E3 discussion [outdated]

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Not using a color palette that has been good looking and effective in FPS level design for over 15 years (see the hordes of Unreal Tournament levels with cold blue/warm orange lighting schemes) just because it's popular is foolish.

Also, I thought all of the movie screenshots in that article you linked looked great, so I'd say the article pretty much totally failed to prove its point to me.

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I will say right now those movie screenshots look horrible. The tinting of Will Ferrell's flesh tone makes him look ill/severely alcoholic and brings out every last flaw in his skin. The desperate attempt to look edgy and dark by tinting everyone and everything green in the last shot only makes the film harder to look at and less stimulating visually. There are no bright reds in the actress's and actor's lips, no definite contrast between their skin and eyes, making their faces harder to read and seemingly only as important as the background. Red is a color of action, it is intimidating, it's stimulating, without it it's that slightest bit harder to grab the viewer's attention at a subconscious level.

And yeah, Doom 4 does use orange and blue. But when it does it does it a. In an environment that would realistically be orange so it uses the blue as a contrast or b. in an environment that would realistically be blue so it uses orange as a contrast.

Not in the way movies do it by having a fucking office building lit in a way that makes it look like a rejected level from Doom 64. Seriously, don't those places normally go to lengths to look as bright and neutral as possible so as to not depress or agitate the staff?

If you look at films from just 20 years ago, you'll see that most of them tend to use a more natural palette, one that is based more closely based on the actual lighting of environment. Tinting was a way of adding atmosphere to movies that weren't particularly down-to-earth; a classic example would be the blue tinting in "Terminator 2: Judgement Day." Nowadays, it seems most Hollywood films want to have this ugly, unnatural palette that feels more at home in a horror film, even if it's a family comedy. Add to that unnecessary contrast and you have one very ugly aesthetic.

i agree re the importance of color. hopefully hell will have some variety to it. id always has awesome art direction, so im giving them the benefit of the doubt for now.

what i wasnt satisfied with is that rough looking lightning bolt effect you see as a decoration.

also i noticed they are really walking a fine line trying to avoid the "its too dark" crying from doom 3 spilling over... yes doom3 was dark but personally i think there are just a lot of people trying to play in overly lit rooms with uncalibrated monitors.

maybe that is why hell looks funny.

omfg why did they put so much orange and brown in here goddamn piss filters. >:[





But in all seriousness, I don't mind the colors looking like they do in say, a foundry or hell, but if all environments in the game are the same-ish and use the same colors that's a problem. But it's probably hard to replicate the original Doom's colors in a modern game and make it believable, especially since the game takes place in an industrial setting so the colors kinda make sense in that regard.

Looking forward to a toxin refinery with green stuff in it!

If you look at all of the footage of neo-Doom so far, there's a fair bit of diversity in the palette. Teal, orange, maroon, yellow, brown, grey, lime green (in the case of the mancubus)...that's actually pretty promising.

kelliegator said:

omfg why did they put so much orange and brown in here goddamn piss filters. >:[

Holy shit I didn't even think of that, it's hilarious that the doom posters AND THE LOGO use these colors too.

Also, I think that cyan+orange is at least a much better movie trend than the ridiculously colorful lighting from much older movies, like some really old horror films I guess... and many other movies too. When at night they'd just blast the scene with a powerfully saturated blue, and randomly have toxic reds, greens, etc. from arbitrary directions. Now THAT was horrible.

Antroid said:

Holy shit I didn't even think of that, it's hilarious that the doom posters AND THE LOGO use these colors too.

Also, I think that cyan+orange is at least a much better movie trend than the ridiculously colorful lighting from much older movies, like some really old horror films I guess... and many other movies too. When at night they'd just blast the scene with a powerfully saturated blue, and randomly have toxic reds, greens, etc. from arbitrary directions. Now THAT was horrible.

I mostly agree, and you know what I hate more than too much cyan+orange?

Bloom. I hate how crazy modern games go with bloom, it doesn't even look realistic, just exaggerated and silly. I remember seeing footage of Shadow Warrior 2 and thinking "looks okay but I'm pretty sure UZI submachine guns aren't that goddamn shiny".

Doom 4 seems to have some of that but not to the point where it bothers me. Maybe it's because most of the game takes place in darkish environment, I dunno.

kelliegator said:

Bloom.

Yeah, bloom does very much suck. I don't think I've ever seen anything resembling bloom in real life. Even on the sunniest days and the whitest surfaces.
The worst is when someone makes a "graphical update" (be it a mod, like for Half-Life 2 or Skyrim, or an official "enhanced version" of agame) and makes the sky fuckin' shining white with bloom because apparently that's cinematic or some shit. Ugh.

Antroid said:

Holy shit I didn't even think of that, it's hilarious that the doom posters AND THE LOGO use these colors too.

Also, I think that cyan+orange is at least a much better movie trend than the ridiculously colorful lighting from much older movies...

Wait, what? Older movies look amazing.

Antroid said:

Yeah, bloom does very much suck. I don't think I've ever seen anything resembling bloom in real life. Even on the sunniest days and the whitest surfaces.
The worst is when someone makes a "graphical update" (be it a mod, like for Half-Life 2 or Skyrim, or an official "enhanced version" of agame) and makes the sky fuckin' shining white with bloom because apparently that's cinematic or some shit. Ugh.

