[Paul B]

It's been ages since I touched EDuke32 or Mapster but I was revisiting one of my old maps using the latest version of Eduke32 (Build Jun 9 2023) and came a cross a problem. This problem doesn't occur using Classic or the Polymost renderer and appears to be specific to Polymer.

If you have a skybox sector which happens to overlap an underwater sector on a different Z axis, the video renderer causes the paralax skybox texture to flash to a darker sky texture as if the lowtag 2 sector below is being applied to the skybox texture when Duke's character enter's into the same same physical 2D space as the underwater tagged sector. Also is true when Duke steps outside the bounds of the underwater sector the Paralax sky then corrects and brightens the sky texture back to it's original state.

Hopefully this makes sense to whoever is looking after the graphical side of things.

[Mark]

Paul B, on 15 June 2023 - 12:01 PM, said:

Hopefully this makes sense to whoever is looking after the graphical side of things.

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[Paul B]

I think what is frustrating about these problems was that they were mostly all addressed previously before they introduced Ion Fury. Now it seems like we are reliving all previous commits for whatever reason like we're stuck in an endless loop.

[Radar]

It's because polymer is a dead broken renderer that's not worth maintaining. Are a couple dynamic lights really worth the unplayable fps dips and stuttering? It's a one-trick pony that doesn't even do its trick well. Just use polymost.

[ToiletDuck64]

Polymer isn't going to ever be truly be obsolete until we get a non-Polymer renderer that doesn't just eat shit when TROR is used in certain ways (mostly involving scissoring).

[Radar]

I think there's better luck one day seeing those glitches patched in polymost than polymer getting optimized.

The choice renderer with dynamic lights is going to be Polygraf.

[Mark]

Yeah, the breaking of TROR scissoring and the flashlight mod is a big deal for me. Polymer is far from useless. Been using it since late 2009 and will continue in the future. I NEED that lighting. I'm addicted.

Radar said: "It's because polymer is a dead broken renderer that's not worth maintaining."
I think at the very least if something gets broken by more recent eduke revisions, that break should get fixed. At least keep Polymer functioning as it was. I'm not expecting miracles of new features and optimizations.

And for Polygraf if it ever happens, IIRC Graf's port or whatever you want to call it doesn't support con code so I wouldn't be using it at all.

I assume Radar is generalising when he asked if the problems are worth a couple dynamic lights. I have dozens of them in each of my maps. Its an important part of my style, not just a gimmick.

[Radar]

I think the ideal path for EDuke32 would be to wait until Polygraf supports dynamic lights and TROR, then port it over as a replacement for Polymer. Since World Tour used the same lighting SEs as Polymer, it should theoretically function well as a drop-in replacement as far as map/mod support goes.

[Phredreeke]

Raze doesn't support EDuke32's CON code extensions (it does support CON code, as it's required to run the game...) and it never will. The devs are currently converting the game's logic into ZScript.

As for Polygraf in EDuke32, I can't see that happening

Spoiler

TerminX considers it to be refactored Polymer code. Meanwhile the Raze devs says similarity is be necessity.

[Radar]

Why does it matter if the code looks similar?

[Phredreeke]

Politics

[oasiz]

I think there is a lot of refactoring needed as well if they were to backport.
Curious to see where the renderer goes down the line but maybe a lot of the plumbing might be tricky to retrofit..


Is there a list of the issues seen in polymer?
Stuff that used to work and no longer does that is.

Sounds like it's worth collecting here the very least, along with any version where it broke.
Considering that it really hasn't had a dev for ~10 years now to maintain it, it could be anywhere and something unrelated that broke things.

[Mark]

They have all been reported by me and others in the forum. I've done a lot of bisecting to determine where they happened. I'll see if I can round up a few and post them here again.

[Mark]

Off the top of my head is the broken flashlight mod that TX said happened when he did some lighting interpolation. I gave him a code example and he was going to look and see if either that code or his changes could make it work again.

[Mark]

https://forums.duke4...post__p__366777

https://forums.duke4...post__p__367782

Others have been fixed or are hiding in threads not started by me and could be hard to find. But getting these issues solved would be great.

[oasiz]

Cheers!
It's good to have these noted down in one place for ease of access.