Burning city F_Sky2

I am not happy with the current burning city F_Sky.

1. Does not look to be in scale.
2. Does not look much to be burning.
3. Is a black night sky, that looks oddly like it was off world instead of earth.
4. Really clashes with many of the levels, which do not appear to be set at night, and are not set dead in the middle of the skyscrapers.

It really ought to be a morning or dusk scene, not full light and not full dark.
Buildings limited in height or more distant, so it applies to the industrial areas we generally map for.
The burning should be in spots in the near distance and clouds of brown and dark gray smoke.
Mostly brown and gray tints, instead of dead black.

Since FreeDoom is not Doom, the sky does not need to be "burning".

Though I agree that a dark sky really needs levels which are fairly dark outside for it to work well.

Unless somebody makes a better sky, the only thing which could be done would be adjust the existing levels to have darker outdoor areas.

wesleyjohnson said:

4. Really clashes with many of the levels, which [...] are not set dead in the middle of the skyscrapers.

Same thing could be said for Doom II's city levels. Apparently, thanks to the magic of wraparound skies, Doomguy's home city features suburbs and industrial zones completely surrounded by skyscrapers, instead of being outside in the periphery of the city. And nobody was ever really by that.


The nighttime thing is a stronger point, because what really matters is "how good does it look?" rather than "does this make sense?".

Speaking of which, something that always annoyed me with the burning city sky in Doom II was its static nature. One could expect flames and billowing smoke to be animated, but they aren't. Not having a burning city in Freedoom immediately allows it to make more sense than Doom II! :p

Burning is not necessary, but as it is occupied it cannot really appear normal and what else can you show.
I think the buildings should be more distant, not higher than half the texture.

It does need to be Earth for me, as map13 is intentionally set in an Earth context. It is harder to tell with the other maps.

I think it looks fucking great :)

And adds a much better feel to the levels with night, but some maps in Freedoom allow the player to walk to the edge of the map (Map19, in particular but also ones like Map13) thus seeing the tiling sky. If Freedoom is to be released as an independent game, shouldn't the mappers work hard so that the consumers don't find the bugs?

Have a new rsky2, with brown clouds and some brown and green hills in the distance (at the proper height). I have tried to make it look like dawn so it is neutral as to the light level.
Am going to keep this version, and also make a version with all the city buildings on it. The buildings will not be very close, nor so dense that the far hills do not show through, mostly because I cannot see myself creating that many buildings.
I will let you all vote.

I am working on a major update of Map19 that started as fixing that edge problem, with the edge moved much farther away and blocking the player from getting close. It has progressed will an entire rework of the lower levels. My efforts to reduce the wad size have caused it to grow to 770K mostly because of improved details. I still see too many flaws to really like it yet, but it hangs together better than the original and is more logical.

I also did Map13 and where can players walk to the edge of the map without using no-clip ? They cannot get out into the street.

The current rsky2 buildings look too large for Map13, and clashes horribly with Map19.

These are candidates for a new rsky2.
They are custom generated for FreeDoom using a city wad, a snapshot using prboom, and hand drawing in GIMP.
There are several choices.
I propose a vote for which to choose. I prefer the last one, rsky2h.

download: http://www.sendspace.com/file/19jt99

All four are variations on a theme, so I don't really see much to vote on.

I don't mind replacing F_SKY2 but I don't think this really cuts it. To give some specific criticisms:

• The "dusk" look is nice, but the sky itself has some nasty color "banding" from having been quantized to discrete levels.
  
• The buildings look pretty dull - they're just flat-textured and are obviously artificially rendered. The original Doom II version of the texture is nice because it's derived from a photo. I'd really like to see something photo-derived because the sky texture adds a lot of atmosphere.
  
• The buildings are too small, too low. The original texture gives the impression that you're standing in the middle of a large city, this doesn't do that. I get that you don't want it to seem like you're standing in the middle of skyscrapers, but this goes too far the opposite way: you have to stand on a high ledge just to even see any buildings.
  

