SArais Posted April 29, 2017 (edited) As I'm currently taking it upon myself to experiment with the HOM effect (which cannot be replicated in gzdoom sadly), I'm curious if others have had the same idea and started playing with combinations of HOMS, textures, things, and map geometry to create interesting effects. So far; my experiments have yielded that it seems to look "somewhat okay" as a Trim for Void-themes. 0 Share this post Link to post
Octavarium Posted April 29, 2017 I think there's an old trick using HOMs and/or bleeding effects to make a neat light "reflection" to be used on liquids or a faked reflective floor, someone else probably knows what I'm talking about hopefully. There used to be a few pics of it floating around; it used a water flat in a sewery type setting, if i remember right. It basically makes it appear that a light source is kind of following you as you move around the effect, kind of like in real life, if any of this makes any sense 3 Share this post Link to post
Pirx Posted April 29, 2017 19 minutes ago, SArais said: off the top of my head, 50 shades of graytall, map06, because i found the HOM corridor there really impressive, especially for the (intentionally) limited resources of the wad. discussion about here 0 Share this post Link to post
Tristan Posted April 29, 2017 Yeah Graytall MAP06 was the first I thought of. I think Mutiny MAP02 (and maybe others in that WAD) uses that reflection trick Octavarium mentioned. 0 Share this post Link to post
Fonze Posted April 29, 2017 Like Oct and Eris said, as light reflections HoMs can be pretty sweet. (Mut map01, not 2 ;p) You can also use HoMs intentionally for a more standard floor/ceiling brightness, like around bright lights, or just to disguise a hole in the floor/ceiling for another purpose, such as when working with complicated lifts, though this is largely useless in most advance ports due to the fake ceiling/floor/brightness effect anyway. There are a few more cool HoM uses I'm failing to remember off the top of my head, though. 0 Share this post Link to post
BigDickBzzrak Posted April 29, 2017 (edited) wow.wad BTW that "illusio-pit" effect can be put to GREAT use. I've once made a lift that has a different floor texture when it's up and when it's down using that effect, in vanilla. Resulted in some fat slimetrails, though. All thanks to wow.wad! 0 Share this post Link to post
bemused Posted April 29, 2017 Best 2 examples i can think of are: HOM corridor in slaughterfest 2012 map 29 Falling through the map into a pair of bottomless lava pits in slaughterfest 3 map 29 Both time of death maps. He seems to have a pretty decent grasp of fucking about with the way things are rendered in-game to make things look pretty cool so probably worth downloading some of his work to see it in more detail 0 Share this post Link to post
SArais Posted April 29, 2017 (edited) Strange, never noticed those Edited April 29, 2017 by SArais 0 Share this post Link to post
40oz Posted April 29, 2017 (edited) It may be important to make the distinction that Hall of Mirrors effect and sector flat bleeding are two different things. When a one sided wall is missing a texture, it projects whatever graphics were last in front of it, so when you stand in front of it and fire the shotgun, it projects all the frames of the shotgun layered on top of one another, giving the illusion of a hall of mirrors. Sector bleeding occurs when two sided lines are missing textures. This causes which ever floor flat is visible from the angle the player sees to wrap over where the wall would have been drawn. Sector bleeding is used to project the illusions of light reflections and deep water you can swim in. Ive heard the deep water illusion can also be used with a regular floor to simulate crouching but i don't know if ive seen a wad do that yet. There's not a whole lot of cool stuff you can do with the HOM effect, but a trick rarely used that you can do with Boom is that you use a middle texture with translucent properties against a HOM effect and it has this cool hazy glimmer effect, good for maybe some sort of walk-through teleport gate. EDIT ive seen waist deep water plenty times, but has anyone recently reproduced this vanilla submersible water effect shown in PG-RAW.wad MAP31? (about 2:30 in) Edited April 29, 2017 by 40oz 1 Share this post Link to post
NuMetalManiak Posted April 29, 2017 I can't recall if it was deliberate or not but I remember seeing the nukage halls in MAP15 of Strain with HOMs, as if they simulated a sloped surface for the nukage. 0 Share this post Link to post
Graf Zahl Posted April 29, 2017 Let me tell you the same thing as I did on the GZDoom bug tracker: HOMs should not be abused! They only work as 'intended' if the same frame buffer is being used consecutively for each frame. Change even a small bit and there won't be any HOM or the HOM will look like crap. GZDoom, for example, clears the frame buffer each time it starts rendering, for other hardware accelerated ports that do page flipping it won't produce some 'nice' looking distortion effect but rapid flickering between two different states - and who knows what all the software rendered ports do. Wanna bet that some also use either double buffering or clear the buffer or do other stuff? Things get even worse if future optimizations need to be considered. What if renderer and play code are thread-separated and to handle consecutive frames some parallel computing is done on two frames at the same time? Then it will become impossible to have a 'well-defined' HOM effect. The operative term here is "undefined". Due to what happens there is no way to predict how the HOM will look, 2 Share this post Link to post
