Do you think GZDoom should have texture filtering on by default?

[Professor Hastig]

1 minute ago, dpJudas said:

Just to put some context into it - here's one fine example of top quality feedback: https://www.doomworld.com/forum/post/2665532. If this thread was the only thread about this subject, then yes, sure, in isolation it would be perfectly fine. In this thread Darkcraft07 was mocked for being so incredibly stupid to vote for his preferences. Great fun. Yeah I'm sure he likes hanging out here now.

 

Which also begs the question, how many other users did not dare to vote for fear of being mocked? This is the kind of non-anonymous information gathering that is ultimately worthless because expressing the deviating opinion from the 'mainstream' runs the risk of becoming a target for ridicule.

 

[dpJudas]

4 minutes ago, Professor Hastig said:

 

Which also begs the question, how many other users did not dare to vote for fear of being mocked? This is the kind of non-anonymous information gathering that is ultimately worthless because expressing the deviating opinion from the 'mainstream' runs the risk of becoming a target for ridicule.

 

I wouldn't go that far. I think the vote isn't too far from what users of Doomworld actually feel.

[liPillON]

since you're checking on this thread, @dpJudas, I have a slightly unrelated question.. may I?

I'd like to put vkDoom into perspective, in relation with gzDoom.. 

 

Was it started as a fork, with the intention of merging it back once work on the vulkan renderer had been completed?

From what I understand by browsing the github repository, it seems the plans now are for it to be a separate "product"

Will it fill a similar role to QZDoom?

[Redneckerz]

8 hours ago, jazzmaster9 said:

I do wonder after years of people complaining about it and nothing changing when do we just call it a day and it just consider it beating a dead horse? 

 

People have this "its Le No chicken Graf wont change lol not true doom source port" yet expect him to change magically if we make fun of him long enough.

I don't think its really making fun of it, but i do agree that the criticism leveled against it, whilst fair, doesn't change the outcome. I would love to see things changed for the better, but at the end of the day, Graf's stance is known, its a one-click change, and most standalone games change it to off anyway. So yes, the pro's out weigh the cons - But Graf's stance is known.

41 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

If your software is publicly available, users are entitled to sharing whatever opinion they have on it - good, bad, or otherwise, so long as it doesn’t get personal or underhanded. It comes with the territory of making literally anything intended for public consumption.

Sure, but the thing is - These kinds of opinions have been shared time and time again. Excellent posts such as those from Scuba and Xaser - These have been uttered before. It isn't news.

 

What i fail to see is why this issue is now being brought up again when the stance of Graf/The Team has been known for years already. So what would a new thread with new posts detailing that its ridiculous convey? Graf isn't going to change his stance on it considering the history of this topic, so what does that lead us to? More posts like these where people tell how ridiculous this stance is?

 

I don't know, it feels like a syndicated tv show at that stage then. That isn't mean't to devalue any post here - Like everyone else i agree that filtering should be off unless the WAD or game makes usage of models - I am just trying to say: We had this conversation already. What is there to be gained?

23 minutes ago, Azafran said:

All of that doesn't prevent users thinking that your defaults are garbage. GZDoom devs can do whatever they want with their unpaid piece of software, but the fact is that as a public release, said public doesn't like the defaults. Sticking to your guns doesn't make any sense and it will be criticized.

 

People have all the right to do that the same the devs have all the right to do as they please with their program.

What good does this do when the stance of Le Chicken is known already? Hoping that another round of critique will somehow sway his opinion?

 

If anything else, what i would suggest is that ZDoom hosts a tiny config.ini as an additional download where the filtering can be turned off - Though i doubt this will be sanctioned because everyone can do that in-menu. But it would be useful for newcomers (Who would use GZDoom anyway to run their beloved Brutal Doom/Project Brutality)

[dpJudas]

4 minutes ago, liPillON said:

since you're checking on this thread, @dpJudas, I have a slightly unrelated question.. may I?

I'd like to put vkDoom into perspective, in relation with gzDoom.. 

 

Was it started as a fork, with the intention of merging it back once work on the vulkan renderer had been completed?

From what I understand by browsing the github repository, it seems the plans now are for it to be a separate "product"

Will it fill a similar role to QZDoom?

I forked it for several reasons.

