Conditionally yes ... conditionally no. It depended on what was beyond the door.

Entering a place where the lights were off ... this is fine.
Entering an elevator or staircase ... no, this makes no sense.
Manhole cover, slid aside ... perfectly fine.
Entrance to a well lit cubicle farm in an office building ... certainly not.

My favorite goof ups of relying on "black behind the door" in City of Heroes were when the Devs [i]forgot to put the black behind the door[/i]. So the door would slide open like normal, and there'd just be a WALL there ... that looked exactly like the rest of the walls everywhere else ... and your character would just run into the wall and disappear. That sort of thing always brought a chuckle of "guess QA never got around to this one!" and the sad sad realization that no matter how many times I'd report it as a /Bug it would just NEVER get fixed. EVER.

Personally, I feel that the better option is to continue the environment "beyond the door" so that you don't have to use the Black Wall Cheat like you're showing here. Best example of this kind of thing would be the Zone Tunnels in City of Heroes that connected different zones that had vehicles and pedestrians moving through them but which your characters could never "go into" because you'd automatically Zone instead.

In City of Heroes they did not bother me much, so no, they had little to no effect on my feeling of immersion. In City of Titans, I am not sure. I expect the game to have greatly improved graphics and a higher level of detail. And in that case those black doorways could seem a little off.

Izzy is a Dev, is he?

^_^

I think if it would be reasonable for the PC to see what's beyond the door, it should display in the opening.

Never bothered me either. I'd put it on a really low-priority "nice to have" list.

It didn't bother me at all. Certainly not nearly as much as the random shuffle of radio missions where you'd enter an office door and end up in a cave or sewer.

The last programming I did was in BASIC back in the 80's so I don't have much of a clue about such things, but I wonder if, after accepting a mission or joining a team some elements of the active mission could be pre-loaded to minimize the load screens?

That's probably engine-level stuff that isn't optional and for all I know they already do that and what we complain about now IS the Speedy version :)

With the City of Heroes game engine, and its capabilities (and limitations!) ... the Black Behind Door #2 thing was never all that big of a deal. Textures and polygon counts were relatively low (by "modern" standards of NOW) and so you could get away with some level of simplified "cheats" on the visuals without it being something particularly glaring.

That kind of "leeway" starts going down as the game's engine and graphics advance. What started out as a way to simplify and cut corners previously could potentially be viewed as being "lazy" or even "cheap" if done in a much more advanced and detailed game world.

In City of Heroes, it was a common joke that all of the characters didn't have Hands ... they had FLIPPERS instead ... because no one had individual fingers. That kind of shortcutting to reduce polygon counts was considered an acceptable compromise [i]for that game engine[/i]. Try doing the exact same thing in City of Titans and you'd get a far different reaction ... especially if you've got fluttering fabrics and windblown hair animations like the Unreal Engine 4 is capable of producing.

In other words, just because City of Heroes could get away with the Black Wall Trick in a convincing/acceptable way does not ipso facto mean that City of Titans will necessarily be "excused" for doing the same thing. As I said, there will be times it is perfectly appropriate to do a Black Wall Behind Door (such as for manhole covers), but there will be other times when it won't be appropriate. Best idea is to plan accordingly.

This does not bother me one bit. Its part of the suspension of disbelief allowed by the medium.

Fireheart wrote:

I'd say the 'Black Portals' arose from increasing use of Instancing. Otherwise, each of those interiors would have to be rendered as part of the Zone.
Be Well!
Fireheart

Technically - many were. Instanced missions were one thing, but the interiors of the stores and hospital, for instance, were in the Zone map - the rooms you walked into were just placed "below" the terrain. For instance if you had an ally targeted and they entered a store - they would "teleport" 20 or 30ft below the building. Like I said before, the CoH devs must have had a good reason to switch to using this for the enterable structures.

Interdictor wrote:

Technically - many were. Instanced missions were one thing, but the interiors of the stores and hospital, for instance, were in the Zone map - the rooms you walked into were just placed "below" the terrain. For instance if you had an ally targeted and they entered a store - they would "teleport" 20 or 30ft below the building. Like I said before, the CoH devs must have had a good reason to switch to using this for the enterable structures.

I assume they changed it so that doors couldn't be blocked. Since they were already using instanced missions with shadowy doors, it's probably the least obtrusive way to make it hard to block a doorway. Making shop doors look and feel like mission doors already did required no new art or other graphic effects, very little in terms of new programming, and had hardly any effect on immersion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk03drVkM2M

Interior Shader. Done and done.

Gangrel wrote:

It was more breaking when you entered a mission and you ended up in a cave system....

Or entered an office building through a manhole cover :/

The black wall isn't something that bothers me, but the difference between settling for this, and seeing what's supposed to be on the other side is the difference between Ford and Ferrari. Of course that analogy can apply to production cost as well. There's a lot of shortcuts I'll settle for to revive the CoH experience in my life. This is one of them. Of course, like so many other things, I'd just ask the developers to remember the lessons of Power Customization, and try not to build anything that will be too difficult to replace or upgrade when it's reasonable to do so.

never bothered me. I suppose this could be easily replaced though with some generic back drop, reflective of the place your entering. as other mentioned though, I would put this lil bit very low on the priority list of "things to do".

That video uses a separate tool set for designing. Great for scene rendering, interesting to possibly use in cgi animated shorts like a cut scene or short movie but not exactly something usuae for games. Famea have a wide range of requirements for the platforms that this wouldn't appropriately scale with. One day, who knows where gaming may go. With engines becoming more capable, vr seemingly on the rise, and heck human thought to machine interface a few genrrations feom now may be playing in a matrix-like environemnt (rather like Sword Art Online depicts).

Redlynne wrote:

Here's an easy dividing line for you on the question of whether a Black Wall Behind Door/Portal is acceptable or not.
Will getting to the other side of that Black Wall require a loading screen?
If Yes ... then Black Wall is quite acceptable.
If No ... then there shouldn't be a Black Wall there.

Sounds good to me!

Never bugged me at all.

I didn't really care.