You can see things up close in the dark

[Sodaholic]

Unlike vanilla Doom, in ZDoom, even in pitch black areas, if you are close to something, it fades in to full bright. It shouldn't be doing this, as it wasn't the original behavior, and besides, it looks pretty bad.

[DaMan]

This has been discussed ad nauseam else where so I would say that's not a bug, it's a feature.

[Enjay]

...it fades in to full bright. It shouldn't be doing this, as it wasn't the original behavior, and besides, it looks pretty bad.

I don't *think* it is as bright as fullbright and Vanilla Doom always had this effect. However, it is a little more obvious/brighter in Zdoom.

Vanilla (under DOSBox)


Zdoom

(Zdoom images resized - which explains the anti-aliasing.)

Personally, I never really liked the original Doom effect either.

[Project Shadowcat]

If I had voting power I'd say to leave this one be.

[NeuralStunner]

If I had voting power I'd say to leave this one be.

Or assign it another CVar, R_NearVisibility...

[esselfortium]

It's most noticeable in extremely dark areas. Try a 0-brightness sector or something similar and you'll see the difference pretty easily: in ZDoom, it becomes fullbright when you stand in front of a wall or look down at the floor below you. In vanilla, it might brighten ever so slightly but will still be near-black.

This has been discussed ad nauseam else where so I would say that's not a bug, it's a feature.

........rofl

[NeuralStunner]

It's most noticeable in extremely dark areas. Try a 0-brightness sector or something similar and you'll see the difference pretty easily: in ZDoom, it becomes fullbright when you stand in front of a wall or look down at the floor below you. In vanilla, it might brighten ever so slightly but will still be near-black.

Vanilla doesn't have freelook , so I'm not sure how to test this.

GZDoom's Doom light mode seems to go a ways in the opposite direction, where walls appear darker up close than in vanilla, but I actually prefer it that way.

[esselfortium]

It's most noticeable in extremely dark areas. Try a 0-brightness sector or something similar and you'll see the difference pretty easily: in ZDoom, it becomes fullbright when you stand in front of a wall or look down at the floor below you. In vanilla, it might brighten ever so slightly but will still be near-black.

Vanilla doesn't have freelook , so I'm not sure how to test this.

Stand in front of a floor that's raised 32 units or so?

[Gez]

Unlike vanilla Doom, in ZDoom, even in pitch black areas, if you are close to something, it fades in to full bright. It shouldn't be doing this, as it wasn't the original behavior, and besides, it looks pretty bad.

Go back to vanilla Doom. The vanilla vanilla. Start playing. Hit the minus key repeatedly to turn the game screen into an itty-bitty tiny teeny post stamp. Now try humping dark walls again and report your findings.


What happens in ZDoom is a direct consequence of vanilla behavior. It just so happens that vanilla behavior is kinda resolution-dependent, and doesn't brighten as much with screenblocks 10 or 11. ZDoom is more consistent.

[Xaser]

This actually came up not long ago, and IIRC, Randy himself weighed in and said that he was aware of the difference but didn't think it'd be worth emulating Vanilla's (slightly odd, code-wise) behavior on this.

[esselfortium]

Unlike vanilla Doom, in ZDoom, even in pitch black areas, if you are close to something, it fades in to full bright. It shouldn't be doing this, as it wasn't the original behavior, and besides, it looks pretty bad.

Go back to vanilla Doom. The vanilla vanilla. Start playing. Hit the minus key repeatedly to turn the game screen into an itty-bitty tiny teeny post stamp. Now try humping dark walls again and report your findings.

Yes, it's a bug there too. Note that it doesn't do that when playing at full-size or anywhere near it.

[Sodaholic]

It really looks weird having things at fullbright when you are next to them, so if this gets fixed, I think that the max screensize of vanilla should be used as a reference.

[Enjay]

Having checked with light level 0 and compared it to sectors with light level 255, the Zdoom effect is quite different to the Vanilla full screen behaviour and walls do indeed seem to be full bright (or pretty close to it) when you stand right next to them in Zdoom.

[NeuralStunner]

It just so happens that vanilla behavior is kinda resolution-dependent, and doesn't brighten as much with screenblocks 10 or 11. ZDoom is more consistent.

I'm guessing Id did this intentionally to improve visibility for those that needed the small screen size for performance reasons.

[randi]

Here is the discussion the last time this came up, mixed in with discussion of COLORMAPS: http://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f= ... 0&start=10
What I wrote then still stands: It's not a simple one-line fix, and since the conditions where it's most noticeable are limited, it doesn't seem worth the effort.

Also, might I also mention that in standard Doom, floors and ceilings are allowed to get much brighter as they get closer to you than are walls? You can't really see in it Doom, since you can't pan the view up or down. It might be possible to construct a 0-brightness map in Heretic and Hexen and see it there, though I haven't tried. This is a consequence of Doom precalculating 16 tables for lighting (hence the reason it has only 16 real light levels) but accessing them differently for walls vs floors.

Which also raises the question: Is the clamp on maximum brightness of walls in Doom a conscious design decision, or was it simply a consequence of their lookup tables? Was it even considered in any way at all? What ZDoom does is basically identical to Doom but without the lookup tables.