 

There's the technical reason. GZDoom supports multiple backends and the abstraction doing this was limiting me in what I wanted to do with Vulkan. If I dropped the other backends I wouldn't have to port all of them to an updated design. I wanted the backend to better support mesh building, command buffers on worker threads and a more complex shader pipeline system. This has performance improvements for both high end and low end, but the catch is that old pre-vulkan GPU hardware can't tag along for the ride. Graf has expressed interest in eventually merging this back into a future version of GZDoom.

 

Then there's the other reason. My GPU have RTX cores and I want to have fun with them. In GZDoom just even mentioning them on Discord would get certain users to complain loudly since they didn't have the hardware. So I decided, fine, you can have your way and I'll go do my thing in a different port tailored for me and what I find fun. By naming it VkDoom I create a very easy way of explaining why old computers won't work with it. :) So it won't fill a similar role to QZDoom. I also still haven't 100% decided yet if I actually want to do a release. That's why there has been no announcement of this project.

 

Nobody really talks about it, but GZDoom is actually a project where no developer has gotten everything they wanted. That's why, while I personally totally align with what Xaser said earlier in this thread, have simply accepted that GZDoom's default won't be what I want. On the other hand, there are things currently in GZDoom that Graf would be more than happy to get rid of. That's how compromises has to work.

[ReaperAA]

16 hours ago, roadworx said:

honestly, quake 2 is an instant "off" for me. the texture filtering looks terrible in that game, and i hate that it's on by default

 

The game textures look better with filtering off, but some of the guns look kind of ugly with big square pixels.

 

Now getting back to topic about GZDoom:

10 hours ago, indigotyrian said:

will be very exciting for GZDoom to finally get good performance once its moved to the brand new Vulkan platform (finally! a solid 60 FPS on Entryway!)

 

I know GZDoom isn't the most optimized port. But this is just ridiculous. I have an utter potato of a laptop (i3 8250u and AMD 530 GPU) and GZDoom handles most vanilla/Boom/MBF stuff fine using the any of the 3 backends.

 

Unless of course it is stuff like loads of Dynamic lights (which most other port don't offer anyway), or stuff like Nuts.wad with tons of enemies (again not fault of GZDoom as the actor logic is much more complex).

 

1 hour ago, dpJudas said:

Just to put some context into it - here's one fine example of top quality feedback: https://www.doomworld.com/forum/post/2665532. If this thread was the only thread about this subject, then yes, sure, in isolation it would be perfectly fine. In this thread Darkcraft07 was mocked for being so incredibly stupid to vote for his preferences. Great fun. Yeah I'm sure he likes hanging out here now.

 

I have to agree with this. Most comments here seem reasonable, but some are underhanded and that's not cool at all.

Edited July 3, 2023 by ReaperAA

[Doomkid]

Whenever you put a piece of software, art, music etc into the world for public consumption, you are asking someone to spend some of their limited time on this planet engaging with that creation. Time is the most valuable thing we have, so to ignore criticism - especially unanimous criticism - about something intended for public use (as opposed to personal use) seems odd to me.

From the user's perspective, I personally feel there's a responsibility to look for good things to say, as well as for things you feel could be better. You're actually doing the creator a disservice by feeling things could be improved upon and not saying so, in the same way you would be by not sharing your appreciation for their work.

 

Thankfully, GZDoom has received praise and accolades abound from not only the various Doom forums, but big time in the Doom YT scene. It's pretty much always suggested as the default way to play the best game ever. There's no higher praise I can think of, really.

 

People need to go about this whole process respectfully no matter what their view is, as far as I'm concerned. No one is saying they hate GZDoom (at least, not the vast majority). You don't get a response like this at all unless people care passionately about it.

 

No one can "force" creators to do anything, but wanting to keep a roundly unpopular setting as the default but also not want to hear what people think of that decision is wanting to have your cake and eat it too.

 

 

I'm not a port developer but I'm glad that the stuff I've made has faced a mix of praise and criticism. When I looked past myself and took in the viewpoint of others during the creation process, I honestly felt like I became a more well rounded person.

[Edward850]

16 hours ago, roadworx said:

honestly, quake 2 is an instant "off" for me. the texture filtering looks terrible in that game, and i hate that it's on by default 

 

8 minutes ago, ReaperAA said:

The game textures look better with filtering off, but some of the guns look kind of ugly with big square pixels. 

Quake2 is a bit of an odd duck. Objectively, the textures were made with filtering in mind, no doubt about it. The GL renderer was the intended target given the lighting was built around its support.