Are you just looking at patches, or testing them in a wad?

Most of the FreeDoom levels that would use it have walls that cut off the city so all that can be seen are clouds. None of the Freedoom levels look right placed in the center of downtown skyscrapers.
They look better in the suburbs and industrial areas, which is why I designed the city buildings with limited height, more scattered, and the only tall buidings in the far distance.

The most affected are Map13, Map16, Map18, Map19, especially Map19.
The buildings actually look too big for Map19.
For Map18, Map16, they are about the right height. In these maps the sky buildings are not close, they are in the distance, so large buildings just look out of scale.
For Map13, there are many city buildings that already provide the near horizon, so not much can be seen.
I played with the building height for two weeks, making it larger and smaller, and this is the height that has the least clash with existing FreeDoom levels.

Buildings that look to be in the distance can look good in any map.
Nearby buildings in the sky pic leads to scale clashes.
Maps with surrounding city buildings do not look good with anything in the Sky pic that looks to be closer, because sky pic buildings will be larger than the far buildings in the level, an obvious visual clash of scaling.

Moving Map19 to use another sky would have the most effect, but it incorporates the previous and next map in the map level. Pushing the map edges out to fix sky visual glitches has made the scale problem much worse. The buildings in the sky pic appear even larger in scale.

It is impossible to get decent clouds after the palette quantization.
Existing clouds I examined in wads show the same color banding.
I was not going to go through the effort of hand drawing clouds in the Doom palette until after getting comments here.

The current rsky2 photo looks neat by itself, but does not blend in at all with any FreeDoom level.

I do not expect many players to spend much time staring at the far sky pic.
The sky pic should blend in well enough that it is not obvious.
Thus generating it from a city wad actually makes it look more natural.

wesleyjohnson said:

Are you just looking at patches, or testing them in a wad?

Tested them out in actual levels; that's why I said the buildings are too low.

The most affected are Map13, Map16, Map18, Map19, especially Map19.
The buildings actually look too big for Map19.
For Map18, Map16, they are about the right height. In these maps the sky buildings are not close, they are in the distance, so large buildings just look out of scale.
For Map13, there are many city buildings that already provide the near horizon, so not much can be seen.
I played with the building height for two weeks, making it larger and smaller, and this is the height that has the least clash with existing FreeDoom levels.

Okay, I tried it in these specific levels as you recommended. I can understand what you're trying to do here (trying to make it seem realistic as possible) and you've done a pretty good job of it, but I still think the buildings are too low.

The sky forms part of the atmosphere of the game - it's the backdrop in which everything's taking place. In this context, the idea is that you're supposed to be in a city. There don't have to be huge skyscrapers but if you can't see any buildings at all then you don't get that impression. It might as well just be clear skies.

I understand that you're trying to aim for realism but not everything in a video game has to be perfectly logical or make perfect sense. Some degree of suspension of disbelief on the part of the player is implied, and having the buildings perhaps a bit taller than they might be in real life isn't asking much.

But on a more fundamental level I don't think the buildings look very nice. The sky is an opportunity to have something nice and photorealistic as a backdrop. The current RSKY2 is good in this sense - although overall it's an ugly texture and not a very good implementation. I agree that something like what you've put together here is much more appropriate for Freedoom's levels.

I do not expect many players to spend much time staring at the far sky pic.
The sky pic should blend in well enough that it is not obvious.
Thus generating it from a city wad actually makes it look more natural.

I think we disagree on the importance of the sky backdrop.

It is impossible to get decent clouds after the palette quantization.
Existing clouds I examined in wads show the same color banding.
I was not going to go through the effort of hand drawing clouds in the Doom palette until after getting comments here.

I'm quite surprised to hear this, because the Doom palette has a pretty big selection of different browns in it. The overall color isn't too different from Freedoom's RSKY1 and it doesn't have color banding like this. Are you sure you can't do better?

wesleyjohnson said:

Map19 [...] incorporates the previous and next map in the map level.

