Raze officially revealed!

[Graf Zahl]

The community would never accept that - all the Build games have very distinctive fonts for their menus and the only one the that could theoretically be redone like that would be NAM/WW2GI.

[sinisterseed]

But ultimately it will be optional, not forced.

If we ever want advanced lighting effects it must be optional. Since this code is doing the entire lighting by using 8 bit lookup tables there is no way it can ever work with dynamic lighting and even less with more advanced stuff.

And it would look fugly as all hell in games like Blood thanks to their "advanced" palette (for lack of a better word).

[Phredreeke]

As someone who have made upscale packs for several Build games I'm interested in how you are tackling hightiles. In both eduke32 and BuildGDX-derived ports they are defined through DEF files while in GZDoom they are placed in their own folder structure. I could rework my packs to work with the latter, but how would palette swaps be handled? Right now I'm supplying separate versions of each palswap, which is a kinda bloated and wasteful solution. Ideally palettes would be able to be swapped in-engine (as with ordinary tiles)

[Graf Zahl]

I haven't made any changes to that logic - It makes little sense to replace a system that appears to be commonly agreed upon by all existing Build engine ports.
The Duke upscale pack mostly works - models are currently non-functional so you only see the textures and I still need to fix a few issues with detail textures.
It hasn't been tested extensively yet - I merely ran a few levels to check resource consumption.

Just one thing, maybe you can give me some info: What's the highpal images? They only seem to be used by Polymer, but what precisely do they remap?

[Kinsie]

Just one thing, maybe you can give me some info: What's the highpal images? They only seem to be used by Polymer, but what precisely do they remap?

A high-palette look-up table (abbreviated "highpalookup" or just "highpal") is used by the Polymer renderer to replicate the software renderer's 8-bit palette swaps on 32-bit assets such as models and high resolution textures.

Since it's polymer-exclusive and polymer seems to be disabled in this port...

[Graf Zahl]

A high-palette look-up table (abbreviated "highpalookup" or just "highpal") is used by the Polymer renderer to replicate the software renderer's 8-bit palette swaps on 32-bit assets such as models and high resolution textures.

Since it's polymer-exclusive and polymer seems to be disabled in this port...

Ok, so I wasn't too far off. It looks like an RGB->RGB three dimensional colormap and that's precisely what you describe.

[mjr4077au]

Any chance for a rough estimate for some kind of release? Kind of sitting on the edge of my chair but it could be 3-6 months away for all I know lol

[Graf Zahl]

A first public alpha will be available either this weekend or next weekend, it depends on how many of the known issues I can resolve. Over the week I cannot invest much time, unfortunately.
You don't make threads like this when you cannot deliver.

[sinisterseed]

Yeah, the bomb wasn't dropped just to show something that was very far off, like you see with trailers, ads and so on these days which usually mean months of waiting before they arrive .

[mjr4077au]

You don't make threads like this when you cannot deliver.

Man, could you be any more of a fkn rockstar?! I'm so excited!

[Redneckerz]

A first public alpha will be available either this weekend or next weekend, it depends on how many of the known issues I can resolve. Over the week I cannot invest much time, unfortunately.
You don't make threads like this when you cannot deliver.

Give me something with a readme or a features list and ill make sure it gets to the places i am most comfortable in during the next week.

That's faster than expected Graf, from Rachael i heard it was still a few weeks away.

[Graf Zahl]

The original idea was to release on Jan 29th (for obvious reasons) but we didn't quite manage. This has been worked on for 5 months, I started on it in late August 2019.

[enderandrew]

EDuke32 is very good in some regards as a Build source port. My frustration with it has been:

* Getting an XBox controller to work well with it (though this improved recently with their Iron Maiden development).
* It doesn't run other Build games
* Neither renderer option is that great at the end of the day

I wonder if anything useful could be salvaged from icecoldduke's attempts at the new PolymerRTX renderer, his SW port, Polymer Contrast Adaptive Sharpening, etc.

https://github.com/jmarshall23/PolymerRTX
https://github.com/jmarshall23/PolymerCaS

It is a shame he took down his repository for IcedSW

[mjr4077au]

The original idea was to release on Jan 29th (for obvious reasons) but we didn't quite manage. This has been worked on for 5 months, I started on it in late August 2019.

I'm sort of not surprised, actually. You've been quite vocal on the engine in the last few months, evidently because you've been balls deep into the code.

I'm interested to see how this plays out within the community, I can see this becoming the de-facto standard but I'm worried some of the original devs might adopt a "Bernie or Bust" attitude and not be supportive. Hoping for the best though, I think some of your comments have hit nerves but since you're producing solutions and its no longer talk, I'm hoping for a much warmer reception.

Whatever terminx has done here has definitely improved the experience. He's not wrong in his commit log either, that's quite the voodoo bullshit...

[Graf Zahl]

That commit will be one hell to port, though, because I have done some massive changes to that piece of code myself and merging that together will not be easy. So definitely not in the first release - if I wanted to merge that I'd have to postpone the release.

What precisely did that code improve? His commit message was a bit unclear and I haven't been able to check it out.