GZDoom 4.6.0 released

[Logan MTM]

Sprite shadows like in the Build engine. Both in software and hardware renderer.

Cool! However, it has never been easier to see a Spectre in the dark.

[Graf Zahl]

Yeah, it should probably be disabled for certain render styles.

[Gez]

Probably only enabled for opaque style, in fact.

[Graf Zahl]

For regular translucency it should be adapted to the alpha, e.g. if a monster is 50% translucent, the shadow should be 25%, for example.

[Nash]

Will do some follow-up PRs for the sprite shadows based on the feedback so far, very soon.

[Logan MTM]

Yeah, it should probably be disabled for certain render styles.

Just to clarify my doubt and possible concern. Shadow sprites is loads into memory once but renders twice, right?
What about monsters made of pure shadow that don't need shadow, because "shadow" doesn't make shadow?
Could this overload performance in any way?

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[Rachael]

Yeah, it should probably be disabled for certain render styles.

Just to clarify my doubt and possible concern. Shadow sprites is loads into memory once but renders twice, right?
What about monsters made of pure shadow that don't need shadow, because "shadow" doesn't make shadow?
Could this overload performance in any way?

What you linked in picture, those are not the kind of shadows.

Performance on rendering these shadows should be fairly light, unless A) your machine has trouble rendering sprites to begin with (in which case, you probably won't run GZDoom at all with a machine like that), or B) there's too many of them on the screen, and then that gets doubled to twice as too many.

To answer your question about memory usage - you are right - only loads once in RAM, twice on screen. The shadows and the sprite itself use the same exact pixel data, just one uses a different rendering style.

[Nash]

What about monsters made of pure shadow that don't need shadow, because "shadow" doesn't make shadow?

You can add +NOSPRITESHADOW to the actor to force it to never render sprite shadows.

[Logan MTM]

AWESOME!!!

[luisgph]

Enjoy your fully-widescreen-ified Heretic and Hexen, and sprite shadows, everyone!

And solid release as usual, Graf and the rest of the team.

Wait what? Now there are oficial Sprite shadows?

[luisgph]

I wanted You did these things on LzDoom but well we need to see and wait

[inkoalawetrust]

I wanted You did these things on LzDoom but well we need to see and wait

AFAIK LZDoom mostly just merges changes made to GZDoom into itself, plus sprite shadows can apperantly even be implemented to Zandronum*, and Zandronum is based on 2014 GZDoom. So LZDoom will definitely have this whenever drfrag releases 3.88, and it will mostly likely work just fine on really old OpenGL 2.1 hardware too.


*I know that's possible because Nash has already joined the Zandronum Discord server to ask the developers where he can contibute to Zandro's repository to add sprite shadows to it too, since it's apparently a relatively simple rendering effect of drawing the same sprite again, but squashed and with a shadowy rendering effect.