SoftFX, or Bigger and Badder Software Lighting FX!

[Muusi]

1 hour ago, mankubus said:

When using Rocketlauncher 2 i dont see that startup window but anyway when launching gzdoom i see the window and both load lights and load brighmaps are enabled yet i cannot see them.

You running it in software renderer?

[Gez]

23 hours ago, AlexMax said:

I always wondered how difficult it would be to get a widely-agreed-upon standard for brightmaps.  Some chocolate forks have them, but the textures to which they apply to seem hardcoded.  Seems like if you can parse UMAPINFO, you could also parse a brightmap lump that maps texture names to palette ranges to fullbright, and get effects like this in a more targeted way.

If all you're gonna do is declare some palette indices are fullbright, then a custom COLORMAP lump is sufficient. No need for a new implementation standard.

[mankubus]

9 hours ago, Muusi said:

You running it in software renderer?

OpenGL

[Scypek2]

I never understood why brightmaps mostly just stick to either making stuff fullbright or not fullbright. Wouldn't it look prettier and subtler if the light dimnishing was only decreased instead of completely removed? Something like, from fullbright to half-bright instead of fullbright to zero-bright. It would be doable in both vanilla colormap editing and zdoom-format brightmaps.

[Snarboo]

2 minutes ago, Scypek2 said:

It would be doable in both vanilla colormap editing and zdoom-format brightmaps.

IIRC, the brightmaps included with GZDoom already do this using something akin to alpha transparency on the brightmap graphic itself. Doing that in software would be a bit trickier, since you'd need a set of half-bright palette entries, but not impossible.

[Scypek2]

You wouldn't necessarily need any extra "palette entries" for that. The regular colormap has 32 rows of 256 pixels each, but they all use the same colors from one 256-color palette, with darker shades replacing the brighter shades in the darkness. Some color gradients are smoother, others (like a darkening shade that was already dark to begin with) are less detailed, and some even turn to brown and gray partway through because that's the closest representation within the limited palette.

 

So making such "partial light dimnishing" in vanilla could just be accomplished by taking the upper half of a gradient bar for the color of your choice, and stretching it down to cover the whole gradient. Still more detailed than a plain-color bar that makes a color fullbright.

[Muusi]

I just like my bright light sources everywhere and wouldn't want them to get dimmer at all. If someone wants to make a moodier version of this WAD, go ahead😁

[Zero Master's Clone]

oh this is so cool nice job

 

[Muusi]

Somehow forgot to update here, the mod is indeed compatible with Chocolate Doom and the DOS original. Carry on. 

[Muusi]

I made one for 32in24-15tex, if anyone's interested.

 

 

Edited September 9, 2021 by Muusi

[jeremieh]

Is it just me or are the eyes a little orange 

[Muusi]

2 hours ago, jeremieh said:

Is it just me or are the eyes a little orange 

Yes they are as the color isn't used so much. Way less fixing other sprites that way. 

[HackNeyed]

This mod is beyond cool!! It adds so much atmosphere and my goodness the Cheshire Cat Caco and Jack O Lantern PE are gorgeous! I might be in love with them a little, is that weird? Anyway this is fantastic work and I really like it. Thank you for sharing I'm so glad I got to check it out! My heart brakes a little that the guys at id didn't think of this and spend a little more time fleshing out something this frickin cool into the base game. Well done!

 

On 4/2/2021 at 12:15 PM, Muusi said:

Please tell me if you find any sprites etc that have fullbright pixels where they clearly shouldn't be so i can fix them :)

 

All feedback is very welcome!

 

Are you sure? Ok here you go SoftFX-Bugs.zip enjoy?! i guess...

 

P.S. I also have Woof's color blood enabled so the Caco and HK blood are unfortunately partly fullbright too. I don't know if that is really fixable or even within the scope of this mod but I'll point it out too.

[Muusi]

12 hours ago, HackNeyed said:

This mod is beyond cool!! It adds so much atmosphere and my goodness the Cheshire Cat Caco and Jack O Lantern PE are gorgeous! I might be in love with them a little, is that weird? Anyway this is fantastic work and I really like it. Thank you for sharing I'm so glad I got to check it out! My heart brakes a little that the guys at id didn't think of this and spend a little more time fleshing out something this frickin cool into the base game. Well done!

 

 

Are you sure? Ok here you go SoftFX-Bugs.zip enjoy?! i guess...

 

P.S. I also have Woof's color blood enabled so the Caco and HK blood are unfortunately partly fullbright too. I don't know if that is really fixable or even within the scope of this mod but I'll point it out too.

Thank you for the awesome feedback! Very much appreciated :) I'll have a look at the zip you included and will make the fixes after the holidays. Thank you so much!

 

About the colored blood. I don't really know how the colored blood stuff works, where the sprites are pulled from or whatever, so i don't really know how to fix them. If i had the sprites and info i could of course make small changes to the blood colors so they wouldn't be fulbright. 

[HackNeyed]

You are welcome but like I said you have shared some really cool work so thank you!

 

1 hour ago, Muusi said:

About the colored blood.

