[Blade of Agony] Road to Wolfenstein Devblog Part 04 | p171

[SamVision]

So the enemies can dodge now? The player should also have a dodge ability then, something like the one from Unreal with double tapping or pressing sprint and a direction other than forward.

[Enjay]

But the player has always had the ability to dodge - because it's controlled by an intelligent being (allegedly anyway ) who can anticipate and react to shots and strafe/duck/get back around a corner/behind a crate (etc etc) whereas enemies have not.

Also, I always found the Unreal double-tap dodge really annoying, kept activating it by accident and eventually ended up disabling it (and UT is one of my favourite games).

[SamVision]

The player has significantly slower movement compared to standard Doom engine games. I feel like a dodge ability like Unreal or Shadow Warrior 2013 would fill the gap quite well. Or just let us sprint in all directions RTCW style.

[Enjay]

True, but the player still has the ability to go "oh shit, that Wehrmacht guy is raising his weapon, I'd better get behind that crate before he shoots" whereas standard Doom enemies do not.

I just think that the player already has many, many advantages over standard Doom AI and making them a bit smarter is merely levelling the field* a bit in an entertaining way. So there is no need to give the player a special version of something he can already do.

*In saying that, if the AI were actually raised to a level matching that of the player, the game would be unplayable. It would be like a team death-match where one team had a total of 1 player and the other team a few hundred: all set up, in position and ready to repel any attack.

[Mere_Duke]

Well, it depends on your patience. We are working hard on the improved version of C1+2 and it is definitely worth being played as soon as it is released with C3.

Ok, I'll wait for this to come. Again many thanks for your years of work on this!
And last, if you need testers (e.g. to catch last remaining bugs), I can help.

[Tormentor667]

Shaders are something that is already part in modern games for some time now: Motion Blur, Vignette, Lens Flares, Film Grain and many more features. These additions have lately been showcased by Total Chaos, an amazing mod by wad'a'holic which makes you ask yourself: "Am I still playing Doom?". These shaders have been implemented and developed by Nash - and yes, Nash is part of our development team. We only had to see if it enhances the gameplay experience and if it fits our philosophy, or if we only want to add these features for the sake of having them.

Post Processing Shaders

Remember old videos from World War II, most of them have scratches, noise, a vignette and are black and white. Whereas greyscale and scratch effects will not work well in a first-person shooter game (I mean c'mon, where does all the beautiful gore go?), we felt that film grain and a vignette perfectly fits the game design philosophy and makes for a fitting feature. The decision was easy to make.

For the lens flares, it took a while though, same goes to the motion blur. Both effects are aesthetic and visual. In some places, it greatly improves the experience (just take a look at the effect in the screenshot; the fire feels extremely bright and blinding). We were not sure, but considering that all effects can be adjusted or totally turned off to your desire, we have decided to add what we have for those who want it. If you are a purist though you can still deactivate all of it, including the noise and vignette, set your resolution to 320x200, and enjoy the mod in its 1994'ish glory.

[Enjay]

Motion Blur, Vignette, Lens Flares, Film Grain...

OK, I'm gonna be "that guy".

Motion blur? Me no likey. It doesn't make much sense, isn't what human eyes do when the head is moving rapidly around (fast forward motion gives a tunnel-vision-like effect, rapid sideways movement causes saccadic masking) and is a common cause of motion sickness in video games.

Vignette? Darkening the edges of the screen limiting my already limited viewport on to the world versus normal vision? Why?

Lens flares? Eyes don't do that unless you have certain types of eye damage that might cause similar effects. Flares make the whole game look as if it is being viewed through a camera rather than you actually being there IMO.

Film grain? See lens flares, but even more so. I'm not suggesting that yours will be this bad but the heavy graining of some yawnfest "really scary" survival horror games look as if you are watching the game on a badly tuned in 1980s TV. Definitely not an immersive effect IMO. Seriously, what on Earth would have to be wrong with your eyes to see the world like that?

