Fog in WinQuake

[JasonX]

Does WinQuake have fog?

[Spike]

no

[JasonX]

Is it possible to implemement it in the software renderer?

[Error]

oh I'm sure it is... the amount of work involved is another question.

[mh]

Quite. The problem is that the software renderer is an 8-bit renderer, which means that there are only 256 unique colours available for it to use. So if you want to blend an arbitrary fog colour with the main render you're going to have to select palette indexes really really carefully, otherwise you'll end up with something that looks like this:

[leileilol]

Laser Arena pulled it off. It even had dithering. Too bad it's closed source. it also had a ton of precalc'ed table files required for it

I'm figuring out a way to do fog too

i'd recommend having something COLORMAP-ish for a lookup table - fading to the fog color, instead of black. this FOGMAP would be generated on level load really quick.

[mh]

Yeah, I reckon you could do it with a table. Have a 256x256 table, look up the palette index in one dimension and a "fog depth" in the other to get the final palette index.

While we're at it: what's the big obsession with fog anyway? Quake fog is crap. What happens in the screenshot above if you dive into the lava pool? Crap, that's what happens. Nobody should be thinking of perpetuating this mistake. Get some proper standards in first.

[leileilol]

256x256 is kind of too much. how about 256x32 lol (palette index by fog density, and like in my post, generates on level load)

[Spike]

mmm, black fog...

[leileilol]

it wouldn't be black. it'd generate toward whatever fog color that would be set in the level's worldspawn parms

[mankrip]

Makaqu has it, but it's so slow and ugly I've hidden it into the Developer menu (which you can access by pressing backspace on the "go to console" item in the Options menu, by the way).





After learning how to dither images properly, I wonder how its 8-bit fog would look if dithered.

[Baker]

MH and mk have a software renderer prototype of damn never everything.

[mh]

That wasn't software I posted.

It was DirectQ with the Quake palette loaded on the screenshot, nearest colour matching.

[mankrip]

Laser Arena pulled it off.

Neat!

[qbism]

Could a palette with better color space distribution improve effects of fog? (and transparency and lighting) This is a link describing a 6x6x6 color cube http://www.webreference.com/dev/graphics/palette.html