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SArais

Good use of delibrate HOMs?

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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.

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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

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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

 

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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

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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 by 40oz

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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.

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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,

 

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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.

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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!

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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.

 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

 

 

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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.

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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.

 

 

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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)

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