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david_a

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Since software ZDoom has the unfortunate problem of totally hanging my system randomly thanks to a 2D ATI driver issue (I think), it seems ZDoomGL is my only hope of playing ZDoom wads. I've been keeping track of current development, but I hadn't planned on trying it until a couple more releases. Well, I went ahead and downloaded 0.73 today after 2.0b42 hanged on me 3 times, and I was quite impressed! This is loads better than the old ZDoomGL!! Feels very solid for such an early release.

That talk about sprite/texture enhancement through filters like console emulators use intrigued me greatly. Is that going to be in 0.74, by any chance? Any screenies? :)

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Heh, it's just an idea right now, so I haven't really looked into it much so far :) But it's still something that I'd really like to investigate, especially for the sprites (I think it'd make the biggest difference there). So it probably won't be in 0.74 since that's looming on the near horizon (mirrors and skyboxes are almost done now, and those were the things I wanted to get done for 0.74).

And thanks for the nice comments! Keeping things as solid as possible is a pretty high priority for me (no sense in having fancy features if they just crash all the time)... That said, in my experience, the old ZDoomGL wasn't that bad, but it sounds like I may have just been lucky :(

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Yeah, the textures probably wouldn't look all that different, and we have high-res textures for that anyway.

I was really interested in how this would look, so I dug around for a test program to apply some of these filters. There's a little test for Kreed's 2xSaI that does just this; put in a bmp, out comes the filtered version 2x as big.

I tried it out on the pinky: http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~aramandb/demon.png

The image on the left was simply resized 400%, the on the right is 2xSaI then a resize. Looks pretty cool if you ask me, I don't really see any of the blurriness that's usually associated with bilinear filtering.

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That looks more blocky than your average znes or gameboy emulator screen for some reason.

That mirror is looking pretty damn fine, I like the subtle contrast shif where the mirror meets the wall :)

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The filtered image was made twice as big so you could see the difference more clearly. The test exe was labeled as "old code," so maybe there's some further hacks in the latest code to make it look better.

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I realy like the result!
it's better than blinelair or trinelair filtering and a lot to blocky sprites without filtering.

maybe if the zdoomgl could ad this in the loading proses,
so that it sharpens the picture a bit(a lot).

Timmie? can u do that?
with an option to turn it on or make it resize the picture even more `£:o)

And about the mirror thing,
that grate on your link also fades out if u look to the end of it(not in the mirror),
so i think it's the mimpap making the tranparent part of the grate this big there is no grate annymore but a fully tranparent render,
this also with the grate in your mirror,
the distance to the grate X2 could have a to far mipmap.

or am i thinking of something else than mipmap? (it should be something downsizing the texture so it's faster loaded and drawed)

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Heh, actually, the far end of the grate is up in the air, so that's why you can't see it there :) There's a few rendering bugs with the two maps in dmc_dm2p.wad... For the most part it's good, though!

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I found another test program for the KScale algorithm.

Here's another shot comparing the three: http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~aramandb/demon2.png

The left is simply resized 400%
The center is 2xSaI, then a 200% resize
The right is KScale, then a 200% resize

The KScale looks totally different since it is only an edge finding algorithm; it doesn't do any blending. I think when the sprites are seen in-game using bilinear filtering that the KScale one might actually look the best, since it only increases the resolution without blurring (bilinear is blurry enough). It's probably the easiest to implement too, since it doesn't mess with the transparency color at all (notice how the edges of the 2xSaI have blue mixed in).

Actually, I just realized something... Since ZDoom supports scaled high-res sprites now, doesn't that mean ZDoomGL does too? Couldn't someone just run through all the sprites for a monster, shove them in a WAD, and write a little DEH thing to scale them (or however you do it)?

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Okay, so that someone was me:

demon.zip

It didn't turn out that hot. The reduction back down to 8-bit color added some nasty dithering, even though the image had less than 256 colors (Irfanview bug). I only tried it in software ZDoom; the result was hardly breath taking.

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I think you could get around the blending blue edges by just switching the color to black.

Im not too sure about that kscale thing. 2xSAI works really well for cartoony console games, id like to be able to see it in action on the doom sprites.

Cant you do an 8 bit conversion with the doom pallete in irfanview without dithering? Hmm corel paint would do that in seconds....

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Irfanview seems to ALWAYS dither the image, no matter what. It doesn't matter if the picture has 4 unique colors and you downgrade it to 16bpp from 32bpp; it will dither. I didn't feel like digging up another gfx program, because Irfanview can go through those things pretty quickly. Maybe the GIMP supports batch commands, I dunno. If anybody wants to redo the gfx wad, that would be cool...

I'll probably send an email to the Iview guy about that. It's caused be troubles in the past too.

I think you could get around the blending blue edges by just switching the color to black.


If you do that, you'll end up with a black border around the image. I guess the other option is to make the semi-blue pixels translucent, but you would end up with "fuzzy" edges. The black edges might not look all that bad, I dunno.

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