Overlapping clouds can completely obscure what they are painted over

[wench]

If multiple clouds overlap they can cause so much darkening everything under them becomes completely black. There is just a lack of accuracy doing transparency in 8 bit colour so after only a couple layers it is impossible to see anything. This seems to be a particular problem in Skara Brae as the ground starts so dark as seen in this screenshot and Skara Brae generates huge numbers of clouds

I'm not sure how the original acted or if it even allowed overlapping clouds but I do not recall this happening.
Regardles I have ideas on how to fix this so I'll assign this to myself

[NotStanley4330]

I can look into this in DOSBox to see original behavior for you. I recall it getting pretty dark but it may have been mitigated somewhat.

[wench]

Ok cool some screenshots would be appreciated, just wandering around in Skara Brae should generate a lot of clouds

[marzojr]

For reference, I think that this issue is because we don't check at all whether clouds overlap when placing them.

[NotStanley4330]

Alright so in testing in DOSBox, the original seemed to totally support overlapping clouds. Most of the time it appears to be just 2 clouds overlapping but it seems that three clouds can overlap and does further darken things. Here are some screenshots.

2 cloud overlap:

3 cloud overlap:

And here is a video demonstrating what this looks like in motion:

Cloud.overlapping.mp4

This actually appears to be in the original game as well, and to a pretty similar extent.

[wench]

Thanks for that I guess then that fixing this will be an engine enhancement of sorts and something that needs to be togglable for the purists

My fix for this will be to still allow overlapping clouds but when rendering only a single layer of transparency will be allowed.