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Indecom4000

WIP: Project Tremors

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Oh hi, I didn't see you there.

 

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My name is Indecom, ( yes by birth  ;)  ) You may not know me as the current developer of the game Starr Mazer DSP, or as the guy who exploded in Devolver Digital's Big Fancy Press Conference 2018 all over Nina Struthers' face during the reveal of Metal Wolf Chaos, or that one time that I did a bunch of visual effects for the live action short film based on the game "The Messenger," or that other time that I made a Doom wad called Quaken Doom 2:

 

You might also know me as the guy that keeps bugging developers to implement advanced materials and per pixel dynamic lighting into the sprite renderer.
But enough of this talking about myself nonsense.

Let's get down to the nitty really, why you're here and why I'm throwing all of this hand written blarney into your eyeholes. Since the full implementation of surface and post processing shaders was realized, something from deep inside me began to rumble. After getting that checked out by a licensed physician, I got a pretty cool idea for a GZDoom based project. I've been inspired by the recent insurgence of "throwback" fps games like Project Warlock, Amide Evil, Dusk, Ion Maiden, and Wrath: Aeon of Ruin. That's when I decided that the next big release from my game studio would be a full commercial game built around a heavily modified, ancient technology, GZDoom ( preferably Vulkan when it's ready lol )

It was at this point that I began to experiment with things. I created what I refer to as the Retro Effects Suite. A low resolution, bit depth limit shader with variable dither:

 

Click Images for Imgur Galleries

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After I got that working I began to experiment with advanced materials and lighting:

image.png.de6ca11cf4c7e37142f56e387f471eb6.png

 

It was at this point that I wanted to push things farther. I wanted to replicate the effect that was being used in Amid Evil. I wanted to create 2D player weapon sprites that are realistically lit by dynamic lights in the level. You may not be aware of this, but sprites are currently incapable of utilizing advanced material shaders, something that is almost required for this to work.

 

But what DOES work is using an md3 model of a flat plane instead of a sprite:

 image.png.2ee81d2bb5faaadfb5292abd79fae083.png 

 

For a better look, check out this video:

 

Yay! It works! It works when everyone said it would look stupid, well I sure something something something...

ANYWAYS, this is great, this all proves that my I am fully capable of achieving the aesthetic that I have in mind for this project. The next step is developing the world of Project Tremors, the codename I've assigned myself for this project.

 

What is Project Tremors? Well, it's not futuristic, it's not modern sci-fi, and there will be no guns.
All the content that I've curated above? Yeah, that's right on down the trash shoot to junkyardtown!

Instead, look at this picture that I found on the internet that captures the kind of atmosphere I'm aiming for:
wallhaven-409112.jpg.5c9089574bb98ae6cd03c6d249114f2c.jpg


Anyways, that's enough of me smashing my fingers into the keyboard. Keep your eyes here for further experimentations and developments.

 

 

If you want to play with some of my earlier tests, here's a download for you:
DOWNLOAD

GZDoom 3.6 minimum

IWAD: Doom2

Screenshot_Doom_20180406_021114.png

Edited by Indecom4000 : Added Logo

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Your out-of-season April Fools joke  thread kinda make me confused. What is the premise of this mod? 
(Sorry if this offended you.)

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There isn't one yet, I'm still developing the idea. I'm using this thread as a sort of dev log for the process. What I do know is that I'm creating a whole new game running on the latest version of GZDoom. It will have a dark and moody atmosphere, something akin to Castlevania or Bloodborne, and will take full advantage of the advance material and shader systems that GZD has to offer.

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Nope! That futuristic level I was building was just a way for me to test out how I could create different material types. This will take place in a dark, gothic kingdom, a land befouled by all manner of evil. You play as a single unholy antihero hellbent on revenge who must travel the land, wiping it clean of wicked sludge. Something like that at least, I'm not 100% on the story yet. But there will be castles, marshlands filled with rotting corpses, a dark and twisted forest, evil hags, draugr, that sort of thing.

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You are the (one of the) Star Mazer devs? Will it ever come out? I was following this since years, hehe.

 

The mod looks great so far, and I am a sucker for newschool effects on oldschool assets aka pixely sprites. Keep it up!

