[Jan Satcitananda]

Thx guys for the comments. Here's something else I wanna show you. You might remember that I've been messing around with splitting the frame into horizontal bands to apply screen warping effects. Now I've coded an experimental routine which manipulates 199 horizontal lines to give a proper vertical looking perspective in 8-bit mode. It's impractical since I'm getting around 10 fps even on E1L1, but demonstrates technical possibility of the concept. It's a pity that the showview command doesn't support fields of view other than 90 degrees; this circumstance leads to distortions and gaps on the screenshots.

[Micky C]

too bad Ken Silverman didn't decide to finish rendermode 2 (software with correct perspective) so it could be an additional renderer option

[Wolf]

Micky C, on 17 April 2011 - 04:37 AM, said:

too bad Ken Silverman didn't decide to finish rendermode 1 (software with correct perspective) so it could be an additional renderer option

I really wanted to make an 8-bit mod, but the fake look up/down was the only thing that reminded me why I shouldn't. I didn't know at one time he had plans to do that, so it really is a shame :[ if I could +1 things, I would.

[Micky C]

Oh no he didn't have plans to do it per se, but he wrote a few test renderers when he was in the process of making a fully openGL renderer with correct perspective. Rendermode 1 has correct perspective but renders all surfaces with a flat colour, rendermode 2 is another software renderer with correct perspective and properly textured walls. It's playable if you don't mind visual glitches (some sprites showing through walls mostly).

If you're interested in having a look, the renderers have been commented out for current edukes to save space or something, but you can still download old versions here. Just grab any of them, start the game, and type "setrendermode 2" into the console.

[Danukem]

This truly is an amazing mod, with many effects that don't seem possible. But there are a couple of things that don't look right, imo.

The frozen enemies look like ghosts, because they are very transparent. Maybe they are supposed to look like ice sculptures, but ice sculptures are reflective. Also, ice sculptures are made of water, whereas the monsters are frozen flesh, so they would not be transparent. Perhaps the best way to handle this would be a multi-sprite solution. The enemy would be non-transparent (perhaps with a new frozen version, or just the standard pal 1). Then you would have a larger ice sprite with icicles hanging from it, that would spawn from the enemy when it freezes. The larger sprite would be transparent, so it would look like the enemy is encased with ice.

Because of the prominent flare effect, the rockets look like a plasma weapon (especially the devastator rockets, because they are so small). I think a different kind of glow would suit them better. In my mods I make them spawn a rounded glow sprite, but maybe you could come up with something better.

[Gambini]

Micky C, on 17 April 2011 - 04:37 AM, said:

too bad Ken Silverman didn't decide to finish rendermode 2 (software with correct perspective) so it could be an additional renderer option

I would kill Randy pitchford and delete all DNF trace in human´s history for a renderer like that. Basically an Open GL renderer with the old 8bits looking.

[Player Lin]

Gambini, on 17 April 2011 - 10:06 AM, said:

I would kill Randy pitchford and delete all DNF trace in human´s history for a renderer like that. Basically an Open GL renderer with the old 8bits looking.

But not anyone can accept the classic 8bits looking in GL renderer like us.

[TerminX]

Gambini, on 17 April 2011 - 10:06 AM, said:

I would kill Randy pitchford and delete all DNF trace in human´s history for a renderer like that. Basically an Open GL renderer with the old 8bits looking.

It's definitely planned to have shading that utilizes the classic 8-bit shade tables sometime in the future in Polymer. Hopefully it'll happen sometime before the next 5 years have passed.

[Micky C]

TX, on 17 April 2011 - 07:45 PM, said:

It's definitely planned to have shading that utilizes the classic 8-bit shade tables sometime in the future in Polymer. Hopefully it'll happen sometime before the next 5 years have passed.

I know it's probably not needed considering today's computers but the 8-bit renderer with correct perspective also would have also been good for those that can't run openGL or just wanted a nice high framerate.

[TerminX]

Huh? You would get a higher framerate in OpenGL than you ever would in software on any kind of modern system (and probably on all sorts of not so modern systems).

[Jan Satcitananda]

Micky C, on 17 April 2011 - 04:59 AM, said:

Oh no he didn't have plans to do it per se, but he wrote a few test renderers when he was in the process of making a fully openGL renderer with correct perspective. Rendermode 1 has correct perspective but renders all surfaces with a flat colour, rendermode 2 is another software renderer with correct perspective and properly textured walls. It's playable if you don't mind visual glitches (some sprites showing through walls mostly).