To me they are all "rule of cool" effects and I feel that they all actually detract from the immediacy of gameplay and, even worse, actively create an impression of removal from the gameplay rather than immersion in it. To me they just smack of the priority being "oooh, look what we can do with our cool effects" rather than "oooh, what can we do to make our game play better".

Most of the above can really enhance screenshots and cutscenes. e.g. Film grain and the things you dismiss (greyscale and scratches) would actually be great for fake newsreel cutscenes (etc.) and a use like that could be perfect for a mod like BoA. And, to be fair,your screenshot does look sweet. However, I find the effects under discussion annoying in actual gameplay - especially in a lengthy game or when they are used heavily.

Anyway, you've said that the effects will all be optioned so I guess that it's down to the individual user to chose what they want enabled (thanks for doing that).

As I said though, the screenshot is pretty sweet.

[Graf Zahl]

All I could say here has already been said by Enjay. These effects are mostly gimmicks that rarely enhance the game but ultimately detract from it.

Hell, I even watch the scratch-free version of that "Planet Terror" movie because that artificial layer of dirt is just that - artificial.

[Rachael]

When waging between practicality and taste, I'm sorry I'm going to be blunt here but practicality is always going to win.

At least you offered the option to disable the shader effects, but in general I agree with Enjay and Graf - they were that extra bit of fluff that wasn't needed. They remind me of my college textbooks that are 1000 pages long when all the useful information in it combined can easily be condensed down to 50.

It's nice to add aesthetics - but this is past the line of what I would consider standard as far as subjectivity and taste goes, in my opinion. What would add far more value to the mod, in my opinion, is having a bit of art consistency - instead of mixing in a bunch of high-colour low-res blocky pixel sprites with usually-brown high-res high-detail models, there should be more of a compromise between the two so they don't look like they were cobbled together from whatever-the-fuck-we-could-find-any-which-spot-on-the-internet-we-could-get-it-from. I'll be honest - I think your mod suffers greatly from that, and worse yet, I think you've gone art-blind to it after seeing it so much, and maybe that's why it looks perfectly okay to you.

[jazzmaster9]

I will admit that im not a fan of Motion blur, but I'm a sucker for cool shaders such as film grain and Lens flare.
You gave the option to toggle those those effects which means people people atleast have the choice to use which effects they want in their experience.

Waiting for E3 to come out cheers

[SamVision]

What would add far more value to the mod, in my opinion, is having a bit of art consistency - instead of mixing in a bunch of high-colour low-res blocky pixel sprites with usually-brown high-res high-detail models, there should be more of a compromise between the two so they don't look like they were cobbled together from whatever-the-fuck-we-could-find-any-which-spot-on-the-internet-we-could-get-it-from. I'll be honest - I think your mod suffers greatly from that, and worse yet, I think you've gone art-blind to it after seeing it so much, and maybe that's why it looks perfectly okay to you.

This, this right here. For all the ambient sounds and special effects, the immersion factor is at an all time zero because of this. I've mentioned it before elsewhere, but why is there a need to mix sprites and 3D models? Maybe if you used voxels it might look a bit better. Everything about this mod just looks incomplete because of this and it feels like the presentation is going to waste.

[JadedLexi]

It's nice to add aesthetics - but this is past the line of what I would consider standard as far as subjectivity and taste goes, in my opinion. What would add far more value to the mod, in my opinion, is having a bit of art consistency - instead of mixing in a bunch of high-colour low-res blocky pixel sprites with usually-brown high-res high-detail models, there should be more of a compromise between the two so they don't look like they were cobbled together from whatever-the-fuck-we-could-find-any-which-spot-on-the-internet-we-could-get-it-from. I'll be honest - I think your mod suffers greatly from that, and worse yet, I think you've gone art-blind to it after seeing it so much, and maybe that's why it looks perfectly okay to you.

It's funny to me that he complains about it in other mods a lot.

