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DaniJ said:

Most (all?) OpenGL source ports provide options to change how sprites are drawn. You can have them aligned to the view plane, just like the software renderer if you wish.

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Wagi said:
GZDoom barely does this. Graf said it looked unnatural.

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Phobus said:
I quite like the additional vibrancy of software rendering. Particularly when compared to how two dimensional the textures, flats and sprites look in OpenGL, due to it being a full 3D environment.

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Graf Zahl said:
It does half the strength of the software renderer. Fake Contrast, after all, is merely a hack to add more definition and too much of it can be disruptive. With true color even more.

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Gez said:

Where does this halving takes place? The only things I could find was the default value of gl_weaponlight set to 8 instead of 16 like in software (but since it's a console variable people can change it if so they want);

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Gez said:

and in gl_CalcLightLevel the halving of relative light if it's negative and the light is below gl_light_ambient (which by default is 20, so it's rarely halved).

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Graf Zahl said:
That's what I meant. I didn't remember that it actually was a console variable. Even better. ;)


That's different and was needed because it would have caused extremely strong light flashes from weapon firing.

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Wagi said:

1) Curving the sky into a sphere, even if the sky is composed of mountains.

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Wagi said:

I'm not bothered by software's freelook because
1) The "stretching effect" is barely noticable at Heretic/Hexen's original freelook limits.
2) There is rarely a reason to look up/down that far in Doom engine games, and even then vertical hitscans are buggy, so what's the point?

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Graf Zahl said:

Despite many claims to the contrary, there is no 'right' way to play Doom. What does constitute proper lighting? Even the software renderer's was subject to the gamma correction feature - and that had much more severe effects than OpenGL - so anyone stating that there's precisely one correct way for Doom to look is flat out wrong

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Graf Zahl said:
It merely sounds like you are using a lower gamma on software than on hardware rendering. Too high gamma can indeed make things look flat and dull.

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phi108 said:
One thing that I would like to see in a GL engine is a different filtering method applied to the first mipmap level versus the second and all other further mips. Up close, I like the unfiltered raw look for sprites and textures. But with no filtering and nearest-neighbor mipmapping, far away views can have some aliasing during movement. I prefer bilinear/trilinear filtering for faw away scenes, so if a GL engine could somehow make that filtering switch at the first mipmap level, I wonder if it would look any good.

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Dragonsbrethren said:

The only other problem with hardware renderers is the sprite clipping. I've always wondered (as a complete idiot when it comes to doing any programming that is practical for today's world) if it would be possible to do a software pass for the sprites, which keeping the geometry itself hardware rendered. Maybe it would kill the speed as bad as a true software renderer, I don't know, it's just something I'm curious about.

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Graf Zahl said:



Aside from killing the performance it wouldn't help, for various reasons:

1. The clipping info for such a pass does not exist. If it did it could also be done in hardware directly.
2. Geometry transformation is not identical unless looking straight ahead so even if it could be done it would not match.

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