3 #1 start
4 #1 end
5 #2 value + "move over"
6 #2 start
7 #2 end
We need to have more than one raster per shadow, because as we move farther
away from a given obstruction it may stop blocking one face of the
squares. However, the rasters should still be fairly "smooth", moving from
"only bottom obscured" to "bottom/middle obscured" and eventually to "only
left obscured" as the rasters move from left to right.
I call these are "raster segments" because they don't represent all of the
values on one line. The "move over" flag is used to tell the shadow
calculation routine that this segment is the start of a new row (previously
this was just assumed). The "value" byte may therefore hold any logically
ORed combination of:
0x01 middle obscured
0x02 bottom obscured
0x04 left obscured
0x80 start of new raster
To compute the shadows, the low three bits of the value should be bitwise
ORed onto a grid. After shadows for all obstacles have been ORed together,
squares whose value equals 0x07 are in shadow, all others are visible.
(Don't forget to AND #$7f to get rid of the "start of new raster" mark!)
Obviously, this requires completely separate shadow creation and use
routines from the older middle-middle method. By encapsulating the
whole thing within a C++ object, it's possible to provide both kinds
of tables without the program using them being aware of the difference.
[ This should be done as attributes/methods of a "map" object. If a
separate object is used, it should be part of the "map" object as a
whole, and needs to be able to interact with the "raw" map and the
"output" map... doesn't really fit. ]
[ should have more here... ]
**********
--
fadden@amdahl.com (Andy McFadden) [These are my opinions, not Amdahl policies]
You get what you pay for, if you know what you are doing.
PGP Otherwise, you get what you deserve. RIPEM