Look and feel

The rendered scene combines authored palettes and textures with separate rules for terrain, models, sky, and on-screen presentation. Matching those rules keeps lighting, distance, motion, and framing consistent with the original engine.

Camera framing and distance

View projection fixes the horizontal field of view. Changing the display aspect ratio changes the vertical field of view, so a wider viewport does not simply reveal more of the world on either side.

Fog and clipping determine how geometry disappears into the distance. Scene fog depends on camera-space depth, using a lookup table and the world’s fog color. The sky has its own fog table and clipping distances. Its distant texture blends toward the same color used to fill uncovered background pixels. The RGB565 framebuffer and dithering also affect the final color, especially in gradual fog transitions.

Terrain color and shading

WLD terrain supplies heights, texture choices, and texture rotation. Terrain lighting combines ambient RGB with a directional contribution at each vertex. The resulting color depends on the terrain normals, then passes through polygon clipping, screen-space color interpolation, and texture combination.

The terrain and model lighting paths have different inputs. Terrain does not use the model renderer’s local-light list. World settings for ambient color, sun direction, and directional RGB are described in WORLD.INI.

Models, palettes, and local lights

Model lighting combines face brightness, ambient and directional light, local lights, and retained instance colors. World-entry prelighting stores map-light contributions for static placements and eligible static-model actors. These stored colors continue to matter when the world is drawn.

COL palettes supply the colors of indexed artwork. Palette ownership and transparency rules determine how texture edges and camera-facing flats appear. Model textures, terrain textures, and placed flats have distinct drawing rules; the model reference covers chroma-key rejection, texture filtering, flat blending, and depth writes.

Water shape and changing light

Water waves displace selected terrain vertices. Their phase uses squared distance from the whole terrain midpoint and the BIOS clock. World wave settings control amplitude, speed, and spatial frequency. Moving the camera changes the terrain window, but does not move the ripple origin.

Displacement also changes normals and lighting. The engine updates marked entries and retains the other entries’ earlier values until a later update or grid rebuild. Those rules affect water-edge shading as well as the wave shape. Terrain lighting describes how the changed normals feed back into vertex color.

Sky, sun, and texture motion

The sky is a finite, tilted plane with scrolling texture coordinates. It is visible from either side and can be crossed vertically. Its background fill, fog, scrolling direction, and sun-disc blending each contribute to the visible horizon.

Texture animation supplies motion within textured surfaces. Playback state belongs to a loaded image, so objects sharing that image also share its current frame. Authored delays and explicit frame selection determine animation timing independently of water displacement.

Movement, interface, and sound

Player movement and actor animation determine the pace of movement, turning, and animation. Their coordinate and timing rules connect the camera view to what the player does.

The HUD, book menu, and subtitles define artwork placement, fonts, draw order, and text timing. The book menu also uses 3D models and animated camera paths. Positional sound supplies distance attenuation and stereo pan; music supplies world-specific CD tracks and their switching rules.

Renderer-specific resources

Choose the renderer’s matching model, texture, and palette resources before applying these rules. The asset directory and edition reference describes the available sets and their differences. Software texture banks and shade and haze tables have their own formats. The Glide rendering pages describe that renderer’s behavior.