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codeslicer

Smoothing out the sprited

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I know this might be a bad post (I had a little too much to drink) why does everyone use that whateveryacallit to smooth out all the sprites? It's ugly A-F!

Explain it to me, damnit!

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Bilinear filtering is a texture filtering method used to smooth textures when displayed larger or smaller than they actually are.

Most of the time, when drawing a textured shape on the screen, the texture is not displayed exactly as it is stored, without any distortion. Because of this, most pixels will end up needing to use a point on the texture that is "between" texels, assuming the texels are points (as opposed to, say, squares) in the middle (or on the upper left corner, or anywhere else; it does not matter, as long as it is consistent) of their respective "cells". Bilinear filtering uses these points to perform bilinear interpolation between the four texels nearest to the point that the pixel represents (in the middle or upper left of the pixel, usually).

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"Ugly" is subjective. Some people might see pixels as ugly, and bilinear filtering as good. I personally have it the other way around (at least in Doom, I prefer pixels and dislike filtering). But we're not all the same, are we?

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Unless he's referring to the smooth animation mod, in which case I'm kinda inclined to agree. It's hard work for sure, but I still think they did a sloppy job. Many limbs still "jump" position because they didn't bother creating tween-frames for them, and the tweened bits there are are awkwardly done without a true sense of their motion or momentum. Not that the original sprites had great animation mind you, but they still had a better sense of motion than the mod in question, which leans on the quality of what it was based on.

It looks too artificial because they often put things right in the middle of the two positions. It's better to look at the overall path arc and deliberately bias the tween frame toward one or the other frame in order to imply acceleration and deceleration, rather than a mechanical looking constant rate of speed.

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I like smooth sprites. The edges sure don't look great but the details in the middle look alright and that's what you mainly concentrate on.

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Pixelated is better imho. There is more contrast in the sprite's coloration. The filtering effect makes me feel like I need to wear glasses.

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Sodaholic said:

Unless he's referring to the smooth animation mod, in which case I'm kinda inclined to agree. It's hard work for sure, but I still think they did a sloppy job. Many limbs still "jump" position because they didn't bother creating tween-frames for them, and the tweened bits there are are awkwardly done without a true sense of their motion or momentum. Not that the original sprites had great animation mind you, but they still had a better sense of motion than the mod in question, which leans on the quality of what it was based on.

It looks too artificial because they often put things right in the middle of the two positions. It's better to look at the overall path arc and deliberately bias the tween frame toward one or the other frame in order to imply acceleration and deceleration, rather than a mechanical looking constant rate of speed.


You talking about Smooth Doom? I don't know about you, but I think those animations are sexy. So sexy that Sarge couldn't help himself but to steal some of them for Brutal Doom. They were asking for it, of course.

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scifista42 said:

"Ugly" is subjective. Some people might see pixels as ugly, and bilinear filtering as good. I personally have it the other way around (at least in Doom, I prefer pixels and dislike filtering). But we're not all the same, are we?


That's because Doom is low res to the point that individual details are measured in singular pixels so blurring them produces very bad results. At a greater detail, the effect works better like, say, 256x256 sized textures.

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Just played on the lowest resolution prboom could do* 640x480 (* from the menu) on a 13inch laptop.
Pixels.
Downloaded chocolate-doom, launched it "chocolate-doom -window -width 320 height 200 -1" and pixels again.
The engine didn't listen really to the commands:
I_InitGraphics: 8bpp color depth not supported.
I_InitGraphics: Auto-adjusted to 320x240x32bpp.

But doom never was smooth, ain't it ?

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But honestly Doom's sprites were not made with linear/bilinear/trilinear in mind, Doom was before any of those hardware methods existed, as is said they aren't big enough to look okay with those filters applied.

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If playing casually and not filming, I turn filtering to the pixely look but (linear mip map, etc) but if I am filming, I turn filtering on because compressing with H.264 looks like crap with it off.

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Somehow, I just like it. Larger monsters like Cacodemons and Cyberdemons don't look too bad with that, I believe. It also depends on the art style. Sprites with a smoother art style do look quite better than those without it.

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codeslicer said:

Why not smooth out the whole map?

I thought walltextures and flats were filtered the same way as sprites by default. You can play with your Display Options (Options -> Display Options -> OpenGL Options -> Texture Options).

Weapons, and also all objects on the HUD, already have the correct on-screen size. The engine never needs to resize them according to perspective. That's why no filtering is applied to them.

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You can see the difference between a game that wasn't meant to be filtered (Classic Doom) and a game that was designed around having filtering, Doom 64, since the N64 seems to force trilinear filtering on everything. The sprites look much better filtered than the Original Doom's do since it was designed with that fact in mind.


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I agree, I think the filtering looks pretty awful in classic Doom but works well in D64.

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Linear filtering I think would be most useful, for Pixel-lovers, if it would only apply the linear filters on the farther away, mipmapped versions of textures/sprites, and leave the nearest images unfiltered for the classic look up close. As it is, when using a port with mipmapping turned on and no filtering applied, far away textures alias and swim slightly (though not as much as unmippmapped vanilla rendering). If linear filtering is turned on with mipmapping, far away scenes are smooth, but getting close to things gives the blurry out-of-focus mess.

I have a small more resource-heavy workaround that looks somewhat better: I upscaled all the textures to 2x or 3x their original sizes, using nearest upscaling, and I load that pack as a hi-res texture replacement, then turn on linear filtering and mipmapping. That makes up-close pixels somewhat more classic, though the edges of pixels get blurry, and far away views still look great with no aliasing during movement. It would be neat if GZdoom allowed this type of nearest-upscaling alongside the other 2x-4x HQnX filters.

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scifista42 said:

Weapons, and also all objects on the HUD, already have the correct on-screen size. The engine never needs to resize them according to perspective. That's why no filtering is applied to them.

Are you playing in 320x200?

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It's the jarring contrast between the blurry sprites and the sharp edges across the alpha that bothers me the most. This started getting more problematic as we play these old games in higher and higher rendering resolutions which exasperates the crudeness when compared with the pristine 3D geometry. Back when the games were rendered in 240p or 480p, the resolution worked as a kind of equalizer and brought a consistency to the visuals.

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Da Werecat said:

Are you playing in 320x200?

I said "according to perspective", which is different from resizing according to screen resolution. It's not just playing with words, the engine actually handles each of the procedures differently.

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