ZDoom

KeksDose wrote:
Just about perfect targeting for projectiles affected by gravity. Here, the imp fireballs have a gravity of 0.125, resulting in a very flat arc over this long distance.

That reminds me of Scorched Earth. And speaking of which, i'd like to see some monsters doing some artillery attacks in doom!

Quick shot of a decorative decal system (and HUD!) I'm working on for an upcoming mod. There's some Doom3-style graffiti in there, the plan is to add a lot more and have it spawn in randomly around dead players.

Nash wrote:Remmirath: these keep getting better and better! Out of curiosity, can you post 2 identical scenes, with and without SSAO? I'm just curious to see what they look like without post processing.

And are you using customized SSAO settings? Those kind of look stronger than GZDoom's defaults.

I'll soon post screenies with and without SSAO. And I'm only using GZDoom's defaults, just cranked up to max.

EDIT: here they are





The scene loses a LOT without SSAO, so I'd like to find a way to force SSAO at runtime.

Remmirath wrote: The scene loses a LOT without SSAO, so I'd like to find a way to force SSAO at runtime.

You can't... the SSAO pass is probably one of the heaviest post processing passes in GZDoom even at its lowest settings, so it can't be forced as a courtesy towards low-end users (yeah, I know, those damn dinosaur computers...).

As much as I agree on the concept of building a scene revolving around AO, I also agree why it's left as a user option. Even modern games don't force SSAO... at best, the game ships with SSAO turned on by default, but the user can always turn it off.

So you're left with two choices: either write a big disclaimer in your project thread and readme that your maps visuals rely on SSAO, or ship your WAD with a batch file or script that enables SSAO.

Or just ship with AO baked textures. Which is a royal pain in the ass but probably worth it in the end.

(which also further pushes the cause, overall, for baked lighting period)

Using AO baked textures will actually cause it to look really terrible for anyone that has the SSAO pass enabled, as it will apply AO twice to the scene.

dpJudas wrote:Using AO baked textures will actually cause it to look really terrible for anyone that has the SSAO pass enabled, as it will apply AO twice to the scene.

Well, it may make sense if a map can explicitly turn AO off if its visuals do not mix with it.
Of course due to the technical restrictions, SSAO, just like shadowmaps need to be under the user's control.

It's not perfect but I think that could be something pretty cool... but my big problem with that is the textures I can't properly create Imperial panels and other stuff in the Dark Forces vibe!
Anyway I should go back to the Wasteland... lol

Well... Yeah. You should. I love your star wars and aliens project... But I'm always wondering whatever happened to Wasteland!

Gifty wrote:Quick shot of a decorative decal system (and HUD!) I'm working on for an upcoming mod. There's some Doom3-style graffiti in there, the plan is to add a lot more and have it spawn in randomly around dead players.

WHOA! Now I can see plenty of uses for that!

My AO policy is "don't shader just bake the damn ao in the lightmap with -dirty and use color-ramped ao to base model textures with". AO on the lightmap does bring a bit of UnrealEngine1 aesthetic so that's a plus. AO-shaded color ramps saves a lot of initial painting time but is a luxury many pros in the 90s didn't have so i'm cheating a bit...... mind that i'm targeting a '00 aesthetic (late DC/early PS2/Dell Dimensions) so i shouldn't be abusing pixel shaders or the depth buffer at all.

The biggest problem with baked AO is that it can't take doors and other sector height changes into account. There's also the issue with needing a tool to generate them - doing it by hand is too hard and also gives a poor result in my opinion.

I did start the work on a ZDRay command line tool meant for baking things, based on the ZDBSP codebase, but I quickly ran into the trouble how to store the lightmaps. Especially dealing with the floor/ceiling is tricky as you can't specify it at the subsector level (gzdoom might regenerate them). Sectors themselves can have huge gaps in them. Ended up concluding it requires more work planning how to output things than the ray tracing part.

Operation Body Count, Take 2

dpJudas wrote:The biggest problem with baked AO is that it can't take doors and other sector height changes into account.

Or polyobjects. Including the dynamic segs involved with them.

I guess Quake-based engines have an easier time with this since any geometry that moves must be connected to an entity, which is easy enough to detect. (On the other hand, that is of course much more restrictive.)