I remember that slow and buggy "8-bit Polymost" mode. Actually I have an idea to attain correct perspective otherwise. Theoretically, it's possible to bind vertical looking with screen tilting. In order to rotate the view, the Build engine renders the image into an intermediate buffer (so called TILE_TILT), which is then displayed on the screen via the conventional rotatesprite procedure. If we draw content of this buffer with some perspective transformation and rotate it at the same time, we'll get a 6-DOF look with the performance of 4 DOF coupled with screen tilting. There are some restrictions preventing us from having free camera rotation using this method, but there may be tricks to bypass them (mostly related to staged rendering).

DeeperThought, on 17 April 2011 - 08:52 AM, said:

The frozen enemies look like ghosts, because they are very transparent. Maybe they are supposed to look like ice sculptures, but ice sculptures are reflective. Also, ice sculptures are made of water, whereas the monsters are frozen flesh, so they would not be transparent. Perhaps the best way to handle this would be a multi-sprite solution.

That's only a test version of frozen enemies, so undoubtedly it's somewhat strange. I was thinking of multi-sprite actors separating the ice shell from the enemy itself and it would look really cool, but since the final version of this mod will not have any of the old Duke weapons (including the freezer), it's better to restore the original look of frozen enemies.

Quote

Because of the prominent flare effect, the rockets look like a plasma weapon (especially the devastator rockets, because they are so small). I think a different kind of glow would suit them better. In my mods I make them spawn a rounded glow sprite, but maybe you could come up with something better.

And the flares, of course, need some tuning too (attenuation over time for the rockets might be convenient). Nevertheless, like other weapons, the RPG rockets are to be eventually replaced with my own versions.

TX, on 17 April 2011 - 07:45 PM, said:

It's definitely planned to have shading that utilizes the classic 8-bit shade tables sometime in the future in Polymer. Hopefully it'll happen sometime before the next 5 years have passed.

Well, that would be awesome. If so, there's a chance that this mod will be Polymer-compatible some day.

[Gambini]

TX, on 17 April 2011 - 07:45 PM, said:

It's definitely planned to have shading that utilizes the classic 8-bit shade tables sometime in the future in Polymer. Hopefully it'll happen sometime before the next 5 years have passed.

Great to hear. I´ve been around Duke for 15 years now, so five more years isn´t that much time

In the hipotetical case, is there any chance it could be also introduced in polymost?

[TerminX]

Gambini, on 18 April 2011 - 05:32 PM, said:

Great to hear. I´ve been around Duke for 15 years now, so five more years isn´t that much time

In the hipotetical case, is there any chance it could be also introduced in polymost?

Probably not. I would have to check with Plagman, but I'm reasonably sure it would be implemented as an additional shader program on top of Polymer that would be incompatible with the way Polymost does things.

Ideally Polymer will eventually be faster than Polymost, so Polymost is pretty much deprecated and unlikely to receive additional functionality or major updates at any point in the future. Because Polymost is also incapable of running on modern hardware that exposes its functionality via OpenGL ES whereas Polymer would be a fairly simple port to these platforms, you may even see Polymost go away altogether sometime in the very distant future once Polymer has been rewritten for speed.

[Jan Satcitananda]

Check this video out guys... I've just captured & annotated some my latest development.


There is a test of my music sequencer I had been talking about in this thread earlier. Long patterns of notes seem to eat up too much sprites to be practical; and with all those clicking sounds during playback and problems with stopping multi-instanced sounds, I'd prefer using conventional digital music in the mod. For instance, the piano plays like if the sustain pedal is kept pressed despite the time limit for each note.

The same map contains advanced light mapping examples. The technical realization is pretty simple: the sunlit texture is rendered first, then it's blacked out by various sprites here and there, and after all the transparent bluish shade texture is rendered over it filling areas which were darkened. Looks pretty realistic, but everything needs to be drawn by hand, so there's not very much of it. The video also shows several other maps I've been working on recently.

Suddenly I have faced a problem with the latest EDuke32 snapshot... the mod gets compiled without errors, but can't be played at all, because EDuke32 pops a virtual machine error message everytime a map is started. I'll upload the current version of the mod in a few days so you could find what the error is caused by.

[zykov eddy]

Just. Wow. You're crazy!
Everything you just did seems like impossible, especially fake dynamic shadows. I also love the music part, how much time it took for you to make this?

[Piano Man]

I may sound like a complete grinch while saying this, but it's something I don't understand...

Is continuing to map in an engine like the Duke Nukem build engine really worth it these days??? Not to be mean, but the engines how many years old... 15??? Don't get me wrong - I used to map like crazy back in the late 1990's, and then attempted to map again when the HRP project started, but I lost interest in it, because the engine is so limited.