Would it be a bad idea to just remove those parts? The original author's attempt at creating continuity never seemed very convincing, and the rest of Freedoom's levels don't bother.

I am really getting tired of "Realistic" being used as the latest Doom put-down. I am not trying to be as realistic as possible.
I am trying to simulate the context with a better sense of believability than previous attempts. The context is a city, maybe burning.

The game is not a photo journal, nor a calender, nor any of the other things where you might admire a nice photo.
Photos suffer from being too realistic. They clash with the level buildings.
This really grates me when my attempts to get the scale right is bashed as trying to be "Realistic", and then realistic photos are preferred because they look neat.
I cannot understand at all why a eye-popping calender pic would be preferable.

I cannot see the sky as providing the context. In most level maps it just fills in the gaps between the buildings. In maps like Map19, the player is best off not focusing on it, because no version of rsky2 would fit well.
The sky is best when it is the least noticeable. A seamless visual from the level map far-ground to the sky pic would seem to be the ideal.

This leads to my to using a level map to generate the city. The buildings look reasonable enough. The GIMP scaling does hack them somewhat, but it would do the same to a photo.
Just what is wrong with them.
Contrast ?, color ?, style ??, not modern enough ?...

I am trying to eliminate the clash of scales that occurred with the previous black rsky2. The feeling of how big the rsky2h buildings are differs with each level map they are seen against. I did try several building scales. What I found was that too small just looks distant, too big visibly clashes in a way the mapper cannot fix.
I have been working on Map19 at the same time and I am fully aware of how hard it is to deal with the visual of those sky buildings in something like Map19. So I err on the side of too small because it can be lived with.

DoomLegacy has its own rsky2, with buildings that are about twice as tall as in rsky2h. If you don't look at them, they can be ignored because they are so brown (like the sky).


I have been drawing clouds for 2 weeks, almost every night. The rsky2h is the best of the lot, yet. Could still do better, but I am getting freaky sick of drawing clouds. The color quantization is doing a hack job on them.

Complaints are not much use if you cannot give any feedback or criteria for exactly how tall the buildings should be, by what measurement, or give some reasoning that could give a relative height.

How should the clouds be different? Should they be darker, more fluffy, more storm-like ??

rsky2a has no buildings, this would eliminate the building height problem entirely.
rsky2h has the darkest sky, but it is starting to look like columns of smoke (which is is not).
The others have different building heights. If there were several replies that those heights were preferable, then I would have found out something for another iteration.

Am working on a revised Map19. I would like to eliminate some of those level connections because it has gotten so big, but also feel I should preserve something from the original author's work. Should use another thread for Map19 discussion.

Fine. Which sky do you want added? I don't see any point in voting about this. Pick which one you like best and I'll add it.

I had always expected to make a final revision.
Feedback on which direction it should be revised would be useful.
General rejection is just annoying.

The clouds:
1. Lessen that vertical smoke appearance somewhat.
2. Will have to be hand tweaked pixel by pixel using doom palette colors. Unless I can invent some way to quantize better. Maybe use the GIMP quantizer.

Right now, I would.
1. A few buildings 20% taller.
2. One building 40% taller.
3. More windows and details, to improve look of some buildings.
4. 10% Stronger light on some buildings.

I do not want to be making any more wild guesses, have them criticized, and have to do this 3 or 4 times. Each of these versions is too much work.

Once it's in a state you consider satisfactory then just me know and I'll merge it. Or even just open a pull request on Github - as you're a programmer I assume you can figure out Git easily enough.

For reference, here are the four sky textures in case anyone else has any opinion.

The palettization is really, really bad, and the forced perspective on the buildings doesn't make sense given their distance. I think the existing sky is far better-looking, and has much more character to it as well.

Wesley, do you have the "original" (unpalettized) versions of the textures? Maybe someone else can do a better job of palettizing them.

