EDGE 1.31-Beta#1

The EDGE Team are happy to announce that EDGE 1.31-Beta#1 has been released. This is a Work-In-Progress package provided for testing, and there is still a lot to do. Three demo wads are included: one for MD2 models, one for mirrors, and one showing the flat alignment/scaling feature.

Home page: http://edge.sourceforge.net/

Major Changes

• MD2 models for things and weapons
  
• Mirrors with multiple reflections
  
• Good emulation of partial-invisibility effect
  
• Nicer dynamic lighting, sector glow effects
  
• Improved way of emulating DOOM light fading
  
• Rendering glitches fixed
  
  
• Flat alignment and scaling line-types
  
• TGA (targa) image format supported
  
• Monster weak spots, defined by DDF
  
• New DDF BECOME() action for changing type
  
• Armor properties can be modified
  

KNOWN PROBLEMS

• changing resolution messes up the screen (must restart)
  
• sound still does not work under Vista
  
• colormapped sectors (e.g. blue water) don't work yet
  
• monsters with models seem to move very jerkily
  
• console background is a bit messed up
  
• additive dyn-lights on mid-masked textures look weird
  

Download link: http://downloads.sourceforge.net/edge/Edge-1.31-Beta1.zip (2.6 MB)

Full list of changes is here:
https://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=560547&group_id=2232

Note: this executable has an experimental method to emulate the grayscale effect of the Invulnerability powerup. On the low-end cards I tested, it either doesn't work or works very slowly (probably done in software), and there has been a report of it causing a crash. I would appreciate more feedback about it (whether or not it works for you).

Wow! I do not see any seams! Great.

I have 1 fps on radeon 9800pro if I get invul

You can see the latest prboom+ sources for real invul effect without colormaps (for hireses), which works even on voodoo

That hq2x scaling code is awesome!

Confirm 1fps when you grab invul, I have a radeon 9000.
I tried the eat command with various values but couldn't see a difference. (using process explorer)
While doing so I noticed the program is very good in alt-tabbing.
I noticed a flashing blue diskette icon sometimes in the right lower part of my screen.
Setting hq2x overall looks awesome.

The invulnerability effect is at normal fps for me.. I'm using an nvidia 8600gt though

Yeah, the invincible effect doesn't impact my performance at all, and I'm using a Radeon X850 card.

I wish the program was more Vista-friendly though :( It's horrible at alt-tabbing, and the program takes so long to load, but it's worth it.

And yes, hq2x is nice. Good job andy!

RTC_Marine said:

The invulnerability effect is at normal fps for me.. I'm using an nvidia 8600gt though

The same on my 8800, but effect is only invert with blend (like vanilla prboom does). Not real BW as in doom. On my Radeon I have 1 fps, but effect looks like a real bw

Oh and if you run icd-tst2.wad with icd-se.wad and enable -infight, the engine will crash after a while

DUPLICATE (delete me)

You can see the latest prboom+ sources for real invul effect without colormaps (for hireses), which works even on voodoo

PrBoom+ uploads double the number of textures (one set transformed to grayscale at load time) and the appropriate set used when desired, so yes, it'll work on a Voodoo. However, you'd quickly run low on texture memory and begin to suffer speed issues due to swapping (especially with hires textures, model skins etc, etc).

But then Voodoo doesn't have fragment programs (obviously) so a fallback is necessary if you want to support such hardware. Personally, I would choose the texenv blending for Voodoo and the duplicate texture approach for later cards with more vram but no fragment programs.

DaniJ said:

You are loading double the number of textures (one set transformed to grayscale at load time)

No! See SVN sources. I use double number of textures only with gl_boom_colormaps 1

gl_texture_usehires and gl_patch_usehires do not work with gl_boom_colormaps 1

http://prboom-plus.sourceforge.net/cm.png
http://prboom-plus.sourceforge.net/new0.png
http://prboom-plus.sourceforge.net/new1.png

https://www.crowproductions.de/repos/prboom/branches/prboom-plus-24/prboom2/

Whether you are doing it for _ALL_ textures or half of them, the technique remains the same.

DaniJ said:

Whether you are doing it for _ALL_ textures or half of them, the technique remains the same.

I do not do it at all. It is only a post-effect fully similar to doom bw and it does not use PS

I've not checked the source. I was only going by what I'd heard. That'll teach me to check my facts first.

So I take it that it is a buffered render post-processing step, color-averaging down RGB to desaturate?

DaniJ said:

I've not checked the source. I was only going by what I'd heard. That'll teach me to check my facts first.

So I take it that it is a buffered render post-processing step, color-averaging down RGB to desaturate?

There are three method there. With and witout FBO. FBO has its two methods: doom bw and dotproduct bw

Preferred method is:
1) rendering all polygons into texture with GL_MODULATE and glColor3f(0.5, 0.5, 0.5) //or something similar
2) copying texture to screen with GL_COMBINE+GL_DOT3_RGB+glColor3f(0.3f, 0.3f, 0.4f) //or something similar
3) http://prboom-plus.sourceforge.net/new0.png

You can see gl_main.c and USE_FBO_TECHNIQUE define there

Invisibility worked fine here.

Tested on:

1. NVidia GForce4 4000 MX
2. NVidia GForce 7600
3. Ati X700 mobile

In MD2_DEMO.wad models death sequence seems slow, maybe twice as faster??

Thanks everybody for testing and other info.

I'm going to implement an new option for the invulnerability effect, a choice between the simple blending, the color-matrix way, and the colormap-every-texture way. Entryway's FBO method sounds cool, but FBOs and shaders are stuff I'm not interested in learning right now.

Uh, I'm not getting any sound. At all. Not even .mus music.

Jim Rainer said:

Uh, I'm not getting any sound. At all. Not even .mus music.

Do you have Vista?

*faps to feature list**

Now if only i had time/care to work on doom stuff

*Yes i am well aware other engines have had things like it for years, but i don't use those engines.

Works pretty well for me. In fact, quite possibly the best that any version of EDGE has. It just feels a lot better than some previous versions have.

No problems at all with the invincibility effect other than it seems to cancel immediately rather than flashing on and off to give me a warning that it's running out.

The hq2x code looks a lot better than I expected it to. I'm not sure whether I like it or not, but it does work well. It kind of makes things look a bit like oil paintings - especially obvious on the cast call after map30 - and I'm not sure if I like that effect or not. But hey, it's optional.

Ajapted said:

Do you have Vista?

Unfortunately, yes.
EDIT: Fuck, I did not see that sentence under the known problems list.

Which sound library is EDGE using? Obviously not a particularly good one...

Monster weak spots, defined by DDF

This sounds really interesting. I wonder if ZDoom/GZDoom will implement something like this in the future.

Nice to see that long sound effects play even if the thing playing them vanishes (like lightning) again. Also i've been having a play with some of the new dynamic lighting, the BFG blast now lights up a whole room, and the lighting bolts from my Storm Demon are blinding when they hit

Graf Zahl said:

Which sound library is EDGE using? Obviously not a particularly good one...

SDL, plus some custom code for MUS and CD music.

Vista broke backwards compatibility with applications that worked fine in XP, so blame Microsoft instead of the libraries.

Just thought I chime in to agree with what Ajapted said about audio under Vista. We have the same problem with Doomsday atm and in order to support all of Vista's new audio features (which are pretty damn nice imo) it means we need to implement an alternative path for audio.