RSKY2

[wesleyjohnson]

My latest attempt to replace RSKY2 with something
- proportioned right
- matching original in time of day so all the existing wads don't look lighted wrong.

If I could get imgur to work, there would be a picture here.
...



http://www.fileconvoy.com/dfl.php?id=geeb3b6e1c8580f03999705810619b65f2fd1fa75c

The file(s) that can be retrieved with the above link is:

rsky_v03.zip (78.566 KB)

The file(s) will be available on the server for the next 10 days.


Imgur:
The imgur browse files button just ignores my clicking on it.
I did a cntl-V save and that worked, but it would not tell me where the file went.
Cannot upload just one file without an account because it won't create an album with only one file.
Uploaded the ppm file too. It error on it 3 times, so I canceled it. When it finally got around to showing the album, the ppm file is there too.
So ..

This is imgur's idea of a quote:
<blockquote class="imgur-embed-pub" lang="en" data-id="a/ayGf1"><a href="//imgur.com/a/ayGf1">View post on imgur.com</a></blockquote><script async src="//s.imgur.com/min/embed.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

I managed to extract this.
http://i.imgur.com/r5z2OPIl.png

http://i.imgur.com/r5z2OPIs.jpgp

[Catoptromancy]

Mirror: http://www.geocities.ws/catodemos/freedoom/wesley/rsky_v03.zip

[raymoohawk]

havent tried in game, but from the png it seems clean and elegant

however before we get rid of the other one, lets remember we can increase the texture count anyway, so we may want to keep both

[Blastfrog]

Eh, I don't like it. It's a prerendered map and the perspective isn't appropriate as a cylinder projection. The clouds look pretty crappy, too.

[Z0k]

i honestly still prefeer Freedoom Old Rsky2 and not the new one, the new one looks well kinda bland, dunno like it lack certain detail, unlike the old one that look a lot complex and detailed also i think fits pretty nice and give unique ambience with the night atmosphere it already have

[raymoohawk]

cant we have both in? we can increase the texture count after all

[cr0wb4r]

I agree with Z0K about the old RSKY2. I like the night time ambience it gives to the city levels.

[Doomkid]

I think the buildings look good in wesley's version actually as they blend a bit better with the existing environment (in theory, anyway)

Maybe changing the cloudy sky to a starry sky could help?

[wesleyjohnson]

I have this as gimp layers, so I can still fiddle some.
It has been heavily touched up by hand, so I am NOT going to do a large number of versions.

Buildings: The individual floors are smaller than a pixel. No matter how it is rendered, the detail of several floors combines to a couple of pixels. The previous night version just made the buildings enormous, so it could show floor detail, but it was out-of-scale because of that.
I preferred to show some floor variation rather than use a blending rendering that makes the whole building a homogeneous blur.
The visible detail in these buildings is larger stuff.

Clouds: The clouds are still rendering lighter than I intended, and I have darkened it several times already. Huge problem is that the palette shifts unevenly when darkening. Right now some of the brown has accidently changed in the quantizer to be orangish highlights that look like a dusk sky. I cannot touch the clouds without losing that. Is that orangish glow appeal to anyone ??

Clouds do not convert to the Doom palette well. This is my 11'th version of the clouds. Most others had severe color banding. It renders better with small clouds and small areas of gradient.

Sticking with a limited palette of brown helps some with the Doom palette problems.
But then the clouds could be mistaken for a dirt floor.

Night sky: As visually appealing as a black sky is, the original was not night sky and the levels made for the original are not lighted for midnight. I can tell the difference and I do notice that the map lighting is wrong for a night scene with no ambient light available from the sky. For a night sky the levels outdoors would have to be black everywhere there is not an outdoor light. There would be huge light gradients from every outdoor light and huge shadows. This is one thing the Doom lighting scheme does not do well. The Twilight map made the best attempt at using a black sky and it still could not make the night lighting work well.

