Skulltag 97D Preview

[Aabra]

The folks over at Skulltag announced that they have successfully married the GZDoom renderer to Skulltag. This change doubles the current OpenGL FPS and fixes all the OpenGL bugs in 97c3. Dynamic lighting has also been added to the port. Check out the full preview here.

[Siggi]

One has to wonder why this wasn't done in the first place.

[fraggle]

Psycho Siggi said:

One has to wonder why this wasn't done in the first place.

Uh.. when Skulltag was started, GZDoom didn't exist.

[Planky]

Nice!

[RandomMarine]

Too bad the community turned worse than zdaemon's when 97b came out.

[Graf Zahl]

fraggle said:

Uh.. when Skulltag was started, GZDoom didn't exist.

I think this refers to the inclusion of the (rather buggy) ZDoomGL renderer in previous versions.

[Csonicgo]

Graf Zahl said:

I think this refers to the inclusion of the (rather buggy) ZDoomGL renderer in previous versions.

Yeah, it was buggy, but at least the sprites weren't glued to the floor, The particles looked like particles rather than pixels (which, combined with anchored sprites, looks like poker chips), I could actually see with the berserk pack, and the sprites and textures could be resampled, so maybe Those "bugs" we had to put up with weren't that bad!

Torr has stated that He will be accepting patches to "fix" these little rendering issues, which I'm sure some will be glad to submit!

[Graf Zahl]

Csonicgo said:

Yeah, it was buggy, but at least the sprites weren't glued to the floor, The particles looked like particles rather than pixels (which, combined with anchored sprites, looks like poker chips), I could actually see with the berserk pack, and the sprites and textures could be resampled, so maybe Those "bugs" we had to put up with weren't that bad!

Sure if minor details are more important to you than general usability the old renderer might have been fine. But the fact is, its performance totally broke down on even medium sized levels, it had no support for horizons and several other problems that made using it unattractive. But what do you expect from abandoned beta-stage software?

Its general unusability for real playing was one of the reasons I made GZDoom.

As for the details you complain about, I might have changed some of it if I had some more time to spare but since last summer my work schedule has been rather full.

Torr has stated that He will be accepting patches to "fix" these little rendering issues, which I'm sure some will be glad to submit!

I sure hope he gets more support from the community than I did. Nobody ever sent me anything that could improve GZDoom

[NiGHTMARE]

Those "bugs" include countless wads not working properly due to ZDoomGL not supporting various vanilla engine tricks (fake 3D and the like), flickering depth fog, line horizon not working at all, translucency not stacking (so f.ex spectres would be invisible when viewed through a fireball), random crashes, white pixels and missing textures on older cards, and probably a few more besides. Not to mention that ZDoomGL runs about half the speed of GZDoom.

[Bucket]

Call me old-fashioned, but it looks pretty sexy with smoothing off.

[Aabra]

There were numerous reasons that the ZdoomGL engine was used first. I really do like the way it handles sprites and particles. However after it was exposed to the community it became quite evident that it simply wasn't going to do.

The bug reports simply overwhelmed us. There were an incredible number of GL related bugs. So many that it really took a lot of the oomph out of 97B. :-(

Above all else the framerate was far too low. When your framerate drops to below 20 fps and your computer really isn't that bad then something is wrong. GZDoom's framerate is double that of ZdoomGL.... and I'm not exaggerating at all. This reason alone was enough to prompt the switch. There were many other reasons too but this was the big one.

[Siggi]

Graf Zahl said:

I think this refers to the inclusion of the (rather buggy) ZDoomGL renderer in previous versions.

Yes, I was referring to when GL was first added to Skulltag, not when Skulltag was first released.