GZD 2.1, can software look any better? (cannot run 2.1 OGL)

[Graf Zahl]

and look best in it, anyway.

No!

[Hellser]

and look best in it, anyway.

No!

[Yes]!

Sorry, had to. But at times, Software renderer looks good.

[esselfortium]

and look best in it, anyway.

No!

Actually yes. You're wrong.

[Graf Zahl]

Prove it!

[wildweasel]

Prove it!

Graf, would you mind not behaving like this, please?

[Kappes Buur]

Most WADs are designed for the standard software renderer and look best in it, anyway.

What a closed minded statement.
Some folk, like myself, prefer to use an OpenGL port exclusively. So, I have to agree with Graf Zahl in saying an emphatic No.

[wildweasel]

It is - and should be - a matter of opinion, anyway, so I would appreciate it if we didn't murder each other over it.

[edward850]

Above all, maps can be expressly designed with software rendering in mind in ways that OpenGL has a hard, if not impossible, means of replicating (and vice versa). The key aspect of having two distinct renderers, of course, means there's always aspects that either renderer cannot replicate of the other.

[Ozymandias81]

I know why Graf says that hardware rendering is better than software one (and I play Doom since 1996, when I had a 486Dx2 66mhz), the following screenies comes to my most enjoyered map from Doom II - The Living End:

---

GZDoom with everything activated...


...then in software mode with ZDoom...

The only criticism I could give to hardware rendering is that textures seems to loss their original Doom palette in my eyes (no, I didn't use any fake contrast), but we know that it isn't. Anyway this discussion is very stoopid IMHO: hardware & software method are both great, even for Vanilla wads than modern ones too.

[Caligari87]

Well, take the same shot with everything disabled in GZDoom (including the dynamic lights which are bumping the saturation on the green walls). You'll get pretty damn close to the software mode results. It's kinda apples-to-oranges if you intentionally crank up the filtering effects then complain "but it's not the same!"

[m4lmaster]

WildWeasel i wish for this thread to be closed on this behalf.

[esselfortium]

Most WADs are designed for the standard software renderer and look best in it, anyway.

What a closed minded statement.
Some folk, like myself, prefer to use an OpenGL port exclusively. So, I have to agree with Graf Zahl in saying an emphatic No.

It's not a "closed minded statement". It's objectively true that most Doom WADs were designed with the game's original renderer, which looks different from GZDoom's or any other port's GL renderer because it works differently. If there wasn't a difference between them, we wouldn't need the GL renderer in the first place. This isn't an opinion or an attack, it's a simple statement of fact.

There are substantial differences in lighting between GZDoom's GL renderer and the original software renderer that most levels in existence were designed for. These differences are further compounded by GZDoom exposing countless lighting-related options to the end-user, which make it effectively impossible to know whether a map will look the same way on other players' computers. The software renderer is a fixed target.

There are also other faults that can make the GL renderer a downgrade for projects that weren't designed specifically for it, such as the GZDoom GL renderer's inability to correctly render sprites without either changing their offsets or cutting them off abruptly at the bottom. But even if GZDoom's lighting was an exact replica of Doom's and the other downgrades were corrected for, there are software-renderer features that cannot be replicated in GL, in much the same way that GL has features software can't replicate.

In the case of Back to Saturn X, to use an example I'm intimately familiar with, the colormap and palette were delicately hand-crafted to optimize their appearance and achieve special effects. For instance, the blue, green, and orange ramps are all designed to hue-shift as they go down, rather than simply going from bright to dark. The blue ramp fades from a bright cyan to an almost-teal into a deep blue, which is most noticeable on glowing lights and on water sectors. This effect is completely lost in other renderers, and results in the maps looking less vivid in GL.

The GL renderer is great for maps that were designed to take advantage of it. The software renderer will look better for nearly everything else, not least because it will usually be what the author saw when they were designing it. And if you think that's a closed-minded statement or anything other than a simple fact, you have blinders on.

[Zanieon]

I have to agree with Essel, everything has it's place on mapping and considerably we have tons of maps made for vanilla, which is intended to look good on software, and look a bit better on GZDoom's GL renderer but still it doesn't differs much from Soft besides Texture Filtering and Dynamic Lights, including all differences he mentioned.

In other way, if you take in mind GZDoom's OpenGL when creating a map, so then you can drop nice beauty stuff like Ed's Valhalla and Putrefier, each side have their benefict and weak points, or you can try both when you really know what you are doing, like what i'm doing here.

the following screenies comes to my most enjoyered map from Doom II - The Living End:

*Pic Comparison*

No offense, but this setting you use makes GZDoom looks shit for a comparison especially because the additive dynamic lights.

Well, take the same shot with everything disabled in GZDoom (including the dynamic lights which are bumping the saturation on the green walls). You'll get pretty damn close to the software mode results. It's kinda apples-to-oranges if you intentionally crank up the filtering effects then complain "but it's not the same!"

So what's the point of use GZDoom then?

[Caligari87]

To make things look "prettier" obviously I mean that if you're gonna compare the SW vs the HW renderer, at least compare them on equal terms so we can say something like "okay, the hardware render, even with all the bells and whistles off, doesn't get the lighting exactly right". At least that's what I thought we were talking about. If not, plz ignore.

[zuzma]

Can't run gzdoom either on my laptop so I use doom touch on my tablet instead. It does lack some features but whatever :>