The WIP Thread

[leileilol]

I already know how this will play out.

The autobump envy will lead to novelty craze for the young and/or naive suddenly getting a "great idea" to get famous, taking old models (perhaps old Ypod or Doomsday models) and dropping a Gimp normalmap filter on them, and there will be low effort "HD DeMoN Edition" repacks (possibly containing the iwads, even freedoom) being shoveled around file sites that don't know any better and much opportunistic Youtube revenue having promoting as a crudely bumped Doom as the way to play with so much glossmapped enlightenment. Eventually the novelty will wear off and they'll revert back once they realize how inconsistent it'll all look especially with new maps with new notHD textures (until the next wave of fans that just found out about it) and begin the cycle anew. It doesn't necessarily have to be behavior coming from this community.

It's not really dpJudas' fault that a pandora's box of 'next gen graphics' is looming to be opened and it's that time for zdoom to go through that cycle other games have had gone through.

[Rachael]

You really see the worst in people, don't you?

I'm not saying you're wrong, I am just saying it's such a shame that it's what you're focused on.

[dpJudas]

When I started using GZDoom I too went through the phase of "let's get a HD texture pack" and indeed quickly discovered that you can't just upgrade the texture pack to get better graphics. And yes, the model packs generally are just plain horrible. I also agree that Doomsday's light looks terrible. Heck, I even think Kinsie is right that the Duke Nukem bump/light enhancements look like shit.

However! Each of those have their reasons, so let's go through them one at a time:

HD texture packs: As you increase the quality of the texture you expose the low geometry of the map and actors. This is particular bad for vanilla maps. Still, custom textures were useful for the careful mapper that knew what they were doing. BTSX, BoA and others looks quite alright.

Models: Polygon models generally suffer from horrible format and animation support, but also the fact that model actors badly needs shadows. They also tend to reveal Doom's [censored word] movement for enemies. Still, custom models allowed Enjay and others to improve visuals by placing custom models here and there. I like the shotgun in Gene Tech or the tanks in BoA.

Duke Nukem light: The light gets so ugly here because they added some invisible point lights below the ceiling light texture. Likewise, Doomsday and Unity Doom abominations look so bad because they rape the general Doom light system. That's not the case with what I'm doing - there are no extra fake lights to try force bump or specularity. If you add normalmaps and specular textures to all of the vanilla Doom textures you won't see it unless there's some dynamic light nearby. In other words: it will make lamps, plasma shots and rockets look cooler, but that's about it. Nash's video used a specular level of 200 - a more typical realistic setting would be 0.1 if the goal is to visually enhance vanilla Doom. A hint of specular reflection.

[FFFFRRRR]

One one side, it is fascinating what you can already do with GZDoom. On the other hand, I'm worried that it will eventually become so complicated that I won't be able to keep up and lose interest. What makes Doom-modding so great for me is how simple it is. You don't need to be a game designer to make something nice with it. It is so easy to make new content for GZDoom. Just a bit of practice and you might be able to make something that looks neat. An image-editing program, Slade and GZDoombuilder is all you need. It originally wasn't supposed to be for realistic looking projects, at least that's what I believe.

If it gets more and more complex to the point where you have to be someone with a serious understanding of not only programming, but 3D Modelling, Lighting and what not to make something that the community considers "interesting", it will eventually lose what made it so much fun for me.

Or maybe I'm just lazy. I don't know.

[Mikk-]

One one side, it is fascinating what you can already do with GZDoom. On the other hand, I'm worried that it will eventually become so complicated that I won't be able to keep up and lose interest. What makes Doom-modding so great for me is how simple it is. You don't need to be a game designer to make something nice with it. It is so easy to make new content for GZDoom. Just a bit of practice and you might be able to make something that looks neat. An image-editing program, Slade and GZDoombuilder is all you need. It originally wasn't supposed to be for realistic looking projects, at least that's what I believe.

If it gets more and more complex to the point where you have to be someone with a serious understanding of not only programming, but 3D Modelling, Lighting and what not to make something that the community considers "interesting", it will eventually lose what made it so much fun for me.

Or maybe I'm just lazy. I don't know.

None of these features are even remotely mandatory to making a good quality .wad/.pk3 - these new features do not detract from the old, you can still make a simple DECORATE weapon mod or a boom-compat megawad and it will still be good.

[Vostyok]

Personally I prefer the old 2.5 sprites look, and find it more satisfying to work with.

If we could use these features to make something completely different though, that would be interesting.

I saw some experimental projects based on platformers and beat-em-ups (even a visual novel), on here not too long ago.

[Gutawer]

I genuinely don't get what all the fuss is about this feature. You all do realise that you don't have to use this in your project, right? This is an option, and one primarily intended for projects with large texture resolutions and lots of model use (in fact, this is primarily being made for one such in-progress project with a 4x texture scale and mostly model actors). Yes - people will make bad looking stuff with incorrect use of the texture maps, but people will make bad looking stuff with or without these features. It's just that bad wad #21430 will now become bad wad #21430 with specular reflections, so, great. Who cares? The fact that people can do specular reflections now will not mean that everyone's projects will need to use them to look nice! I'd expect this community especially to know that, considering we're all sticking around on an enhanced version of an engine from 1993.

And well, if you do still dislike this feature's addition... this is only the start, full PBR support is planned .

[leileilol]

It's less about the dislike of the feature and more about warning of the coming community tectonic shift resulting from the graphics envy, and a potential rainstorm of "1/5 this mod don't not work with ssj4freddyroblox's GZ Brutal Doom II DeMoN HD 4K Edition" on everything.that doesn't acknowledge the feature, as well as the press coverage on anything with a normal map as priority regarding "amazing Doom modding" in the future. It will go through this phase.

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a talented mapper with a potentially very interesting mod that only works on a specific source port that doesn't use features could remedy some of the frenzy. *cough*arcane dimensions*cough*zdoom projects vs doomsday in the 00s*cough*btsx*cough*

[wildweasel]

Whatever your preference is, I don't think it's quite worth this amount of kerfluffle.

[Rachael]

Whatever your preference is, I don't think it's quite worth this amount of kerfluffle.

Nailed it.

[RiboNucleic Asshat]

I was under the impression that most people here knew well enough to just ignore the obnoxious "MAK DIS COMPATIBL WIFF !!COOL DOOM!! MOD!!1!!" type of people. We've already gone through that before with you-know-what and it's not like the screaming masses contribute much anyway (Ironic that I say this, because I haven't really contributed much of worth either).

I won't comment further on this in this thread because I'd rather not crowd out the people who want to show off their WIPs.

[Tormentor667]

I simply love the feature and cant wait to use it in BoA - thats it

[Rachael]

I simply love the feature and cant wait to use it in BoA - thats it

@ Tormentor667: We all love BoA and your attention to detail is one of the things that has made you such a popular modder.

But be careful stacking up too many effects - remember last time I gave you a debug build of GZDoom?

This particular effect will stress the GPU more than the CPU - so I think you'll be fine when you start using this one - as long as a user has a GPU that can handle it - but please please please keep it in mind.

(By the way, in this message I do not mean this administratively - I mean it only as a fan of BoA and expressing my preferences - so please don't take this as an authoritative post, it's not meant to be)

[Nash]

WIP Blade Runner-inspired scene using lo-fi materials (64/128px) with no filtering. Still very early, I'm going to fill this entire street with Hong Kong-style lights and maybe some models. inb4 but muh pixel vanilla pixels

[Marisa the Magician]

I've been abusing Tracer to do some silly things.



There's also a lot of black magic involved with line drawing functions and fancy math.