Doomkid Posted April 29, 2017 The first maps I ever saw make use of the bleeding sector lights were Toke's DM wads. Used to great effect! To follow what Graf said (sorta), I always found it strange how HOMs "animate" in vanilla, put in some ports they remain "still".. Difficult to explain, might post a little video, but I was always curious why this was the case. 0 Share this post Link to post
Octavarium Posted April 30, 2017 Huh, I guess the light reflection trick was more common than I thought. Also, I suppose it is more of a bleeding effect than a HOMmy one. Ah well, I tried! 0 Share this post Link to post
Graf Zahl Posted April 30, 2017 8 hours ago, Doomkid said: The first maps I ever saw make use of the bleeding sector lights were Toke's DM wads. Used to great effect! To follow what Graf said (sorta), I always found it strange how HOMs "animate" in vanilla, put in some ports they remain "still".. Difficult to explain, might post a little video, but I was always curious why this was the case. That is the double buffering effect. If you only have one buffer, all frames will add up in a single buffer But if you double buffer, you will have different remnants in the two buffers so if you switch between them you will see remnants A for one frame and remnants B for the other. And the light bleeding is just the unclipped middle texture being renderer over the floor. Again it should be noted that this only works with software rendering. As soon as a depth buffer comes into play it won't show anymore. 1 Share this post Link to post
printz Posted April 30, 2017 As much as I like vanilla hacks, HOM just looks lame. To demonstrate, just load the automap and clear it. Now the HOM looks like the automap, instead of looking like its hall-of-mirrors (pretty unsatisfactory) metaphor! Now I'm not gonna ask you to avoid making HOM labyrinths; go ahead. 1 Share this post Link to post
MFG38 Posted April 30, 2017 I know that HOMs can be utilized for creating mountain-like landscape borders in vanilla Doom. I haven't seen it done a whole lot, though - but then, I've only played a select few vanilla wads, let alone ones that utilize the effect. Make a bunch of sectors, bring their floors up to random heights, make another sector behind them, bring its ceiling all the way down to the floor, leave the sidedefs of the backing sector untextured. Simple, but effective and cool-looking. 0 Share this post Link to post
Memfis Posted April 30, 2017 Ah fuck, all links here are dead: https://www.doomworld.com/vb/doom-general/49235-hom-art-new-pics/ Does anyone have these pics? 0 Share this post Link to post
Soundblock Posted April 30, 2017 (edited) I find stairsteps that are one pixel high to look best untextured. Kinda makes a slope, and doesn't look like a giant tapeworm stretched from wall to wall. Not really a HOM, but "sector bleeding", but since we're also mentioning other "untextured effects"... 7 hours ago, printz said: As much as I like vanilla hacks, HOM just looks lame. To demonstrate, just load the automap and clear it. Now the HOM looks like the automap, instead of looking like its hall-of-mirrors (pretty unsatisfactory) metaphor! Now I'm not gonna ask you to avoid making HOM labyrinths; go ahead. Yeah, the automap or weapon-reload frames showing through are real immersion/third-wall breakers and the reason I'll never deliberatley use a HOM in any of my maps. 0 Share this post Link to post
SArais Posted April 30, 2017 (edited) 2 hours ago, Soundblock said: Yeah, the automap or weapon-reload frames showing through are real immersion/third-wall breakers and the reason I'll never deliberatley use a HOM in any of my maps. Arguably the largest problem of it sadly; Graytall's 6th map uses the homs to an interesting effect in the lower half with "hom alternators" if you will. Makes a really neat wavy effect with the doortraks and fireblus; and the holes make really interesting tunnels. I also tried stuffing HOMS inside of switches; It mostly works; except for the fact that each peice of the texture needs to change; not just the part of the switch pressed. 1 Share this post Link to post
Dr. Zin Posted April 30, 2017 20 hours ago, 40oz said: Sector bleeding is used to project the illusions of light reflections and deep water you can swim in. Ive heard the deep water illusion can also be used with a regular floor to simulate crouching but i don't know if ive seen a wad do that yet. https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/a-c/barracks Is an early showcase for a bunch of other vanilla visual tricks as well. 1 Share this post Link to post
SleepyVelvet Posted April 30, 2017 keep in mind that different port settings, like frame rate and turning speed, can make the homs look either chunky or creamy. The graytall map06 basement looked better creamy for sure, and the fatter the strip of HOM is, the more it will suffer from artifacts. This is why the hallway wall is partitioned into those narrow strips. the windows in the center room, the wider HOMs, could might of well have been Sky and looked fine for all I know. But, i was fixated on the HOM gimmick. also, the Invis spheres make cool eyeballs, and i liked how they combined with conveyor belt and silent teleporter in addition to the HOM. I thought the "latent image" effect could be used here, so i experimented with it: the red-blue eyeballs, and teleporting archvile's in the mirrors. 1 Share this post Link to post
SArais Posted April 30, 2017 1 hour ago, Dr. Zin said: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/a-c/barracks Is an early showcase for a bunch of other vanilla visual tricks as well. Very useful. 0 Share this post Link to post
Jon Posted August 29, 2017 I agree HOM looks awful and basically should not be intentionally used. Some historic WADs have used it intentionally. King REoL certainly did for at least one map. I still fully intend to get the HOM/triple buffering code into chocolate doom (nukeyt has written it, but I think it needs some work) 1 Share this post Link to post