Perspective: Cylinder projection ??. I played with trying a different engine, but it is only going to shift some edges by a 1/2 pixel or so. These city buildings are not close enough for the perspective difference to have more than a pixel difference any direction. The cylinder projection could be imitated by turning some buildings, but that just messes with one view to appeal to another. The building at the edge of this sky is turned 45 degrees to face the viewer more. If you knew the city and how it should appear from a particular viewpoint, it would make a difference. But for this usage, some variation in building view angle is just visually desirable, and the error is undetectable.

Haze: These buildings look like they are seen through a haze, at a distance. It seems appropriate. The previous night RSKY looks like there is no atmosphere.

Distance: These buildings are set farther away than the previous RSKY. Having the same huge building up close on all four sides was highly annoying. Farther distance also eliminates the player detecting the lack of perspective changes.

[andrewj]

I think the buildings (and foreground) in this sky look quite good.

I see no issue with "cylindrical projection" -- the original RSKY2 texture in DOOM suffers the same stretching in a software rendered port.

The clouds ruin it though, they are too bright and just very bland (and also looked dithered). Should start again and carefully pick a set of colors which will map well into the DOOM palette.

[wesleyjohnson]

Version 04

More buildings to fill in some holes. Some adjustment to some buildings.
Getting really tired of trying to draw clouds. These clouds are now more scattered, with some holes, and have been darkened several times, and most of the brown make grayer. Still runs a little light, but I have gotten too dark with others. The doom palette still ruins the colors.

This is being drawn in a much larger format and reduced to this size and doom colors.
The patch size is too small to do any real work with. I only touch up the reduced size file a bit, where obvious improvements can be made.
I use my own custom made palette reduction program, which can do controlled amounts of dither. It has options to reduce dither side effects, like spinning a mask, adding noise, and detecting swatches of color conversion. Most of what you see is actually the scale reduction done by GIMP (cubic interpolation).

The link or URL you must send to the recipient(s) of your file(s) is:
http://www.fileconvoy.com/dfl.php?id=g3f55b0f48add60ed999711095611e46566ce75d4e

The file(s) that can be retrieved with the above link is (are):

rsky_v04.zip (78.022 KB)
rsky2.ppm (96.015 KB)
rsky2p.png (51.021 KB)

The file(s) will be available on the server for the next 10 days.

[Catoptromancy]

http://www.geocities.ws/catodemos/freedoom/wesley/rsky_v04.zip

[raymoohawk]

for variations sake we could have all 3 skies in

[wesleyjohnson]

Well, a whole week without rejection.
And, no one has asked me about the strange building that looks like a slug sitting up
(now that it is in your mind you will not be able to see it normally).
Getting acceptance by demonstrating neutral coloring and style.

[MrFlibble]

Sorry for bumping, but this seems to have not been added to the project. I wonder why?

[Blastfrog]

MrFlibble said:

Sorry for bumping, but this seems to have not been added to the project. I wonder why?

It was explicitly rejected for being unfitting and ugly.

[MrFlibble]

Well, I did not have an impression of it being rejected, from all the generally positive comments:

raymoohawk said:

havent tried in game, but from the png it seems clean and elegant

Doomkid said:

I think the buildings look good in wesley's version actually as they blend a bit better with the existing environment (in theory, anyway)

andrewj said:

I think the buildings (and foreground) in this sky look quite good.

Voltcom9 said:

I actually really like this sky. It could tentatively even be a sky 1 replacement.

[Blastfrog]

None of those people being maintainers. Chungy and Doctor_Nick both disliked it, IIRC.

[MrFlibble]

Well, maybe it could at least be archived as an unused resource? Since some people liked it I assume that someone might want to use it in their work.

I'm quite fond of the idea which is frequently emphasized by raymoohawk, that Freedoom is to be a resource for further game modding/development. However, currently the only extra/alternate assets that are readily available are those which have been moved to the attic. I believe it would make sense to archive other unused resources as well, such as those which were considered for submission but did not end up in the game (assuming they are of acceptable quality, of course).