Vavoom turns 10

[Firebrand_kh]

Today Vavoom engine turns 10 years old; to celebrate, Janis released a new version, which contains many bug fixes and performance improvements. Among the new features, the OpenGL renderer has been improved and now is able to do Doom 3-style shadows for static and dynamic lights, also makes models render per vertex light and cast shadows. You can download it from the usual spot at the Vavoom engine site.

[kristus]

Cool stuff. Got any screenshots of that?

[Remilia Scarlet]

Wow, this sounds pretty sweet. Never tried Vavoom before, but I just compiled it from source so I'll give it a try later.

[sirjuddington]

New lighting looks pretty nice. Though for all it's advanced rendering features it sure is missing some basic stuff (non-blurred sprites, widescreen support, etc). Perhaps one day if I get the time I'll look at the source and try improving some stuff myself :P

[Zeroth]

Vavoom is a fantastic multi-platform engine, one I keep on the side to play Strife in linux.

I will however unapologetically call the multiplayer functionality to be garbage in comparison to zdaemon. Never could get it to work well across the net.

bust aside from that, I'm glad to hear of the new release and I'm anxious to see screenies of the new features.

[Firebrand_kh]

Here are some screens of the shadows in a test map.

http://i919.photobucket.com/albums/ad33/Firebrand_kh/shot0003.png
http://i919.photobucket.com/albums/ad33/Firebrand_kh/shot0002.png
http://i919.photobucket.com/albums/ad33/Firebrand_kh/shot0001.png
http://i919.photobucket.com/albums/ad33/Firebrand_kh/shot0000.png

I'll also post a link to the test map in case someone is interested:
http://files.drdteam.org/index.php/files/get/Qs4tH-8eu0/shadows-test.zip

[jute]

The lighting sounds wonderful, but I didn't really notice any appreciable difference when I tried Doom II and Hexen this morning. I've never used Vavoom before so maybe I'm doing something wrong. Does this lighting system work with vanilla maps or only maps that were designed taking it into account?

[Firebrand_kh]

First, make sure you are running in OpenGL, Direct3D doesn't has advanced renderer yet. If you are running on OpenGL, maybe your hardware doesn't supports shaders or the required extensions, in such case, there's nothing to be done. What video card do you have?

[jute]

My card can handle it, I assume, since it can handle Oblivion, Doom 3, etc. at max settings. I used the -opengl modifier. It just doesn't look any different as far as I can tell. I was hoping to see transitions in shadows and light like your shot0002.png, for instance. Would that kind of thing only appear in maps built with this lighting in mind?

[Khorus]

Firing the pistol behind the wall on map01 gave a quick indication it was working on my end.

[jute]

I tried the shadows.wad and it worked, so I guess maps need to be designed around it for some of the more interesting effects to be apparent. It looks very nice.

[Firebrand_kh]

It works with any maps, no special features are needed for shadows to work.

[jute]

Well, when I run shadows.wad, it looks just like this: http://i919.photobucket.com/albums/ad33/Firebrand_kh/shot0002.png, with the opening door casting a moving shadow on the wall, light filling the room, and dramatic shadows from the crate and skull-thing. I haven't noticed anything like that in any vanilla levels, thus far at least.

[Khorus]

It works wherever there is a dynamic light (map20 example). It's quite subtle, but it looks better than having solid shadows all over the place.

[kristus]

Since most maps aren't made to use this, it is bound to be subtle or just not show up in most cases.

[Zeroth]

how does the lighting interact with sprites? does it cast shadow in the shape of the sprite or does it just pass through?

[Firebrand_kh]

No shadows are cast on sprites, is more difficult to calculate them since sprites are "plain" textures.

[maggot202]

I have a problem running pwads on vavoom. I drag and drop the pwad on vavoom.exe and it throws the following error:

W_GetNumForName: playpal not found!

Can anyone help me here? Thanks!

[Firebrand_kh]

You can't just drag and drop wad files, you must specify the PWADs to load on the launcher.

[Zeroth]

I see. I should take up modelling and make some better monster models. I can't wait to see levels made specifically to explout this lighting feature :-D

[DoomKn1ght]

I am really disapointed that the software polygonal renderer is going to be removed since it's my main interest into vavoom. OpenGL and D3D don't work for i.e crash often. Nice job for the shadows though.

[kristus]

DoomKn1ght said:

I am really disapointed that the software polygonal renderer is going to be removed since it's my main interest into vavoom.

It's not as solid as the hardware engine and it's slow as hell.

[Firebrand_kh]

OpenGL and D3D are stable enough, and the software renderer hasn't been touched in a good while, because not much can be done for it.

If you are having crashes wit OpenGL and D3D, you should post them on the Vavoom forums, so that they can be checked at and fixed.

[Csonicgo]

kristus said:

It's not as solid as the hardware engine and it's slow as hell.

Never has been for me, even back in the early 2000s. if anything, I found it faster than legacy at the time.

I would me saddened somewhat if it was removed. It was very interesting in that it was a functional polygon software renderer for doom, for computers that just can't run the hardware mode. Said computers still exist (netbooks, for one) and software mode was nice to have.

[entryway]

kristus said:

It's not as solid as the hardware engine and it's slow as hell.

Try 32innail.wad map05. Software renderer is much faster there. At least at 640x480. OpenGL is unplayable: ~20 fps. 700 with glboom-plus, 600 with gzdoom.

[Graf Zahl]

Csonicgo said:

I would me saddened somewhat if it was removed. It was very interesting in that it was a functional polygon software renderer for doom, for computers that just can't run the hardware mode. Said computers still exist (netbooks, for one) and software mode was nice to have.

Sure, but you have to consider the added burden this puts on the developers. In the end it's a lot of work for a very small user base.

People with systems that have no usable 3D acceleration are better off with a 'classic' software renderer of which there's more than enough available.