esselfortium
Cumulonimbus Antagonistic Posting
Posts: 5268
Registered: 01-02 |
Software looks better to me in most maps, but it's not because of an inherent limit in GL rendering. It's more, I think, due to keeping too closely to trying to emulate how Doom's lighting worked and not really being able to get there, ending up in some weird limbo of true-color rendering that still has chunky sector lighting.
I've found that lighting that is completely fine in the software renderer tends to look flat and lifeless in GL (and as a result, so do the textures themselves) unless the map was very carefully designed to take advantage of true color rendering's strengths; conversely I think most maps just end up playing to GL's weaknesses, including a lot of the currently-released maps maps that require it.
Sector lighting in GL tends to look chunky even when it's gradiented pretty thoroughly, and unfortunately GZDoom's dynamic lights aren't capable enough to close the gap and be used by themselves, and maps that attempt this tend to look rather drab: dark rooms with blob lights alone do not a good map make.
I do quite like the appearance of Doomsday's renderer (fake radiosity, yay) and its BIAS lighting system sounds like a promising solution to the old problem of sector lighting in a true-color renderer, but updates to the port have seemingly been in development hell since like 2003, now. :(
Doom64EX is one obvious case where GL works. The game's resources were all designed around the renderer's abilities (and/or vice versa :P), and the altered map format is directly built around its lighting system, which has little to no relation to how lighting is set up in standard Doom maps. It admittedly still takes a lot of sectors to get the floor/ceiling lighting to look as smooth as the walls so easily do, though :P
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11-21-11 07:24 