I mean to this day, we still can't do PROPER room over room rendering, there's very little in particle effects, and the graphics are sorely outdated, DESPITE the fact that a great deal has gone into the HRP and Polymer project.

Now say you were able to combine the LNGA mod and the Polymer - maybe there's a little more potential - but working with an engine in which you have to code the f**k out of to get what you want... seems like you're trying to kick a dead horse.

How well do you think the DN3D mapping sector is going to go once Duke Nukem Forever is released???

[Mblackwell]

To be honest the limitations of the engine are what make it easy to continue to mod for. Additionally it's fun for people that care to discover ways to break those limitations. With the current state of EDuke32 there's not much you can't do anymore, and you can accomplish it with less time and resources than it takes to do things in most modern engines. If you don't think that modern engines take a hell of a lot of work to get what you want out of them you're sorely mistaken.

[Stabs]

that vertex lighting is interesting is that sector or sprite based? because that looks like it could do the job of emulating point lights in 8-bit

[Jan Satcitananda]

zykov eddy, on 30 April 2011 - 07:25 PM, said:

Just. Wow. You're crazy!
Everything you just did seems like impossible, especially fake dynamic shadows. I also love the music part, how much time it took for you to make this?

I think it didn't take very long to code the sequencer; it was done within a single day. Then I've found the score on http://marseillaise....lish/score.html and in several hours converted it into a pattern of notes which is featured on the video. =)

Piano Man, on 30 April 2011 - 08:17 PM, said:

Now say you were able to combine the LNGA mod and the Polymer - maybe there's a little more potential - but working with an engine in which you have to code the f**k out of to get what you want... seems like you're trying to kick a dead horse.

Actually it's far easier to attain what I want in the classic renderer owing to more flexibility. For instance, I have no idea how to employ additive/multiplicative transparency and overbright shades in non-8-bit modes (customizable shader-based processing could facilitate this though). Besides, functions like showview aren't supported by Polymer at the moment. Modern game designers are undeservedly refusing indexed color, since in certain circumstances it's more powerful than truecolor, and with all the new hardware you could take advantage of it and create embarrassingly realistic scenes in realtime. But after all, high-end graphics is not an excuse for poor half-assed gameplay.

DanM, on 30 April 2011 - 11:21 PM, said:

that vertex lighting is interesting is that sector or sprite based? because that looks like it could do the job of emulating point lights in 8-bit

It can use both sprites and sectors, but it's rather sprite-based, because it displays four translucent variations of the same texture one above each other lit up at different corners with different colors. The post related to this kind of lighting can be found on AMC: http://www.amcwebfor...p?topic=8223.50 It can't emulate point lights due to geometry limitations, but one can make really smooth lighting using this technique. Still I'm going to improve it so it could work with sectors of any shape.

[Gambini]

Piano Man, on 30 April 2011 - 08:17 PM, said:

I may sound like a complete grinch while saying this, but it's something I don't understand...

Is continuing to map in an engine like the Duke Nukem build engine really worth it these days??? Not to be mean, but the engines how many years old... 15??? Don't get me wrong - I used to map like crazy back in the late 1990's, and then attempted to map again when the HRP project started, but I lost interest in it, because the engine is so limited.

I mean to this day, we still can't do PROPER room over room rendering, there's very little in particle effects, and the graphics are sorely outdated, DESPITE the fact that a great deal has gone into the HRP and Polymer project.

Now say you were able to combine the LNGA mod and the Polymer - maybe there's a little more potential - but working with an engine in which you have to code the f**k out of to get what you want... seems like you're trying to kick a dead horse.

How well do you think the DN3D mapping sector is going to go once Duke Nukem Forever is released???

What keeps you tied to these forums then? I dont understand that either.

There´s a nostalgia factor in some of us when playing the classic games we used to have fun with when life was easier. Duke3d happens to be the most significant one, mostly because it opened the doors to modding, at least that´s my case.

Build and therefore Duke are old, 15 years old (or more if you think that build was done before). Old is old but old is not bad, what is bad in my opinion is trying to make something old look new. Polymer seems to be a well designed engine, but its execution is wrong because it only renders geometry made through a Build editor.

This is how Duke nukem looks with The HRP and other related "enhancers".



You can clearly see the woman behind all that plastic surgery is still old, and will always be old despite how much you try to make it look young.

