The Still New What Did You Last Do Thread

[Captain J]

I guess such a discuss of between community guides is very, very rare. Right?

[InsanityBringer]

it's pretty neat that it actually had a noticeable, if small improvement in GZDoom performance. I guess I'll always be far behind on the modern graphics tech, but I think I can learn to appreciate the things I do pick up. It's a field of fun problem solving.

[irontusk341]

The marriage between Taco Bells Beef and cheese burritos and Mcdonalds Fries is a match made in tastebud heaven.

[leileilol]

Worth noting that GLQuake/Quake2 would use points to handle the particles so the drivers would go through painting circles (where available, i.e. PowerVR, but NOT 3DFX) instead of one triangle with an ugly 8x8 texture (which adds up a lot as quake/quake2 particles tend to be very dense). I'm not sure what game uses points anymore.

as for what I do lately.... as you would expect from the recent av changes and steam launch

[InsanityBringer]

if I remember correctly, Quake 2 is capable of going either route depending on whether or not the point parameters opengl extension is present.

[Captain J]

Quake 2 is indeed a big step up to Q1 and it's one of my childhood game. But the opengl stuff man. If i turn this on, everything becomes blurry and stroggs' face no longer resemble a face. And i would like to point out the shoulder part of Iron Maiden's rocket arm. Is it really supposed to be thin and thorny? The game indeed has some limitations, but was still manageable.


Also forgot to share this animation. How really big is Fall Guys?

EDIT: Today's my birthday! It was great and got some good birthday arts. And just made this!

[leileilol]

Quake2 still developed with an old deluxe-painted-PCX-files art pipeline with little tech art consideration of 3D hardware not supporting non-power-of-two (which wasn't a thing until the mid-late 00s), that's more id's fault. I only brought it up because there's also a fillrate issue when you got all those alpha blended particles of tiny 4x4 dots with much wasted texels around itself being overdrawn on each other as triangles. It's kind of a similar analogue with the triangles-as-screen-quad issue. Also when you're sending points instead of triangles, this relaxes the drivers' CPU overhead quite a bit.

[Darkcrafter]

Is it me guys or Doom Registered v1.1 and Doom 2 have different palettes? Doom v1.1 appears to have more contrast and gray has a bit more of blue to it. I compared them using original executables and I prefer the look of Doom v1.1 way more than Doom 2. Huh?

[Rachael]

Are you sure you aren't just using gamma correction? At 0 gamma correction they should look about the same.

Just grabbed my v1.1 iwad and extracted playpal and did a file compare - the playpal is the same then as it is now.

[leileilol]

The gamma correction code differs in 1.1 at least since it's a quick post-release addition as 1.0 shipped with none.

[Darkcrafter]

Hmm...HUD also looks different! The gamma is the same - at zero. Here is a very lazy comparison I made with Paint by making screenshots of both versions, I compared Doom v 1.1 and Doom 2 v1.666 though, Doom 2 v1.9 looks the same to v 1.666

Perhaps should compare them using the same map.

[Rachael]

So I checked with Photoshop and the difference between those is exactly 4 shades, which is the same as 1 shade in the palette register.

With old VGA modes, prior to truecolor, each pixel was assigned a color based on 3 channels of 6 bits. This essentially meant that instead of (0-255) for every channel like we do with modern displays, ye olde DOS ones had (0-63) as their color choices for the 256-color palette. Since the screens were analog they obviously were quite capable of displaying the full gamut (0-255) and even more on top of that, but that's what the cards at the time were wired to push to the screen.

So then what would be happening here? My guess is with the new gamma correction system which saw improvements in v1.2 and even more in later versions, that the rounding by dividing by 4 to fit the color registers changed.

With GZDoom it actually would be possible to emulate this using a simple posterization shader, which removes colour fidelity and locks it to the 6-bit color system that was used in those days. With what seems to be the rounding error here, it might be possible to do that with both.

Yes - as you can guess - doing true colour gradients was a little more difficult in those days than it is now. That's why all the install screens for very old Windows programs had a metric fuckton of dithering done to them.

[Darkcrafter]

Now I get it, thanks for the detailed answer!

[scalliano]

*hides*

[Nems]

That slaps so good. <3