What are you working on?

[ceriux]

i like that your textures dont look all blurry.

[Dr. Shadowborg]

i like that your textures dont look all blurry.

Thanks, I'm trying to go for a Doom / Duke3D / Quake fusion style. Doom and Duke3D map textures are generally not blurry, so I'm happy to hear that I'm hitting the mark.

[Dr. Shadowborg]

More textures with some detail brush practice:

http://br0gspot.files.wordpress.com/201 ... htex14.jpg
http://br0gspot.files.wordpress.com/201 ... htex15.jpg

[mankrip]

An update on my 8-bit color software renderer:

This is what 8-bit textures made with Floyd-Steinberg dithering look like.

And this is my approach, using the same texture resolution as the above picture.

The first one has 8-bit textures quantized with Floyd-Steinberg dithering, plus 4-step lighting dithering (including color correction and brightness correction), which is combined in real time with the texture. The texture in it is mapped using a hi-res kernel with 16 levels of dithering, like the one in PrBoom (but smoother). The combined T&L kernels can smooth texture detail up to 32 levels, which is higher than any software renderer I know of.
Some people like to compare my dithering to the dithering in the software renderer of Unreal and UT99, but those games uses a 4-level kernel, which is much less smooth.

The second screenshot was rendered using the same techniques, but instead of using 8-bit textures quantized with Floyd-Steinberg dithering, it's using 32-bit TGAs compiled into the 8-bit data format I've created. Usual dithering algorithms for creating 8-bit images works per-texel, which is bad for scaling the texels afterwards; the intended color definition gets lost.
My algorithm compiles the textures in a format that allows for per-pixel color definition at any texel scale.

It's all rendered in real time, in 256 colors. Those screenshots were not modified in any way and are in lossless 8-bit color PNG format, so it's exactly how the renderer looks like.

Of course, the engine has cvars for disabling most of those effects. Color & brightness correction can't be disabled yet, because it requires significant changes in the code, and to disable it I'll have to implement a secondary codepath that works in the old way.

And this is an example of the texture quality I'm going to use in my game. The palette isn't final, that skybox wasn't made by me, and I'm still going to implement better support for TGAs with 8-bit alpha channels, so some things should improve.

i like that your textures dont look all blurry.

Thanks, I'm trying to go for a Doom / Duke3D / Quake fusion style. Doom and Duke3D map textures are generally not blurry, so I'm happy to hear that I'm hitting the mark.

I suggest disabling mipmap filtering, to achieve a more sharp look on distance.

[Spike]

I suggest disabling mipmap filtering, to achieve a more sharp look on distance.

nnoooo! if you disable mipmap filtering, you end up with everything using mip0 everywhere. when combined with even quakes texture resolution, this results in a whole boatload of noise. flickering glitchy noise that vaugely looks like what it should and sparkles in an ugly way the instant the camera moves/rotates even slightly.
it irks me somewhat when people use nearest minification filtering too.

what he actually needs is anisotropic filtering, which would nicely improve the texture quality.
however, whether the gpu driver supports it without forcing trilinear filtering is a different matter (you might need to use trilinear filtering in order to get it to actually work properly).

anyway, these two settings can be used to boost textures a bit, with chunky texels (fte cvars):
gl_texture_anisotropic_filtering 16
gl_texturemode nll

[mankrip]

I suggest disabling mipmap filtering, to achieve a more sharp look on distance.

nnoooo! if you disable mipmap filtering, you end up with everything using mip0 everywhere. when combined with even quakes texture resolution, this results in a whole boatload of noise. flickering glitchy noise that vaugely looks like what it should and sparkles in an ugly way the instant the camera moves/rotates even slightly.

Just like DOS Doom and Duke Nukem 3D.

Anyway, I didn't suggest to disable mipmaps. I suggested to disable filtering on the rendered mipmaps, because although the closer surfaces are not filtered, the mipmapped surfaces looks filtered. I'm talking about the surfaces, not about the textures.

WinQuake looks a lot sharper than that, because although the mipmaps are filtered, the mipmapped surfaces aren't.

It may also be a matter of the renderer using mipmaps at a much closer distance than it should. I don't know if GL engines supports d_mipscale, but that could help.

If you want to go for a full hardware-accelerated anisotropic filtering look, the best solution is to also implement large texture magnification for pixelated games without aliasing between texels to get the most texel-accurate look possible. It will absolutely not look like software rendering, but it can make low-res textures look very pretty.

[toneddu2000]

@Dr. Shadowborg: very attractive mapping, please keep it up and share more pics!
@mankrip: very cool work on your engine!

PS: love the "ancient portal" shot!

[Dr. Shadowborg]

@mankrip: Nice engine work there, the second screenshot looks a lot better than the first, the floor in particular benefits greatly.

@spike: As you expected, gl_texture_anisotropic_filtering 16 didn't do much without the bilinear / trilinear filtering turned on, gl_texturemode nll however worked wonders to kill the nasty ugly bandings in nearest mode. Trilinear looks a lot better, but it seems to lose some sharpness / clarity upclose. The textures do however look nicer in some regards.

Some shots of both:
http://br0gspot.files.wordpress.com/201 ... st_nll.jpg
http://br0gspot.files.wordpress.com/201 ... linear.jpg

Still need to do some more "domestic" textures for more comfortable living quarters, but I think I'm almost done with base / modern texture sets for now, next will come the lost civilization / medeval / runic metal texture sets...

[mh]

I suggest disabling mipmap filtering, to achieve a more sharp look on distance.

nnoooo! if you disable mipmap filtering, you end up with everything using mip0 everywhere. when combined with even quakes texture resolution, this results in a whole boatload of noise. flickering glitchy noise that vaugely looks like what it should and sparkles in an ugly way the instant the camera moves/rotates even slightly.
it irks me somewhat when people use nearest minification filtering too.

what he actually needs is anisotropic filtering, which would nicely improve the texture quality.
however, whether the gpu driver supports it without forcing trilinear filtering is a different matter (you might need to use trilinear filtering in order to get it to actually work properly).

anyway, these two settings can be used to boost textures a bit, with chunky texels (fte cvars):
gl_texture_anisotropic_filtering 16
gl_texturemode nll

I also suggest doing gamma-correct miplevel generation. Virtually no Quake engine that I'm aware of does this, but it's such a huge boost in visual quality.

[mankrip]

I also suggest doing gamma-correct miplevel generation. Virtually no Quake engine that I'm aware of does this, but it's such a huge boost in visual quality.

Mine does.

[c0burn]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yGVSLx2AJQ

[ceriux]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yGVSLx2AJQ

very nice!

[toneddu2000]

So cool c0burn! 3d models created by you?

[c0burn]

So cool c0burn! 3d models created by you?

http://www.moddb.com/mods/alternative-g ... -for-quake

Not by me, no. I added the switching animations and a couple of frames to the db shotgun firing animation!

[qbism]

What am I working on? Hype. Taking https://qexpo2016.com from zero to ...? The goal is 50 booths of good quality and 100 active members by the time the Quake Expo is underway. So far, 15 booths have at least begun construction and we have 40+ members, many whom you'll recognize.

Here's a graph of views including last week. Certainly the shareware anniversary was a factor:



The potential exposure isn't worth breaking your back, but it's worth a few minutes to throw together a booth for an existing or ongoing project, or polish up something sitting on the hard drive. Many of these 'what are you working on' creations could make great booths... creations do not have to be complete!