This morning, I was looking out my bedroom window and the sunlight was causing a bit of bloom on the curtain as it peeped through. Subtle, but perceptible. The problem is, games want to make sure you see the effect, so they exaggerate it so much, you scratch your head and go, "Why is that person's fucking skin full of bloom?"

it seems like bloom implementations usually take a one size fits all approach to different lighting scenarios. ie sikkmod for doom3, looks really nice in near dark enviorments, but as soon as you encounter a couple light sources half the screen is washed out. the brighter an enviorment is, the less bloom you need, or something lol.

GoatLord said:

Wait, what? Older movies look amazing.

To each his own. I always thought that the hyper saturated colorful lights everywhere in such movies made them look completely retarded.

I tend to agree with OP, Doom 4 looks a bit urine washed. There was a cool edit made to a screenshot a while ago:





I'm not sure if he also edited the first image to make it look even more like urinal spill-over. I prefer the second, maybe the PC version will be moddable so those of us who liked Powerrangers can sleep at night.

We've already seen this image a number of times.

The hell level is yellow because sulfur, a volcanic element which is piss-yellow because it is. At least there's some bright red puddles of blood at the bottom of the canyon (sort of pictured).

The second image looks like a child went over it with crayons, it's so amateur in it's execution. It's also bizarre to see the bloodred sky not tinting the stone red as well, even PSX/Doom 64 had the sense to do that.

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I was just restating what everyone has said before.

That is all.

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I can understand the rationale behind sulfur etc. but we are also talking about flying demons and a marine who can double-jump; suspending my disbelief further for a bit more color seems pretty easy.

Dinosaurs said:

I can understand the rationale behind sulfur etc. but we are also talking about flying demons and a marine who can double-jump; suspending my disbelief further for a bit more color seems pretty easy.

exactly. who gives a shit if sulpher is supposed to be yellow in a game based around fighting hells minions on mars. still i think that the community shouldnt over react... the game looks good, and for that we should all breathe a sigh of relief.

rampancy said:

exactly. who gives a shit if sulpher is supposed to be yellow in a game based around fighting hells minions on mars. still i think that the community shouldnt over react... the game looks good, and for that we should all breathe a sigh of relief.

A huge fucking sigh too, I honestly was expecting another heavily scripted COD style shooter. The FPS genre has really sucked lately, but it looks like the developers took note of the Doom community and why people play this type of game in the first place.

The emphasis on movement and projectiles has really renewed my hopes for Doom 4.

The game is dynamically lit, you are in the middle of a giant pool of lava in one level, and under a dingy yellow sky in the other. It isn't color grading, it's ambient light that is dominating the scene. It would be like standing in a room lit with incandescent lights... the whole rooms dominant ambient light would be orangish-yellow.

Look at the ending scene of Terminator 2 for an example.

I made a little webm to demonstrate the lighting in the game. Notice the lack of yellow tinge. Also notice how enemy fire lights up the room around them as well as the player's weapon. It's all dynamically lit.

http://webm.host/efa06/vid.webm

Plus, it isn't like this is a shock or something, do you remember Quake II and to a lesser extent, Quake III?

DooM_RO said:

....
http://i.imgur.com/XmmRzMt.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/2O47wsc.jpg

Noiser said:

Let me rephrase: These TWO screenshots looks MORE colorful than ANYTHING I see in the reveal (that wasn't two screens by the way... you have four videos, a trailer and a lot of screens to see).

???????????
Those two monochromatic screenshots are more colorful than ANYTHING shown in the reveal? Seriously?

But Quake 2 is Quake related not Doom related, besides for also the fact that Quake 2 is based on a planet with an orangey/yellow atmosphere.

Avoozl said:

But Quake 2 is Quake related not Doom related, besides for also the fact that Quake 2 is based on a planet with an orangey/yellow atmosphere.

Quake II is hardly Quake related besides having a grenade launcher and sharing a title with the original.

As far as I'm concerned, Every id game from Doom to Doom 3 were all pretty much sequels of eachother. Regardless of name, they were all a weird mish-mash of sci-fi and occult (Quake II being the only one that was strictly sci-fi) and were 3D action shooters with slight horror elements.

All I was trying to point out with Quake II is that the vast majority of that game was washed in orange ambient light. Sure, there was a reason for it. Just like there is a reason for those tones to dominate the 2 neo-Doom levels we've seen. They fit the setting and it's a byproduct of the environment calling for intense colored lighting.

There aren't filters and color grading in neo-Doom, at least not nearly as noticeable as it was in Rage, which used pre-baked lighting and used color grading to simulate atmosphere and ambient lighting.

Obzen said:

Plus, it isn't like this is a shock or something, do you remember Quake II and to a lesser extent, Quake III?

Yeah both Quake and QII were very brown, Quake 4 and Doom 3 were surprisingly colorful in areas though:





Maybe Doom 4 will be the same, we haven't seen all the environments yet so some maps might have more contrast.

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Obzen said:

The game is dynamically lit, you are in the middle of a giant pool of lava in one level, and under a dingy yellow sky in the other. It isn't color grading, it's ambient light that is dominating the scene. It would be like standing in a room lit with incandescent lights... the whole rooms dominant ambient light would be orangish-yellow.

Look at the ending scene of Terminator 2 for an example.

I made a little webm to demonstrate the lighting in the game. Notice the lack of yellow tinge. Also notice how enemy fire lights up the room around them as well as the player's weapon. It's all dynamically lit.

http://webm.host/efa06/vid.webm

Plus, it isn't like this is a shock or something, do you remember Quake II and to a lesser extent, Quake III?


http://www.freakygaming.com/gallery/action_games/quake_2/crawling_marine.jpg

Someone make a "What Quake 2 is vs what Quake 2 should be" pls. kthxbye