Freedoom's RSKY1 is a similar color and it doesn't suffer the same color banding.



It might be that a slight change in hue will make it palettize much more nicely.

esselfortium said:

I think the existing sky is far better-looking, and has much more character to it as well.

I'd encourage you to actually try it in game (WAD download link above) in the levels for which it's designed, because you get a better feel for what he's trying to do. MAP16 is a good example map to try. I like the idea of what he's doing, it's just some details of the implementation that I wish could be improved.

I think the current sky is super cool, it adds so much to the atmosphere of the 2nd episode. These scyscrapers with green lights look very nice and kind of futuristic. It would be sad to see them go. But if you replace RSKY2, IMO at least you should make it different enough from RSKY1 for some variety. Just another bunch of brown clouds would be boring.

Memfis said:

I think the current sky is super cool, it adds so much to the atmosphere of the 2nd episode.

Dito! I also like it very much and to me it has become sort of characteristic for Freedoom to me.

What other color clouds would a possibly burning city make ??
Really don't think that white clouds and blue sky is going to fit the Doom mood well. (Actually RSKY1 looks earth-like and would fit well behind the city. A new RSKY1 could then be more off-world, with black space sky backgrounds and off colors, or a sky as seen from inside a large dome).

There is no forced perspective. I have created a city wad and am taking a snapshot of it using PrBoom. PrBoom provides the perspective.
I am currently making city textures with walls and windows, because there is currently only one to work with, BRWINDOW.

I now have four more city wall textures, but need more.
I takes half a night to do one. Everything comes out in monotones.
I can airbrush all night long and the quantizer will reduce it to monotones.
They have an outside wall, windows, and some stuff inside the room can been seen (like most city offices). I should make some with blinds too. I will release these for inclusion as FreeDoom textures.

I have noticed that the color quantizer is really doing a bad job on the city walls too.
It uses a PNG from GIMP and reduces it to a PPM with strange splotches of the same color.
The color quantizer in GIMP does a much better job. I am going to switch to that for now.
It may help if I can find a way to make the airbrush dither instead of blending in the RGB space.

Unfortunately there is about 2 hours of hand touch-up to convert each PrBoom pic to a rsky patch. Some of the detail work is entirely pixel by pixel.

Anyone have a Doom color palette quantizer than can dither?
I have to do all the city textures before they get used by prboom, and the sky texture afterwards. I am keeping all work in GIMP native files, and the PNG versions don't look so bad either.

Some buildings have been raised, some are twice as high, with more of a downtown skyline effect in the far buildings.

The downside is that I play using DoomLegacy, which substitutes its own rsky2 (taller). It is when I have to test FreeDoom levels using PrBoom that I see how bad the FreeDoom rsky2 looks in comparision.

The FreeDoom rsky is a neat looking pic, but it is not proportioned to be used as an rsky, and the level maps are not 'downtown' (none of them), and they are not lit for midnight. A dawn suburb/industrial area rsky is what I am aiming for.

wesleyjohnson said:

What other color clouds would a possibly burning city make ??
Really don't think that white clouds and blue sky is going to fit the Doom mood well. (Actually RSKY1 looks earth-like and would fit well behind the city. A new RSKY1 could then be more off-world, with black space sky backgrounds and off colors, or a sky as seen from inside a large dome).

Plutonia's RSKY1 has white clouds on a blue sky for an overcast look, so I'm not sure why you're suggesting that it's unfeasible for Doom. Beyond that, though, there are all sorts of ways that a city sky can be designed that aren't "brown sky" or "blue cloudy sky", so your example doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

In any case, Freedoom already has a sky with simple tan/brown clouds. E2's sky should set a clearly different mood, which the current one already does.

I now have four more city wall textures, but need more.
I takes half a night to do one. Everything comes out in monotones.
I can airbrush all night long and the quantizer will reduce it to monotones.
They have an outside wall, windows, and some stuff inside the room can been seen (like most city offices). I should make some with blinds too. I will release these for inclusion as FreeDoom textures.