The catch however is there's a chunk of people played Quake2 without the filtering because they used the software renderer, likely out of necessity due to graphics accelerators still not being quite mainstream yet, and filtering would have been performance prohibitive on the CPU. So suddenly there's now a subset of people who entirely expect the game to look a very specific way despite the intent, it's a sort of a reverse GZDoom in a way.

[Professor Hastig]

17 minutes ago, dpJudas said:

Graf has expressed interest in eventually merging this back into a future version of GZDoom.
 

 

Assuming this happens in the near future - it may be interesting to see how all those low end potato users react. From what you said it is unlikely that the engine would still be able to support OpenGL with a modernized Vulkan backend so they'd be stuck.

 

[Herr Dethnout]

1 hour ago, Doomkid said:

Whenever you put a piece of software, art, music etc into the world for public consumption, you are asking someone to spend some of their limited time on this planet engaging with that creation. Time is the most valuable thing we have, so to ignore criticism - especially unanimous criticism - about something intended for public use (as opposed to personal use) seems odd to me.

100% agree on this.

 

What's it seems odd to me, is that I remember cleary that some changes made in GZDoom over the time where made based on surveys in his public... But they simply ignore this one that was a constant complain for years?

 

I don't really understand... 

[Professor Hastig]

23 minutes ago, Herr Dethnout said:

 

I don't really understand...  

 

Come on, he's just teasing you because he knows how you all react to this item never being changed. It's the only explanation that makes sense at this point.

 

[Nash]

Something that I have always wanted to submit to GZDoom is something similar to the FTEQW source port -

 

Upon launching GZDoom for the first time, a presets menu will pop up, with presets like "classic", "modern", perhaps a couple of others in between. Classic will, of course, do stuff like no texture filtering, maybe set the transparency mode to vanilla, etc.

 

This at least gives new users a quick setup experience.

I think this presets menu will be the best "in the middle" solution that keeps everyone satisfied.

[Professor Hastig]

Make your suggestions here:

 

 

I'm not sure that named presets are good enough - I think a small number of options to be set on start would be better, and desiging it so that the user has to make an explicit choice for any of them. If there's less than 10 of those it should be fine - and it solves all problems without alienating anyone, save those who think options are a product of evil.

 

[Scuba Steve]

It would be based as fuuuuck if 'Vanilla essence" was basically implemented as the lowest of the low "DOS Settings."

[Azafran]

3 hours ago, Redneckerz said:

What good does this do when the stance of Le Chicken is known already? Hoping that another round of critique will somehow sway his opinion? 

 

Maybe it's been argued over and over but my account in this forum is half a year old and I've never uttered a word about this topic. A forum is a medium to have an ongoing conversation, it would be impossible for me to go back and read all the messages one by one since the beginning.

To be talking again about the same topic only means how relevant and how aware the people are about that topic, it's natural. It think it doesn't matter what we're going to achieve with it.

 

3 hours ago, Doomkid said:

Whenever you put a piece of software, art, music etc into the world for public consumption, you are asking someone to spend some of their limited time on this planet engaging with that creation. Time is the most valuable thing we have, so to ignore criticism - especially unanimous criticism - about something intended for public use (as opposed to personal use) seems odd to me.

From the user's perspective, I personally feel there's a responsibility to look for good things to say, as well as for things you feel could be better. You're actually doing the creator a disservice by feeling things could be improved upon and not saying so, in the same way you would be by not sharing your appreciation for their work.

 

Thankfully, GZDoom has received praise and accolades abound from not only the various Doom forums, but big time in the Doom YT scene. It's pretty much always suggested as the default way to play the best game ever. There's no higher praise I can think of, really.

 

People need to go about this whole process respectfully no matter what their view is, as far as I'm concerned. No one is saying they hate GZDoom (at least, not the vast majority). You don't get a response like this at all unless people care passionately about it.

 

No one can "force" creators to do anything, but wanting to keep a roundly unpopular setting as the default but also not want to hear what people think of that decision is wanting to have your cake and eat it too.

 

  Reveal hidden contents

I'm not a port developer but I'm glad that the stuff I've made has faced a mix of praise and criticism. When I looked past myself and took in the viewpoint of others during the creation process, I honestly felt like I became a more well rounded person.

 

I agree 100% with this. This attitude of "this is a piece of free software that I do however I want, you have zero say in the matter" it's ok but seems unaware of the realities about releasing something to the public: you'll receive opinions and feedback whether you want it or not.

