What is the attraction of PS1-style visuals?

[dpJudas]

I can't say I agree. GZDoom and Doom modding by its core is mixing new and old, just like the PS1-style visuals of new creations are doing. I fail to see the difference.

[leileilol]

Not PSX but a similar analogue with regards to PC hardware, I sometimes do spend time on shaders for a silly r_legacyCard cvar on an experimental OA engine branch. It's fun reproducing 1st/2nd gen GPU stuff. So far I've got a silly G100 shader (16bpp no dither, bilinear forced with broken mip selection, and only alpha stippling for blends), a rough NV15 shader (imprecise texture filter), a very rough PVR1 shader (even more imprecise texture filter, and blocky alpha blends only and a post-dither), and a 3dfx shader (4x4 dither on textures, dither subtraction, dithered mipmap blend with broken lod calc)

On the other hand, the game already does work on all of that hardware mentioned for cross-checking, and I do find it fun working in workarounds to make the game look better in the earlier blendfuncless PC 3d hardware (from a tech artist perspective), like hacks in texture loaders to give alpha channels to textures, parsing shader scripts differently (rgb modulated additives = rgb mod converted to alpha mod, rgb mod is normalized). There's some kind of feeling I get out of it, but I can see how it could be 'insane legacy crap, gut it for vulkan gcc10 win10 immediately' for someone else looking to spice up their programming resume.


Artistically? I'm trying my best. I've had the art direction set in stone for years (~512tex with square preference, 2500tri players, minimal surfaces per model, shared textures for projectiles, etc), I just need to find more of the time to fill those goals. Star Trek Elite Force's a good technical example I aspire towards. Trekness aside, it did fix some broken Q3 stuff (specular/flares), leaner than Q3 in several ways (MDR, MP3 sounds), and is graphically prettier (particle systems, creative environment map usage, flares work, detail textures, etc). Not being impossibletasked normal-mapped PBR RTX probably invalidates all of this as 'low quality crap' to some expecting more out of a hobby project though...



tl;dr: as pleasure hobby i make 1997-2000 pc game from 1999 pc game but not for hashtag retrogaming.

[Graf Zahl]

What? No 3dfx Voodoo shader with 16 bit colors and ugly dithering?
At least it was miles ahead of the Playstation and when I had my first encounter with it some time after having played Quake 2 and Unreal with hardware acceleration on the Voodoo I couldn't believe how ugly most PS1 games looked. That's possibly a major part of why I have zero fondness whatsoever for the visuals it created.

One thing I remember from that time is when I moved from the Voodoo to my first NVidia card is that in some games all the HUD text looked broken, can that be related to that NV15 imprecise texture filter?

[Kinsie]

And that Black Metal example is just as weird and off-putting as deliberately screwing up the visuals of a game with shitty filters, if not even more so.

So, why's bilinear filtering on by default, again?

[Marisa the Magician]

Damn it, Kinsie, we have to let it go, he won't change his mind about it.

[Graf Zahl]

That's how I experienced hardware accelerated 3D for the first time.

At least you get the option to turn it off, that needs to be enough.

[Rachael]

It's the first thing anyone looks for the moment they open GZDoom for the first time.

Anyway - I think this thread's value has run its course. There isn't much to add when everyone has very strong preferences about graphics and quite honestly you can't convince anyone that your preference with graphics looks better than someone else's. This isn't really going anywhere, so there's not much point to continue it. The important thing to remember is art is very subjective - limitations do not necessarily make a medium bad, and you can't tell someone that they don't like something if they very clearly do. You simply can't say "no you're wrong" when it comes down to something this subjective.