ZDoom

Oh hi, I didn't see you there.


My name is Indecom, ( yes by birth ) You may not know me as the current developer of the game Starr Mazer DSP, or as the guy who exploded in Devolver Digital's Big Fancy Press Conference 2018 all over Nina Struthers' face during the reveal of Metal Wolf Chaos, or that one time that I did a bunch of visual effects for the live action short film based on the game "The Messenger," or that other time that I made a Doom wad called Quaken Doom 2:

(nevermind the angsty music, Amanda Palmer is Life)

You might also know me as the guy that keeps bugging developers to implement advanced materials and per pixel dynamic lighting into the sprite renderer.
But enough of this talking about myself nonsense.

Let's get down to the nitty really, why you're here and why I'm throwing all of this hand written blarney into your eyeholes. Since the full implementation of surface and post processing shaders was realized, something from deep inside me began to rumble. After getting that checked out by a licensed physician, I got a pretty cool idea for a GZDoom based project. I've been inspired by the recent insurgence of "throwback" fps games like Project Warlock, Amide Evil, Dusk, Ion Maiden, and Wrath: Aeon of Ruin. That's when I decided that the next big release from my game studio would be a full commercial game built around a heavily modified, ancient technology, GZDoom ( preferably Vulkan when it's ready lol )

It was at this point that I began to experiment with things. I created what I refer to as the Retro Effects Suite. A low resolution, bit depth limit shader with variable dither:
https://imgur.com/a/RDH3EEj

After I got that working I began to experiment with advanced materials and lighting:
https://imgur.com/a/civ77jr

It was at this point that I wanted to push things farther. I wanted to replicate the effect that was being used in Amid Evil. I wanted to create 2D player weapon sprites that are realistically lit by dynamic lights in the level. You may not be aware of this, but sprites are currently incapable of utilizing advanced material shaders, something that is almost required for this to work. But what DOES work is using an md3 model of a flat plane instead of a sprite

https://imgur.com/a/3MZeVZW

For a better look, click this link for a video: (view in HD please)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Iem9uf ... sp=sharing

Yay! It works! It works when everyone said it would look stupid, well I sure something something something...

ANYWAYS, this is great, this all proves that my I am fully capable of achieving the aesthetic that I have in mind for this project. The next step is developing the world of Project Tremors, the codename I've assigned myself for this project.

What is Project Tremors? Well, it's not futuristic, it's not modern sci-fi, and there will be no guns.
All the content that I've curated above? Yeah, that's right on down the trash shoot to junkyardtown!

Instead, look at this picture that I found on the internet that captures the kind of atmosphere I'm aiming for:
Anyways, that's enough of me smashing my fingers into the keyboard. Keep your eyes here for further experimentations and developments.

If you want to play with some of my earlier tests, here's a download for you:
DOWNLOAD

Damn. I was hoping that this would be a total conversion based on the Tremors movies!

Best of luck with your projects, I think tusing a flat 3d model for the weapons is a great idea! The same effect could also be possible for any world actors, which would be invisible but have a separate quad model that always faces the player.

Thanks a bunch! Tremors is actually just a play on words, since this project is pretty heavily inspired by portions of the original Quake.

Hey guys, I figured I'd give you all a look at some of the materials that I'm putting together for this project to give you some kind of feeling of the direction it's taking:



The music is not final.

Indecom wrote:The music is not final.

What music is that? I rather like it.

It's just one of YouTube's free audio tracks. It's the only one they had that was "close" to the audible aesthetic that I wanted haha. Generally speaking I want something darker and more Gothic, but beggars can't be chooser. haha

Dude, you're the guy who got to explode on Nina Struthers? Much envy, lol. This project looks awesome, and I can't wait to see more.

Thanks Dwailing! For you kindness, you get a youtube video demonstrating the work I put into rewriting a portion of GZDoom's lighting engine.



I spent the last couple of days rewriting how GZDoom handles lights. Both at the shader level, and at the source code level. There's no longer a limit to how bright lights can be, and as you can tell in the video, the light falloff is quite smooth, much more appealing than standard linear attenuation which looks like total butt. Lights can be independently brighter than one another based on the RGB values you assign them in the map editor. RGB values over 255 are considered overbrights. This will allow you to define a super bright light by assigning RGB values of (25500,25500,25500) making it essentially 100 times brighter than previously possible.

I've just uploaded another video showcasing the lighting formulas in our custom build of GZDoom. Not only is it possible to toggle between classic and natural but you can also further modify the look of the lighting to suit your tastes using an attenuation coefficient to get the perfect look for your map:

Experimenting more with weapons and models.

I set up an advanced material node in Blender that will render all of the images I need to make more weapons easily, so I'm pretty pleased with myself. Lol





More here:
https://imgur.com/a/cjelZfG

Oh man, this looks good. Anything Quake is a very yes from me! Those screenies make me wanna kick out some Jeehun Hwang style Quake tunes. Or maybe boot up some DarkPlaces Quake. Love that Scythe-like weapon!