@Craigfatman: Impresive work you say it will be released soon? Can´t wait

[Danukem]

@Gambini: Lezing wrote a very good reply to Piano Man already, and what you are doing in that last post borders on trolling. I understand the point you are trying to make, but comparing "The HRP and other related "enhancers"" to bad plastic surgery can be interpreted as an attack on a lot of different projects. In fact, the LNGA mod itself includes many cosmetic enhancements which you consider good, so you obviously don't think that graphically enhancing an old game is fundamentally unsound. Now someone may get offended and reply to your post, keeping the thread OT for longer, which isn't very nice to Lezing.

[Gambini]

If my post shoud be taken as offensive, then it would be towards his idea of this kind of 8bits projects being a waste of talent. Also I was purely refering to the aesthetical aspect of new generation enhancements. Projects designed with the new stuff in mind are fine and i don´t see anybody coming to those threads to troll and say they should be designed for software renderer.

[Jimmy]

Nonsense, it is not trolling or even borderline trolling, and I'm an authority on the subject. The HRP is hokey, plain and simple. It's an attempt to bring something built in the 90's to about 2002 by just replacing assets. This project has oodles more creativity than the great majority of 32-bit projects that are all based around kit-bashing assets from other games and websites and have never been finished.

[Danukem]

Captain Awesome, on 01 May 2011 - 03:56 PM, said:

Nonsense, it is not trolling or even borderline trolling, and I'm an authority on the subject. The HRP is hokey, plain and simple. It's an attempt to bring something built in the 90's to about 2002 by just replacing assets. This project has oodles more creativity than the great majority of 32-bit projects that are all based around kit-bashing assets from other games and websites and have never been finished.

If you guys want to hate on the HRP and other 32-bit projects, that's fine, but you should start your own thread about it. Some 32-bit projects are very good --even a few that use HRP assets-- and you guys are derailing this thread to insult them. If you want to reply to this, do it somewhere else.

[Player Lin]

Oh come on...why everyone want to hating/insulting/attacking each others even if we're love Duke3D and Build? ......DooM and Quake community did same ****ing shit and always forking the whole community... Is that necessary?

Whatever, I'm just taking my bullshit... :X

(OK, I feel I'm trolling with no reasons... :\)

[Jimmy]

DeeperThought, on 01 May 2011 - 04:31 PM, said:

If you guys want to hate on the HRP and other 32-bit projects, that's fine, but you should start your own thread about it. Some 32-bit projects are very good --even a few that use HRP assets-- and you guys are derailing this thread to insult them. If you want to reply to this, do it somewhere else.

It is not hate. It is my opinion. Instead of being biased why don't you open your mind to realise we are not derailing the topic, but instead defending CraigFatman's work on his own wonderful mod in which another person was somewhat attacking my claiming he was wasting his time on an old engine, especially since he wasn't using Polymer. Learn to read.

[Mblackwell]

Well, the idea that there's something wrong with Polymost or Polymer is quite incorrect. You can easily do something great with either if that's what you have in mind. The original Duke wasn't really meant for it though, but if you're smart you can make it look nice. Part of the HRP's problem is there's no specific project lead and it's a bunch of disparate are from a lot of different contributors with not much in the way of guidelines. It can make some of the Duke levels look kind of wonky, but user maps that are created to use the HRP assets can look quite lovely.

Point being there's nothing bad about using either and the original post was already responded to by others in a way that wasn't disrespectful or offtopic, so now listen to DeeperThought and stop derailing the topic.

[Jimmy]

Mblackwell, on 02 May 2011 - 02:54 PM, said:

Well, the idea that there's something wrong with Polymost or Polymer is quite incorrect. You can easily do something great with either if that's what you have in mind. The original Duke wasn't really meant for it though, but if you're smart you can make it look nice. Part of the HRP's problem is there's no specific project lead and it's a bunch of disparate are from a lot of different contributors with not much in the way of guidelines. It can make some of the Duke levels look kind of wonky, but user maps that are created to use the HRP assets can look quite lovely.

Point being there's nothing bad about using either and the original post was already responded to by others in a way that wasn't disrespectful or offtopic, so now listen to DeeperThought and stop derailing the topic.

I never commented on Polymost or Polymer, though. I commented on the HRP. You guys are either trolling or bad readers. I have been tinkering with the idea of switching my project over to Polymer.

[The Commander]

No offence, but I think every post from this one here should be deleted.

[Forge]

There's absolutely nothing wrong with HRP, polymer, polymost, or craig's project. They're all options to expand on the look and feel of the game. Use them or don't(I use only 8 bit or polymost unless a map/mod calls for something else), but there's no need to hate on them if you don't like them. Nobody's forcing anyone to use them. If a map takes advantage of what they offer and you don't like it, don't play the map. Your loss.

Craig's project does have an appeal that I'm interested in, and I would definitely play maps made specifically for it.