The New What Did You Last Do Thread

[Nash]

Just had a mini argument with a friend over... pasta.

I insist that fettucini tastes different, even when prepared in the same way as spaghetti and with the same sauce. He says "no man, pasta is pasta".

[Trance]

There are different kinds of pasta made from different grains (outside of Italy, of course) and other ingredients. Fettuccine has a significant egg content compared with other varieties of pasta, so that might be why it tastes different.

[Nash]

That's what I've been trying to tell him. He insisted that "pasta is pasta", because we were comparing the taste of spaghetti and fettucini from the same brand, with the same sauce.

I keep telling him that fetuccini has a more "full" taste to it...

[Zombieguy]

I HATE pasta...

[Trance]

In a lot of cases "pasta is pasta" holds up, since most of the well-known varieties involve just flour and water, as spaghetti does. Fettuccine isn't the same, though.

[Nash]

We didn't actually have any of the packagings with us to compare the contents and ingredients between spaghetti and fettucini... will be sure to do that next time I meet him...

(I know how silly this sounds, all of this over pasta)

[Nash]

Frustrated. We (again, as in, me and my graphics artist) are having so much trouble translating model renders into Doom sprites. The issue here is scale. A realistically proportioned model will not look good when scaled down to Doom's normal sprite resolution (of around 56 to 64 pixels). So we made the model look squat by scaling the X and Z axis to 120%. It already looks ridiculous in the model editor. But it's still not scaling down well. So much detail is lost when we attempt to match our model to Doomguy's 56 pixel height. The result is just some incoherent pixel mess.

Looks like it won't be a simple matter of X/Z scaling the model... we really need to tweak the models' proportions to make them look fat and squat.

And this will mess up our animated rig so further tweaking is required... argh!

[Blox]

Please don't, instead use placeholder sprites with the actual sizes, and render out a sprite twice as big, which ought to be much less of a PITA.
It'd also look better, which is a big bonus too.

[Bouncy]

wouldn't it make more sense to do something a tad more hi-res? I don't see why you *need* to limit yourself to doom's resolution with things like scale.

*shrug*

edit: Yeah, agreed with Blox, too.

[Nash]

The thing with sharp high res renders is, 4 frame walk cycles start to look crappy. Since there will be many variations of zombies (up to a max of 99, limit is due to naming convention to accomodate extended animation range because 26 frames isn't enough), this will result in 1) big downloads 2) high RAM usage.

Also, I'd like my model renders to fit the Doom renderer's aesthetics. Realistically proportioned models always end up looking narrow/thin.

EDIT: So I decided to use Blood's sprite renders as reference instead of Doom's. Compared my model side-by-side with Blood's zombie. At 125 pixels tall, the Blood zombie has more definition than my render at 160 pixels. The actual model is very high detailed, it's just that these details are getting lost in the scale down... :/

[Enjay]

All good points but will 2x sprites really create all those problems? Sure, ultra-hi-res sprites would look awkward with 4 frame walk animations etc but I reckon that you could get away with it with 2x or even possibly 4x without making things look silly or jarring with the rest of the aesthetics.

[Nash]

I edited my post. I decided to bump the resolution a little and use Blood's renders as a reference point. The blood zombie sprite still looks better than mine...

The only way is to butcher the model's body proportions to follow Blood's zombie. This can't be achieved by simply scaling the model... the body mass has to be tweaked and everything, head size, etc...

[NeuralStunner]

6 to 8 walk frames looks good. Don't limit yourself too much. (The Might and Magic sprites are extremely fluid, unfortunately they used mirroring on things that really shouldn't be mirrored, so that really undermines the niceness of it.)

Unfortunately, as far as I know ZDoom does not have a "disable aspect correction" option. That would pretty much fix that problem. As it is I'd say just render them in 1:!, and people that live with aspect "correction" will just have to deal with it. (They're already putting up with squares not being square. Oh well.)

[Nash]

If I increase the resolution to 256 pixels, a single frame would be around 12 KB.

The total amount of frames for the non-death states is 35. With rotations (5 angles), this amounts to 175.

The death frames have a total of 55 frames (there are several death states... this is a zombie killing game after all).

This brings a grand total of 230 frames. 230 frames x 12 KB = almost 3 MB. Per zombie variation.

For optimization sake, let's say I limit a scene to only 10 zombie variations (as much as I'd love to have more) at a time. That's 30 megs of RAM on zombies alone. o_O

[NeuralStunner]

Most players should have at least a couple gigabytes of RAM. I don't think GZDoom even uses much VRAM. Really, if someone can run, say, Skyrim, they'll still run circles around this. So don't be too paranoid about it.