 

Also I want to make clear that I think that GZDoom is an awesome piece of software that does a great service to this community. What this port achieved goes way beyond what Doom did and it's amazing. I don't want to send the wrong impression about my stance on this.

[Jakub Majewski]

I wonder, that if GZDoom were to collect info about its uers, including what settings they play on, perhaps the developers would learn that a large amount of players prefer to turn some of the default settings off...

 

But It's pretty likely, that having GZDoom do a data survey like that in the background would not sit well with a lot of people... people aren't too fond of spyware(even if they use it daily). Maybe I'm wrong though.

[Midway64]

28 minutes ago, Jakub Majewski said:

I wonder, that if GZDoom were to collect info about its uers, including what settings they play on, perhaps the developers would learn that a large amount of players prefer to turn some of the default settings off...

 

But It's pretty likely, that having GZDoom do a data survey like that in the background would not sit well with a lot of people... people aren't too fond of spyware(even if they use it daily). Maybe I'm wrong though.

 

GNU/Linux users would probably gonna be the odd-mans out, given the nature of their OS being immune to common viruses (aka Windows viruses).

Unless they packaged in a different program for each OS/Kernel.

Edited July 3, 2023 by ValveMercenary : A little clarification, "are" to would, you get the deal.

[Edward850]

9 minutes ago, ValveMercenary said:

 

GNU/Linux users are probably gonna be the odd-mans out, given the nature of their OS being immune to common viruses (aka Windows viruses).

Unless they package in a different program for each OS/Kernel.

What was being suggested was not a virus at all, but rather user telemetry. That is conceptually operating system agonistic.

[Midway64]

He mentioned "spyware" so I supposed it would be that.

Sorry for the mistake.

[Redneckerz]

1 hour ago, Nash said:

I think this presets menu will be the best "in the middle" solution that keeps everyone satisfied.

Seems about right. Wouldn't this be able to be incorporated in the basic launcher like utility that is already standard with GZDoom? That could be a real easy pre-launch situation.

1 hour ago, Scuba Steve said:

It would be based as fuuuuck if 'Vanilla essence" was basically implemented as the lowest of the low "DOS Settings."

God that would be awesome. Instantly propels the port from Stardom to Universe level awesomeness.
 

1 hour ago, Azafran said:

Maybe it's been argued over and over but my account in this forum is half a year old and I've never uttered a word about this topic. A forum is a medium to have an ongoing conversation, it would be impossible for me to go back and read all the messages one by one since the beginning.

This is a conversation that goes back years. As such this conversation has been made many times already. 

 

However, the only opinion we haven't yet heard is that by Graf himself. So lets have an updated 2023 notion, right? @Graf Zahl.

1 hour ago, Azafran said:

It think it doesn't matter what we're going to achieve with it.

Well certainly you want a conversation about a parameter that mostly everybody disagrees with to have a different outcome, no? Else, what would be the point other than have a room full of folks that agrees? You need a compromise. Something that @Nash suggested is a good thing coming.

1 hour ago, Azafran said:

This attitude of "this is a piece of free software that I do however I want, you have zero say in the matter" it's ok but seems unaware of the realities about releasing something to the public: you'll receive opinions and feedback whether you want it or not.

That's the thing - Nobody isn't unaware of this reality. The actual reality is that its Graf's preference and ultimate decision to have it changed or not. And if not, you can always fork. That's always the stance so this attitude of ''You will recieve opinions and feedback whether you want that or not despite the originator's stance on this whole ordeal being known'' to me achieves very little.

 

Since you can't have that cake, you would need a compromise, a second best possible option. Something that's both realistic to implement and to achieve.

 

[Azafran]

5 minutes ago, Redneckerz said:

Well certainly you want a conversation about a parameter that mostly everybody disagrees with to have a different outcome, no?

I'd like the defaults to change. But I don't necessarily expect that to happen, I'm just giving my opinion on the matter (this topic) and having fun doing so. I don't need to achieve anything, having this discussion is fulfilling already, and it think that's the point of a forum!

 

7 minutes ago, Redneckerz said:

That's the thing - Nobody isn't unaware of this reality. The actual reality is that its Graf's preference and ultimate decision to have it changed or not. And if not, you can always fork. That's always the stance so this attitude of ''You will recieve opinions and feedback whether you want that or not despite the originator's stance on this whole ordeal being known'' to me achieves very little.