[Tormentor667]

Thanks to all of you for the feedback so far. We have been discussing the "post-processing" topic for a while internally and have had different opinions ourselves as well. Some liked the idea of having it, some found it distracting and unnecessary as well. The possibility of having these features "optional" was the reason why we agreed to add it as is. For those who like these effects, they can have them and for the purists, we have the option to completely deactivate this modern aspects of post-processing. Fortunately this time we have the chances to please both sides

This doesn't work all the time though:

It's nice to add aesthetics - but this is past the line of what I would consider standard as far as subjectivity and taste goes, in my opinion. What would add far more value to the mod, in my opinion, is having a bit of art consistency - instead of mixing in a bunch of high-colour low-res blocky pixel sprites with usually-brown high-res high-detail models, there should be more of a compromise between the two so they don't look like they were cobbled together from whatever-the-fuck-we-could-find-any-which-spot-on-the-internet-we-could-get-it-from. I'll be honest - I think your mod suffers greatly from that, and worse yet, I think you've gone art-blind to it after seeing it so much, and maybe that's why it looks perfectly okay to you.

I think you are not wrong with guessing that we've gone art-blind - I actually agree to a certain point with you, as it really looks perfect to us But there are actually two reasons why this "art-style" will stay as it is, no matter what the community proposes or demands.

First, we are all limited to the resources we can access and to the resources we can create. None of is a model designer, and even though we already tried to get someone supporting us in this department, we didn't find a person for the team. So we have 3 different choices: a) get model resources from other games, b) create sector-based structures to resemble a model or c) make a sprite out of it. The latter decisions are limited because not every structure makes sense to be created in sectors, and making sprites for huge objects (like tanks, flak guns, or moving trucks) is simply a visual desaster. We had to go for existing model resources if we wanted to realise our vision.

Second having model based enemies (if you don't like the sprite style) suffers the same problem as above with a single twist: We don't have sources for all the stuff we wanted to create. But what we have is a very talented sprite artist (doomjedi) who is capable of doing everything we need.

So, why did wie decide to mix up things and what is the general rule of our design philosophy? Quite simply: Enemies (except tanks) and smaller objects are all sprite based but "hires" (twice the resolution as in original Wolf, actually everyting as MacWolf resolution), larger objects (like tanks) and map geometry elements are models. We think that the static objects blend in very well with the map geometry and don't feel "wrong" when you look at them. Just take the following screenshot as an example:


Lamps and chairs are models, enemies and meals are sprites and so is the vase, in return the clock is a model. Does it blend so badly?

[Rachael]

That's probably one of your better screenshots for the effect I was talking about - but I'll be honest - it *almost* works.

The guards look like they have very little shading, where even the nearby chairs clearly have a lot more detail. Both sets are clearly closer to the line, but they're extraordinary examples of their respective groups, not the norm.

I haven't played the mod lately so I don't know what it looks like now, but I remember from my previous play-throughs that the hub level suffered absolutely horribly from this. There was so much mish-mashing it stands out like a cactus in a sand dune. Even with the food on the table in this screenshot - the colour of the food is so vibrant and pretty and the rest of the area is brown and drab. That's what I mean by *almost* works - it still sticks out quite a lot, none the less.

I'm not going to argue with you or "demand" you change these things - it's your mod, you're the leader, not me, and you know better than me what makes the mod successful. I am only telling you that this is one of the big gripes I've had with the mod - other than its massive size and massive resource consumption when it is in use. I've always been a proponent of you making the mod your way and doing what works - but this is pretty wonky, for me. Now - if the chairs and the overhead lamp had flat shading and a sharp edge like the guards do - there wouldn't be much discussion about it because at least it'd look consistent. The issue is the clashing art styles, not how much detail they have.

[Graf Zahl]

What bothers me about that screenshot is not the guards - it's the food lying on the table. These items are so at odds with the rest of the graphics it almost hurts. And of course, using an upscale filter to smooth their edges...