I have noticed that the color quantizer is really doing a bad job on the city walls too.
It uses a PNG from GIMP and reduces it to a PPM with strange splotches of the same color.
The color quantizer in GIMP does a much better job. I am going to switch to that for now.
It may help if I can find a way to make the airbrush dither instead of blending in the RGB space.

Unfortunately there is about 2 hours of hand touch-up to convert each PrBoom pic to a rsky patch. Some of the detail work is entirely pixel by pixel.

Anyone have a Doom color palette quantizer than can dither?
I have to do all the city textures before they get used by prboom, and the sky texture afterwards. I am keeping all work in GIMP native files, and the PNG versions don't look so bad either.

Dithering isn't the solution, and typically should not be used in Doom graphics -- the resources get scaled and stretched around pretty significantly, so the result is generally a mess of moire or giant off-colored pixels rather than the illusion of color blending. It's for this reason that the stock resources virtually never use the sorts of dithering you'll get as options when palettizing an image.

Instead, try a very subtle layer of monochrome noise (maybe 1 or 2 percent opacity) using Soft Light or Overlay blending mode to add a small and controllable amount of random grain. This will serve a similar purpose to dithering and will help the palettization process, but you'll likely still need to adjust your hue/saturation and brightness/contrast to fit more seamlessly into the color ramps available.

As an aside, screenshots from a Doom level really don't make for a good sky...

wesleyjohnson said:

There is no forced perspective. I have created a city wad and am taking a snapshot of it using PrBoom. PrBoom provides the perspective.

That's not what esselfortium meant. You took a picture of some buildings in PrBoom, but in real life if you saw buildings that far away then you wouldn't see the sides in that perspective.

In the picture you see the right side of the left buildings and the left side of the right buildings. Assuming the buildings are aligned with each other, at that distance you'd just see the end (no sides), or you'd see the same side of each building (if you were at an angle relative to them).

For all the suggestions on what not to do, I do not see any suggestions on what alternative color clouds a possibly burning city could have over them. I do not have any good ideas, and apparently neither do you.
The Doom palette does not have a good green range, and green clouds are silly on Earth (it is a city, not a copper mine). There is red, but red clouds make it look like Hell.
The Blue in the palette is the worst represented, so Blue tinted clouds are infeasible.
Brown is the only color in the Doom palette that has sufficient range to do something like clouds.

Perspective:
You think the buildings are supposed to all face the viewer ?
I think that you are judging the distance by the size of the buildings, and they are not as far away as you surmise. I have made some of the buildings taller which should lessen that impression.

I could turn some buildings to break up the appearance of a single alignment.

To make the left and right edges of the sky join invisibly the building at far left and far right have to merge at the join to appear
as a single building.

The available dither of GIMP an ppmquant uses wildly differing colors to dither with, and the result is only viewable from a distance.
I could hand dither as suggested, but cannot do very much is one sitting. I tried noise too, and the color quantizer just ignored the differences.

I am moving some of the colors to ranges where there are more colors choices. This means that everything becomes gray and brown.

One of my city walls which was blue, after nearly a dozen recolorings, is becoming very gray with a few blue streaks. It now quantizes into a mass a navy blue, with sky blue splotches. I really do not see how both the GIMP and ppmquant quantizer can miss using all those other blues in the palette. There are not that many blue, but there are more than the two that it uses.

I am trying to write another quantizer dither algorithm that accomplishes the same thing, only dithering with the closest 2 colors to the RGB color of the original.

I don't follow -- there are lots of color and composition possibilities for Earthy skies. Medium/light gray clouds, black sky with gray clouds for a stormy nighttime look, the light blue and white of Plutonia's sky, dark blue (Hexen has a very nice cloudy night sky like this that's appeared in a number of Doom PWADs), orange and pink sunset, solid orange a la Thy Flesh Consumed, etc.