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Thanks Elend! I'm the developer of Starr Mazer DSP, which is the Starr Mazer prequel, and is pure shmup arcade action. That is definitely coming out, within the next year. Starr Mazer proper is still under active development. The team just signed a bunch of awesome deals to get the games made more better and more fasterer.

 

Here's a look at the progress that DSP has made in the past year since I rebuilt it from the ground up:

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And back on topic, I just threw together this super temporary logo for the project's codename ( I have no title yet, so this is very subject to many changes haha )

25e1a6571be45869a2dc80438447e21c.png

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2 hours ago, Indecom4000 said:

Anyways, that's enough of me smashing my fingers into the keyboard. Keep your eyes here for further experimentations and developments.

 

 

If you want to play with some of my earlier tests, here's a download for you:

 

that 2nd to last picture is the most amazing looking shit I have ever seen in doom!

 

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Haha thanks a bunch! If you have the latest GZD version, feel free to give my test map a run and see it in action. Be sure to check out the retro fx option on the options screen!

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Oh wow, cool a Starr Mazer Dev working on a Doom project. I am a backer of Starr Mazer. Tremors sounds like it's going to be awesome and all that epic lighting looks great. I am always a big fan of lighting in games and Doom maps so seeing your testing is making my mouth water. I have been playing Doom with PBR for a while now and it looks great so ignore all those naysayers.

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Thanks Rex705! My thoughts are kill them with eye candy. Lmao.

 

Speaking of which, check out my material spotlight:

 

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So I've begun working on some fundamental code changes to GZDoom itself to allow for light intensity modification. Currently in GZD lights are capped in terms of brightness, which doesn't help if you want to create areas that are filled with intense light. Normally to remedy this you'd have to stack several lights on top of eachother in one space to ramp up the brightness. 

 

With the changes that I'm making, along with a little help since I'm totes a noob, we've managed to make this happen with just a simple multiplier value that can be assigned to a single light source:

 

Screenshot_Doom_20190406_193031.png

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Dude. Whatever you did to make the style of things in that video and the screenshot above, do more of that. It looks amazing.

 

My only minor criticism, the angle of the shotgun thing is kinda weird. It's pointing more to the left than the center. If it were moved down a touch, and angled more to the right and then slightly moved left, it would make a huge difference.

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Oh, that shotgun isn't going to be in the game. It was just a test for the technique I was developing. I plan to have purely fantasy and medieval weaponry :)

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Lol that's not an affect of the bloom, that's an effect of me testing a custom build of GZDoom that allows for insanely bright lights. Currently it's impossible to create lights that are what I would consider bright without making your own build of the engine.

 

I'm also working on rewriting a different part of the lighting system to allow for more realistic spread of light. Still have some kinks to iron out as evident by these blacked out segments.

Screenshot_Doom_20190407_083258.png

Edited by Indecom4000

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That stuff definitely looks interesting and I hope you keep us posted here. I love PBR on low-res textures and advanced lighting in oldschool engines.

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Hey guys, uploaded a new video. Spent the last couple of days rewriting how GZDoom handles lights. Both at the shader level, and at the compile level. There's no longer a limit to how bright lights can be, and as you can tell in the video, the light falloff is quite smooth, much more appealing than standard linear attenuation which looks like total butt. Lights can be independently brighter than one another based on the RGB values you assign them in the map editor. RGB values over 255 are considered overbrights. This will allow you to define a super bright light by assigning RGB values of (25500,25500,25500) making it essentially 100 times brighter than previously possible.

 

 

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That looks awesome can't wait to see what all of this turns into. You should help the GZDoom team out with a nice lighting update.

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I'm planning to take a stab at adding some cool features, like volumetric lighting if I can figure out a decent way to do it :P

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I've just uploaded another video showcasing the lighting formulas in our custom build of GZDoom.

 

Not only is it possible to toggle between classic and natural but you can also further modify the look of the lighting to suit your tastes using an attenuation coefficient to get the perfect look for your map:

 

 

To give you a better look at what's been done, check out these before and after photos!

Before:

image.png.cdd1619b82c850089f27bc7fdd75b398.png

 

After:

image.png.e83d7240c6d935b3ccc7412f27d57a18.png

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