DF-21 Forums

[Wedge Anchillies]

i'm new, i hear alot about HOMing, but i don't know what it is or what it looks like.

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walking through the gromas mines,
planting a charge...
WHIRR CLICK CLANK!-
"uh oh...

[Darth Oosha]

I may be just lazy enough to link you to the Wikipedia article on it and leave it at that. This is basically what it looks like in DF; we don't have the flickering version.

The cause is generally that the player is trying to look across a distance that's longer (either in DFUs, in adjoins or both) than the engine can handle. Instead of drawing a black space or something there, it doesn't drawn anything; so, for example, if you bring up the map and then dismiss it, the map doesn't get wiped from the areas of the screen that are part of the HOM.

[Wedge Anchillies]

thanks, shoulda guessed it meant hall of mirrors.

_________________
walking through the gromas mines,
planting a charge...
WHIRR CLICK CLANK!-
"uh oh...

[Nottheking]

A slight tip on how to avoid HOMs from distance: break up long wall sections into multiple walls. There is no practical limit for how many walls a sector may have, or even that are drawn on-screen. In most cases, I'd cut any wall so that sections are no larger than around 64 DFU. I've found that in some borderline HOM scenes, it's eliminated the glitch.

And as for the "window" type of HOM (where the game draws too many sector adjoins through sector adjoins) I'd just recommend avoiding places where you can look through a lot of adjoins at once. As a general rule, linear staircases of considerably length should be avoided. Also know that you can cleverly place columns or other wall pieces to obstruct the player's vision and cut down on how many adjoins are visible.

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Wake up, George Lucas... The Matrix has you..