 

Again, it's not my goal to achieve anything, just giving an opinion. It's like when the president you don't like gets elected, you can't change that but people like to share their stance on the topic.

Maybe someone (not me! lol) makes a GZDoom fork based on features the community wants and never shut up about.

[TasAcri]

17 hours ago, Individualised said:

I can't really agree. With filtering off it looks like an impressive but unwanted DS port.

 

5 hours ago, Edward850 said:

Quake2 is a bit of an odd duck. Objectively, the textures were made with filtering in mind, no doubt about it. The GL renderer was the intended target given the lighting was built around its support.

The catch however is there's a chunk of people played Quake2 without the filtering because they used the software renderer, likely out of necessity due to graphics accelerators still not being quite mainstream yet, and filtering would have been performance prohibitive on the CPU. So suddenly there's now a subset of people who entirely expect the game to look a very specific way despite the intent, it's a sort of a reverse GZDoom in a way.

 

I first played Quake 2 with filtering ON in 1999 and i had no idea i could turn it OFF. I thought this is how Quake 2 should look. Then one day i saw it run in software mode and i remember thinking it looked vastly better (even though it was slower).

 

The filtering makes the textures lose detail, especially on enemies and weapons.

 

https://www.marky.ca/3d/quake2/compare/content.html

 

On top of that, the colors also look like you have a piss filter applied to them in GL mode. But that's another issue entirely. On a whole, GL Quake 2 (and less so Quake 1) looks way uglier than software IMO.

 

Nowadays i use Yamagi and always turn off texture filtering. The same goes for Quake 1 Remastered, i appreciate there's a menu option for that.

[Redneckerz]

1 hour ago, Azafran said:

I'd like the defaults to change. But I don't necessarily expect that to happen, I'm just giving my opinion on the matter (this topic) and having fun doing so. I don't need to achieve anything, having this discussion is fulfilling already, and it think that's the point of a forum!

I get that, and its not what i am arguing against. I am saying that a room where most universally everyone agrees that something has to be changed will benefit better from presenting solutions rather than stating that something has to change. Because that conversation has been ongoing for quite some time and i don't feel that's productive. I hope that clears things up.

 

 

[Lobo]

I like texture filtering. If I want pixelly Doom-ishness then I don't open up GZDoom at all: there are plenty of other ports for that.

 

This whole discussion just seems wierd to me: I mean why are you all so worried about what other players might like or not? 

Just set it up to your own preferences.

[TasAcri]

12 minutes ago, Lobo said:

I like texture filtering. If I want pixelly Doom-ishness then I don't open up GZDoom at all: there are plenty of other ports for that.

 

This whole discussion just seems wierd to me: I mean why are you all so worried about what other players might like or not? 

Just set it up to your own preferences.

 

It's been mentioned already but this is about the newcomers who never played DOOM and those defaults make the game look too different than the intended look, in a bad way. It's all about the first impressions.

[Lobo]

Right. Worried about what other players will do or think.

[TasAcri]

9 minutes ago, Lobo said:

Right. Worried about what other players will do or think.

 

I don't really care about what other think, but it's also unfair when someone has the wrong impression about something only because it wasn't presented to them properly. In this case, it's unfair for the game itself and it's creators, most of all.

[ebrl]

Texture filtering makes everything so godawful ugly that I don't even feel like engaging in a serious argument about it with anyone who, for whatever unexplainable reason, honestly claims to prefer it. I don't think it's matter of "taste" or "opinions", I don't think this should be an argument in the first place, it's impossible for me to even attempt to understand what kind of weird stuff is going on with their brains that causes them to not have a strong, visceral reaction against it. It's objectively terrible. It's like you're wearing someone else's glasses. I refuse to believe anyone actually prefers it - for my own sanity, I like to believe that this "preference" is simply a complete indifference because they think Doom is just an old and ugly game that is supposed to look old and ugly and they don't really care what brand of old and ugly it is.

[Bauul]

8 hours ago, dpJudas said:

I forked it for several reasons.

 

Thanks for the context! The bits and pieces I had picked up from various disparate Discord conversations gave the impression a primary goal of VKDoom was to be a better base for indie development, but it sounds like that's more just a possible byproduct of it being a fork that has a more modern renderer.

 

[Lobo]

Not very veiled attack against me: might as well just call me names straight out.

 

Guess my having a different opinion really gets your juices flowing.