 

I think it's a hard coded palette swap to some greens and blues so it might not be worth "working around it". It is a relatively new cosmetic feature and the HK's blood just happens to use the same greens in their glowing hands. Honestly I kind of like the idea of green glowing toxic blood for some of hell's creatures. BTW the orange eyes have really grown on me too. Good choice!

[Muusi]

5 hours ago, HackNeyed said:

You are welcome but like I said you have shared some really cool work so thank you!

 

 

I think it's a hard coded palette swap to some greens and blues so it might not be worth "working around it". It is a relatively new cosmetic feature and the HK's blood just happens to use the same greens in their glowing hands. Honestly I kind of like the idea of green glowing toxic blood for some of hell's creatures. BTW the orange eyes have really grown on me too. Good choice!

At first I was kinda bummed that i couldn't really make the eyes red due to all the reds being used in so many sprites but yeah I've started to like the orange too. Kinda like hellfire burning behind the demon eyes. Can't thank you enough for the kind words :) 

[thestarrover]

Sorry for the newbie question.

To run SoftFx.wad with the original Doom.exe and Doom2.exe on DosBox, Deusf.exe is required, right?

Is deusf.exe -append SoftFx.wad the right method?

 

Thanks in advance!

 

[Muusi]

On 12/23/2021 at 8:14 PM, thestarrover said:

Sorry for the newbie question.

To run SoftFx.wad with the original Doom.exe and Doom2.exe on DosBox, Deusf.exe is required, right?

Is deusf.exe -append SoftFx.wad the right method?

 

Thanks in advance!

 

IIRC you just load Doom or Doom2.exe and before hitting enter you add "-file *insertnamehere*.wad

[Gibbon]

I'm using this as part of my TOOM Parade play through on YouTube with RZDoom.  It looks absolutely fantastic!  Great work!

[Muusi]

7 hours ago, Gibbon said:

I'm using this as part of my TOOM Parade play through on YouTube with RZDoom.  It looks absolutely fantastic!  Great work!

Glad you like it! I watched your video and it's weird that the gibbed corpses have those 3 fullbright pixels on them. I specifically remember fixing those and now I'm worried i uploaded some earlier version or something. Have to check it out. Thanks for the feedback though! 😁

[Gibbon]

On 1/8/2022 at 10:00 PM, Muusi said:

Glad you like it! I watched your video and it's weird that the gibbed corpses have those 3 fullbright pixels on them. I specifically remember fixing those and now I'm worried i uploaded some earlier version or something. Have to check it out. Thanks for the feedback though! 😁

I quite like the full right pixels on corpses.  But if there's a newer version I'll check it out too.  It's become one of my de-facto auto loaded WADS.

 

Edit: Any chance of a Heretic/Hexen/Strife version too?

Edited January 9, 2022 by Gibbon

[Bytefyre]

A very intriguing idea, I have to say!  The one thing I noticed in a quick test I ran in Underhalls is the some of the reds are turning pale orange, like with the colored bars in the first side room and the red square on the switch.  I'm using DSDA-Doom v0.24.3 with Software and Gamma 1 for reference.

[Muusi]

Posted a minor update to the WAD that SHOULD fix the gib sprites that had fullbright pixels on them. Please report if there's more :)

[plums]

A while ago I made a deflated cacodemon corpse so that they don't block your view as much when the floor is littered with them. Someone recently made a map using SoftFX and I have edited the corpse to work with it. Anyone is free to use it if they want.

 

https://user.fm/files/v2-5cc2d5ea5a3eb7e1423879dfb4c694dc/headl0_softfx.wad

 

 

(The non-SoftFX version is here which is you can also use.)

[Emperor S P O O N]

Just letting people know, there are some unmodified Id software resources in this mod. I understand this is a work in progress, but I feel this needs to be addressed especially since it's been giving me a headache when trying to upload my wad to the idgames archive.

You can easily fix this by opening the wad in SLADE, then going to Archive -> Maintenance -> Remove Duplicated Entries from IWAD. You may want to do this process multiple times, even closing and re-opening SLADE to do it because there can be some that slip through.

[Muusi]

13 hours ago, Emperor S P O O N said:

Just letting people know, there are some unmodified Id software resources in this mod. I understand this is a work in progress, but I feel this needs to be addressed especially since it's been giving me a headache when trying to upload my wad to the idgames archive.

You can easily fix this by opening the wad in SLADE, then going to Archive -> Maintenance -> Remove Duplicated Entries from IWAD. You may want to do this process multiple times, even closing and re-opening SLADE to do it because there can be some that slip through.

Thanks for letting me know! Right now I can't recall leaving in anything unmodified but I'll look into this, any hints on what I missed? 

[Emperor S P O O N]

9 hours ago, Muusi said:

Thanks for letting me know! Right now I can't recall leaving in anything unmodified but I'll look into this, any hints on what I missed? 

A lot of the monster and item sprites, and (I think) a few textures/patches.

[Muusi]

On 12/6/2023 at 3:53 PM, Emperor S P O O N said:

A lot of the monster and item sprites, and (I think) a few textures/patches.

I uploaded a new version after manually checking every single file. Thanks again :)