Software renderer's lighting in GZDoom (and Zandronum)

[Mr. Tee]

I see what the OP means, and although the difference isn't hugely noticeable, it does keep the good ol' Doom feel alive.

I always thought Doom had this sort of "things get brighter when you approach" lighting since the space marine suit had LED lights around the visor, so that Flynn could better see what he was cutting up with his chainsaw.

[shoober]

I made a thread about the differences between ZDoom and GZDoom about how they render certain things differently. There were a number of things mentioned that simply cannot be emulated with OpenGL that makes the software render so magical (like the diminishing lighting around the charactor). The wall textures have a different brightness based on those screenshots. I was only going by what was presented in the screenshots. I'm not sure how the wall textures look now with the update. Maybe someone could post some screenshots?

[BouncyTEM]

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Hey, look at that, it has diminishing lighting around the character.
Which was in the original version as well as the update.
Someone didn't bother to check it out.
though to be fair, those screenshots from earlier are meh.

[shoober]

GZDoom does have an option to try and emulate the diminishing light effect around the character, but its not 100% identical to how it looks in software. Emulating software lighting to be 100% identical under OpenGL would be a really hard thing to do. Maybe even impossible. Just like how GZDoom tries to emulate the fuzz effect of spectre demons, but its not 100% identical to how it looks under software mode. I came to the conclusion that Doom is meant to be played with a software render to have a lot of its effects rendered properly.

[Blox]

Now you're just being absolutely nitpicking and totally ignoring that you can have fog and the absence of colors going nuts due to palette limitations in various situations.
(This honestly reminds me of the "But it's not the Doom RNG SSG!" issue that was raging back in the Skulltag days.)

[Nash]

Did you even play the EXE? Especially with the "blocky" option, it pretty much looks like the software renderer; the banding is just like in software. The only "difference" here is that GZDoom has more colours because (WAIT FOR IT) it's not limited to 256 colours like the software renderer!

[andrewj]

I don't think there is any licensing issue here.

The main innovation with EDGE was to store the lighting in a texture and use multi-texturing to apply it to the level geometry.

Korshun's method, if I understand correctly, is simply performing the DOOM lighting equation directly in a shader.

[Gez]

Thanks for having looked into it.

[shoober]

Now you're just being absolutely nitpicking and totally ignoring that you can have fog and the absence of colors going nuts due to palette limitations in various situations.
(This honestly reminds me of the "But it's not the Doom RNG SSG!" issue that was raging back in the Skulltag days.)

Did you even play the EXE? Especially with the "blocky" option, it pretty much looks like the software renderer; the banding is just like in software. The only "difference" here is that GZDoom has more colours because (WAIT FOR IT) it's not limited to 256 colours like the software renderer!

I like the software render because it keeps the grittiness and dirty look that makes Doom a much scarier game. Trying to pretty it up with OpenGL doesn't do it justice.

[Korshun]

The long-awaited Zandronum version is out!!!

Windows
Source
(linux binaries coming soon... They are not made by me but by Monsterovich)

[Blox]

Well what else can I say but that this looks much better than before.

[Nash]

Shouldn't these be contributed to their respective port authors/maintainers for inclusion into the official versions?

[Mr. Tee]

I like the software render because it keeps the grittiness and dirty look that makes Doom a much scarier game. Trying to pretty it up with OpenGL doesn't do it justice.

I couldn't agree more, it's just that working with paletted images is so damn annoying... Just when everything looks great, you convert to it to Doom's palette and what does it look like? It looks like garbage:

Screenshot_Doom_20121219_095511.jpg

This is the only reason I am working on both GZDoom mods and ZDoom mods. Converting textures and sprites to paletted images and doing touch-ups is very time consuming.

[Gez]

Shouldn't these be contributed to their respective port authors/maintainers for inclusion into the official versions?

Maybe once it's a bit cleaned out so that it becomes an optional lightmode like the others instead of overriding user settings. Now that andrewj has confirmed there weren't licensing issues with it, it is possible.

[Nash]

Alright. I hope the blocky mode gets included too, because I actually like the banding. :P