Mithran Denizen
Senior Member

Posts: 1093
Registered: 05-10 |
wesleyjohnson said:
I did not imply a disaster. I stated that it will undo much level developer work, and change the levels appearance.
How much of your work is honestly 'undone' by shifting the hues of two color ranges slightly? Come on. If you're talking about PWAD authors rather than yourself, then their meticulous work is already more 'undone' in Freedoom by the fact that all the textures look different from Doom's, not to mention that all of their maps are suddenly populated with drastically different looking monsters, some of which look downright stupid by comparison.
Anyway, significantly changing the game's appearance is still the most persuasive part of this idea, because it might help Freedoom stand out a bit more as a valid entity in itself, rather than just being seen as a crappier version of Doom. If people are serious about wanting something that closely resembles Doom and plays like Doom does, then they'll probably just choose Doom, regardless.
So, who is going to elect themselves to do this total makeover of appearance, and will anyone else be able to re-edit it afterwards.
Obviously this thread would be much more worthwhile if Freedoom had some kind of acting 'art director', or at least some kind of artistic direction and/or guidelines. In the absence of such, however, I don't think this discussion can hurt anything. I seriously doubt that anyone will attempt to hijack Freedoom and impose a new palette against community consensus.
FreeDoom is not a totally new game, it is a separately generated Doom without the legal entanglements of the original. It is tied to that mission and thus should be seeking to be as close as the "legally separate generation" necessity allows. This mission does not allow FreeDoom to explore all the wad modifications and enhanced lumps that are possible. The PWADs are high priority in the FreeDoom mission that I remember.
I'd still argue that Freedoom should strive to be as different a game from Doom as possible, while preserving basic compatibility with its map and demo formats. Again, a little more distinctiveness could go a long way toward making Freedoom seem less like "that crappy Doom ripoff that nobody cares about" and more like an actual game that can stand on its own merits.
Nobody is talking about exploring any advanced "wad modifications" or "enhanced lumps", though; we're talking about not copying DOOM.WAD's PLAYPAL lump verbatim. The palette has been in the IWAD (and modifiable via PWADs) since the beginning.
Besides, Freedoom's maps make use of Boom extensions anyway, which is something I recall you fervently supporting in the past, so I'm not sure where this argument of purism is coming from all of the sudden. Seeking to be as close to Doom as legally possible might make more sense if the maps themselves were vanilla compatible, but as it stands, Freedoom can't even be be run under "vanilla" or "chocolate" style engines without the gross hack of having to replace all the Boom maps with vanilla ones. Even so, striving to emulate Doom as close as legally possible will result in, at best, an IWAD that is a Doom knockoff of worse quality. So long as some semblance of internal consistency can be maintained, then the more originality that can be breathed into the project, the better.
If we want a totally new game, we can start a new WAD. Call it FreeWAD or something. It can throw off all the encumbrances of having to retain compatibility.
Taking Freedoom in that direction would make it much more interesting and valid in my opinion, but it seems like a bit of a strawman argument. Nobody here has said anything about disregarding compatibility; we think Freedoom can stand as its own Doom-compatible game without having to ape its palette to the exact detail.
Lastly, Is this something that cannot be done just by altering your Gamma controls. You can make it darker that way too. DoomLegacy has the Gamma, bright, and black level controls, and other ports have color balancing controls too.
None of the ports that I use have any color balancing controls, but even if they did, that's not the point. The idea is to give Freedoom a more unique and consistent look, not to fiddle with engine-specific methods of tweaking the screen.
[edit: minor clarification]
Last edited by Mithran Denizen on 09-03-11 at 00:55
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