problem

load up a recent freedoom build, warp to map31. notice how all the east-west walls are much foggier than the north-south ones. any one have any ideas on why this is?

esayeek said:
load up a recent freedoom build, warp to map31. notice how all the east-west walls are much foggier than the north-south ones. any one have any ideas on why this is?

Welcome to fake_contrast land, id software's cheap trick to make levels look more 3D.

North-south walls are made artificially light, and east-west walls are made artificially dark. You can see this in any Doom level once you know it's there. This works nice if your idea of level design is lots of cuboid rooms. Conversely it can really mess up your super-detailed modern level if it looks out of place (e.g. Darkening ep2 map01's canyon has some oddly lit walls due to this effect).

Of course, if you're replacing darkening with fogging, you'll really hate this feature, because you definitely don't want fog to vary depending on the angle of the wall... only thing I can suggest is avoid axis-aligned walls...

Shouldn't PrBoom disable that...?

cph said:

Welcome to fake_contrast land, id software's cheap trick to make levels look more 3D.

North-south walls are made artificially light, and east-west walls are made artificially dark. You can see this in any Doom level once you know it's there. This works nice if your idea of level design is lots of cuboid rooms. Conversely it can really mess up your super-detailed modern level if it looks out of place (e.g. Darkening ep2 map01's canyon has some oddly lit walls due to this effect).

Of course, if you're replacing darkening with fogging, you'll really hate this feature, because you definitely don't want fog to vary depending on the angle of the wall... only thing I can suggest is avoid axis-aligned walls...

of course you're right, but here's one more question: how did i play doom for 8 years and miss this until now (when an odd colormap happens to accentuate the effect)?

esayeek said:
of course you're right, but here's one more question: how did i play doom for 8 years and miss this until now (when an odd colormap happens to accentuate the effect)?

Join the club... I only spotted it after searching for a bug for hours to explain why a particular wall on DE2 map01 was darkened.

Fredrik said:
Shouldn't PrBoom disable that...?

I'd love to, but all ports do it and all levels are designed using it (not with it in mind, but if you test how a room looks with it, it'll look different without it). And there's nothing in the WAD format to allow me to configure it per-level. There's the fake_contrast option in prboom.cfg, if you want to play with this.

Ah, good. Thanks.