QZDoom - ZDoom with True-Color (Version 1.3.0 released!)

[ZZYZX]

Eh? GZDoom already translates voxels to models. And it works.

[ibm5155]

Hmm, does it work with giant models like 512x512x256?

[Graf Zahl]

No, the KVX format has a hard limit of 256x256x256 because too many fields are bytes.

[Danfun64]

QZDoom will start to experiment with more risky features. Like this one - plus netcode changes, if I get anywhere with that. (I don't know if I'll have anything as robust as Carnevil's system for Skulltag but it should hopefully be at least as usable - but time will tell for that)

As long as the new netcode still allows for online multiplayer saving/loading, i'm happy.

[Caligari87]

EDIT2: Idk how that worked, but can't gpus render voxels as voxels with raycasting?

I'm curious about this as well. Anecdotally (not somewhere I can do a 1:1 visual comparison) I seem to recall voxels look nicer and more "believable" in the SW renderer, while in GL they look more like the object is built of legos, which I find less desirable (Happy to be proven wrong if there's actually no visual difference, BTW).

[Rachael]

@Caligari87: You are not wrong. Each voxel slab (that is, one column) is drawn based on the center of its distance from the viewer, no matter what part of it you are looking at. Essentially, voxel slabs can each be thought of as sprites, themselves, except they are rendered differently.

GZDoom cannot do it this way because, obviously that prevents you from being able to look down on voxels from the top of them. You either would have to convert each individual voxlette into its own sprite - or do what GZDoom does - convert them into cubes. And converting them into cubes is a lot faster because then you don't have to reposition/recalculate based on camera angles.

That being said, it would be possible to use the 2D buffer from the SWRenderer that is presently used to draw voxels in OpenGL, but it would not look good.

[Rachael]

I reset my master yet again - this time, it was to clean up all the merge conflicts which probably didn't really belong there to begin with. When updating (if compiling from my repo) remember to issue "git reset --hard".

[ZZYZX]

You either would have to convert each individual voxlette into its own sprite - or do what GZDoom does - convert them into cubes.

Probably can be done with drawing points instead of cubes with large glPointSize. No idea why this wasn't done — might look like shit as well.

[Graf Zahl]

This wasn't done because it's crap. OpenGL is 3D so the voxel also needs to be 3D or it looks like shit when moving the camera around. It's also a lot more complex to get right than just making a model out of cubes.

What could be done to make voxels look better is to smooth the edges, but I've yet to find some ready-to-use code for that.

[Zen3001]

So this is basically "GZDoom for people who can't run the latest OpenGL", am I understanding this correctly... ?

Isn't that what zdoom always was?

[ZZYZX]

"GZDoom for people who can't run the latest OpenGL" is the GZDoom GL2.0 compatibility mode.

[Graf Zahl]

People may use the software renderer as a matter of preference.
But those using the software renderer because they cannot run OpenGL are hopeless cases to begin with, you'd need a computer from the beginning of the millennium, not to have GL 2.0. Anyone seriously trying to use ZDoom on such a system should stick with a version more concurrent with their hardware.

[MrDowntempo]

People may use the software renderer as a matter of preference.
But those using the software renderer because they cannot run OpenGL are hopeless cases to begin with, you'd need a computer from the beginning of the millennium, not to have GL 2.0. Anyone seriously trying to use ZDoom on such a system should stick with a version more concurrent with their hardware.

Well, there are more corner case situations. Chromebooks or small single board computers that only support GLES for instance. Also, I use qzdoom on a laptop that can run gzdoom, however the software renderer in qzdoom outperforms the hardware renderer (integrated intel graphics). I'm picking up an exta stick of ram for it though, so we'll see if that helps (sharing more ram with the igpu)

[Marisa the Magician]

I wouldn't really say "beginning of the millennium. The first Intel GPU to support 2.x on all platforms was the GMA 4500, released in 2008. Anything from the current decade (that is, starting from when the "Intel HD" brand started) will have guaranteed 2.1 support minimum, though, but it'll still have subpar performance. Not even the "Iris Pro" line seems to be any good either. I don't know who at Intel came up with that statement about them being on par with dedicated GPUs, but I call bullshit.

[Graf Zahl]

I wouldn't really say "beginning of the millennium. The first Intel GPU to support 2.x on all platforms was the GMA 4500, released in 2008.

True, but back then Intel's graphics hardware was so bad that almost nobody used it outside of office computers.
Today the number of such systems that are in use by people who play games can be considered infinitesimally low.

What I'd really like to see one of these days is some actual benchmarks with suitable maps from various Intel chipsets to decide if they are actually worth supporting or better left relegated to some legacy GZDoom version. I know that the Geforce 6800 in my old 2004 computer is way too slow to run anything exceeding vanilla complexity at decent frame rates.