There are lots of existing Doom-paletted skies (and other resources) to use as learning and research material for what can be accomplished within its palette; you'll find that there's a whole lot more to use than just brown.

I think the current sky looks fine. If you're going to go around replacing assets, it's a better idea to do it to ugly looking things, not redo perfectly fine graphics just because you don't like that it depicts night-time.

Doom's diminishing lighting/headlamp effect doesn't make things consistently dark, but rather a nice looking (if unrealistic) gradient. So long as it's 192 brightness at most, I think any outdoor section in a map will look fine as day or night.

Besides, real cities place stationary lights everywhere. If you're so concerned about the maps looking too bright against the night sky, why not just place those tall blue tech lamps in the maps?

Don't know if this is still a issue or not. Geez... design by committee always sucks. Personally, I like all of the skies in this thread. The city skies look particularly good, as does the generic one. However, I have a tool that I wrote that can do the palletization, with R, G, B, H, S, V sliders. It can crank out 100 different variants of the skies if need be.

No need to write another tool. Just let me know if it's necessary, and direct me to the image that you want recolored. Again, if it's not Doom's original sky, people are going to complain. Basically, you need to say "Fuck it", and keep your best attempt so far, and move on.

Too late. I have also written a tool (ppmquant2) that adds several features directly aimed at some of the problems.

1. Invented a color quantization method (n-dither) that chooses between several close colors. How many is a command line parameter.
2. Center vrs surround weighting on error correction, and color vrs intensity weighting parameters on n-dither.
3. Add noise to n-dither. This goes far to relieve the patches and streaks.
4. Add speckle to n-dither. This is the one that I am currently tuning.
It detects areas of same color and forces speckle. Currently it is making tiny maze patterns, and seems to be all or nothing, so it needs some more work.

I will submit this tool in the library when it reaches maturity.
Perhaps it can replace ppmquant in the ppm library.

I have made changes to the city. Buildings much taller, some different angles. I have made some new city building textures. These will be submitted for inclusion in the freedoom wad. They look much better, even at a distance, than the filler textures I was using.

Am currently working on a city wall texture with solar-panels. Quantizing the green-gray upper panels is coming out with a one color green splotch and several stripes of other colors. It is the third choice of colors for those panels that I have tried.

Still, the only colors that have any decent blended range are browns and grays. Trying to use any other color pair for a wall panel gives stripes or splotches of mono-colors. The speckle option was supposed to help with that, so it needs more tuning.

Have not got back to the sky yet. Was thinking of a dawn gray with a few storm clouds in the distance, just to be different from anything else. I already have seen what a disaster putting any blue in it will be. Maybe if the speckle gets fixed well it can cope with that.

I worked on Map19 recently and had to test with prboom. The current sky still looks wrong in scale, too close, and dark.

Is your color quant tool good at breaking up splotches ?
As I am tuning the image, and quantizing every 3 minutes, for several hours at time. This would only work if I can run it locally on Linux.

I have the GIMP images and PNG images. But I am not at the point right now where I could submit the latest GIMP image to someone else to quantize, as I am still making a variety of city building textures. They would at least have to handle a PNG image to doom palette quantization. The many blends and gradients are quantizing to mono-colors, splotches, and stripes. This leads to repetitive rework of every texture. The GIMP quantizer is no better than ppmquant, which is much worse than ppmquant2.

Still working on this project.
Have ppmquant2 working better, and have tweaked the speckle code.
Still not happy with the speckle leaving fingerprint patterns, it may need more tweaking. ppmquant2 is finally making a nice marble pattern from a brown to green blended panels, which is much better than the previous green blotch on a brown blotch I was getting before.
Have made some city textures, but need some more for variety.
Need at least one more for a skyscraper that currently is the metal texture.

Freedoom bike shedding: episode 327

Holy balls, can we just leave SKY2 alone?