[Marcos]

I've been trying to find a way to make a flashlight for polymost, and after several hours a found a way.
It's very simple, increase the gamma value to 1.60 and the contrast to 1.10, and use a white transparent sprite to light the area.
http://www.mediafire...wwzwu736zb3ed3y
press "f" or "page up" (look up) to use the flashlight.

[DavoX]

Ah the good ol' flashlight for Duke. Many people tried to make one Care to make a video or screenshot of it? I'm at work.

[Marcos]

[I tried to make video or screenshot but the flashlight doesn't show on any of them. I think it's because of the gamma and contrast changes.

[Jimmy]

People still use Polymost?

[Danukem]

Captain Awesome, on 03 August 2011 - 10:53 AM, said:

People still use Polymost?

Yes they do, and for good reasons. But if I want a flashlight, Polymer is a no-brainer.

[ReaperMan]

Captain Awesome, on 03 August 2011 - 10:53 AM, said:

People still use Polymost?

Yeah... people with shitty computers. (duh)

[Jimmy]

I have a shitty computer and I use 8-bit. In my experience Polymost always looked like garbage using 8-bit materials, and if you used the 32-bit stuff it'd just bog down your shitty system to nothing.

[Danukem]

Captain Awesome, on 03 August 2011 - 10:57 AM, said:

I have a shitty computer and I use 8-bit. In my experience Polymost always looked like garbage using 8-bit materials, and if you used the 32-bit stuff it'd just bog down your shitty system to nothing.

This is getting off topic, but there are advantages to using Polymost with (mostly) 8-bit materials. Emphasis on mostly. For example, you can have hi-res skyboxes and fonts (which don't look bad at all with 8-bit textures and sprites). Currently Polymer has some serious bugs and limitations. That's why we still use Polymost for WGR2.

[Jimmy]

Perhaps. I just have a distaste for OpenGL. It makes things look really weird. I will say that Polymost is a lot better now than it was a few years ago, and leaps better than SWJonof/SWP's Polymost. Horrid stuff.

[Marcos]

Isn't there a way to make polymer compatible with all computers that don't have a good video card? I mean the possibility to deactivate the effects that need a good video card and make polymer runs like polymost. Because then polymost would be useless since polymer would have that option.

[Jblade]

Helixhorned did some nice work to make the polymost shading match the classic mode a bit better; I still prefer classic but polymost supports proper widescreen and some people might not want the slightly squished display in classic widescreen.

[Plagman]

Captain Awesome, on 03 August 2011 - 11:14 AM, said:

Perhaps. I just have a distaste for OpenGL. It makes things look really weird. I will say that Polymost is a lot better now than it was a few years ago, and leaps better than SWJonof/SWP's Polymost. Horrid stuff.

Can you elaborate on what's very weird? Maybe point it out in a screenshot or something.

[Jblade]

Plagman, on 03 August 2011 - 01:01 PM, said:

Can you elaborate on what's very weird? Maybe point it out in a screenshot or something.

I think it's more of a personel preference thing; personally speaking I prefer classic because the old shading tables made dark areas much more 'gritty' and spooky. The same goes for transparent stuff - although obviously having real translucency is useful for glass and stuff, people using certain sprites like the teleport ones for lens flare effects look MUCH better in classic mode since the way transparency was handled in that gave it an additive effect so it genuinely gave a better impression of lighting things up. When the sprite is just see through it doesn't really look that great. The smoother fade to black of polymost and polymer is no doubt much better for certain people of course, I know there's several people who don't like classic mode anymore compared to it.

[rasmus thorup]

I prefer polymost. I just have to turn gamma to 90, contrast 1.05, brightness -0.05. Then the dark areas look dark and the nightvision goggles are actually useful.

Your flashlight is good, but i wont use it. Just doesn't fit in. Maybe in a real mod

[Jimmy]

James is right, the shading and translucency are definitely different, and as a whole affect the atmosphere of the game greatly. But also another thing that bugs me is the lack of proper billboarding. Everything in Polymost looks like cardboard cutouts. The FOV feels slightly off, and looking up/down feels a lot different and weird. Polymost also randomly adds stray pixels to the edges of sectors for some reason, and it's an annoyance.

[Plagman]

Well, looking up/down uses real perspective instead of faking it, so it definitely looks different from classic. It also looks correct; if BUILD had been able to handle perspective they would have put it in, it wasn't a design decision to have messed up vertical aiming or anything.

Can you get a screenshot of the stray pixel thing you were talking about? It's the only thing you mentioned that's not entirely obvious.

[Jimmy]

It doesn't look correct to me. It just looks like the screen is still warping, just in a different manner from classic. This is mainly at the outer extremities that classic doesn't allow for.

Top is Classic, Bottom is Polymost.






Compare the screenshots, all of which are mostly identical, save for enemy positions. The dark room with the Chaingun shows the stray pixels. You'll also notice that the game seems to zoom in when using Polymost.

[Micky C]

The reason why looking up and down appears distorted, besides the billboarding sprite issue is something people don't tend to think about, and it goes for polymost, polymer, and every other 3D game out there. Perspective is based on a true mathematical perspective of what geometry would look like through a camera (I don't know how else to describe it.) This means that when you look up at a tall building, it's wide at the bottom, and narrow at he top.

Yet what happens in real life is that your eyes receive information from the world, then what happens is that the brain reprocesses this information so that the perspective different. Different how? Go look at a tall building, it isn't that much narrower at the top than it is at the bottom. IMO this is less distorted and a pretty good evolutionary trait, we don't need buildings to be narrower at the top because we have sterioscopic vision.

Think the distortion in 3D games isn't so bad? Go up to a door frame and look up or down; either the top or bottom will be massively narrower. Yet with a door frame in real life, the sides will remain basically parallel. It's this reprocessing of visual data which leads to funky eye tricks with circles and bars if you've ever seen those posters. Since you won't be able look at a door frame the same way, I just ruined 3D gaming for you

[Danukem]

^That's a nice observation.

[Spiker]

The monsters look bad because they are sprites and this was designed for models. But IIRC there was a command that makes it look good even in non-classic renderers.

[Micky C]

Spiker, on 04 August 2011 - 02:09 AM, said:

The monsters look bad because they are sprites and this was designed for models. But IIRC there was a command that makes it look good even in non-classic renderers.

I think you're referring to polymer which can render the sprites to be always perpendicular to the camera like in the classic renderer. I can be achieved through the console.

Quote

r_pr_billboardingmodeface : sprite display method. 0: classic mode; 1: polymost mode

IMO this classic vs polymost discussion is void, because polymer is the future, both for modern, realistic effects, and for imitating the functionality of the classic renderer. I'm under the impression they're even going to hook up the shade tables to the highpalookup system to get classic shading of 8-bit textures, which means the only thing polymer won't be able to imitate would be the vertical distortion (although I'd wager even that could implemented except it'd be pointless because it'd look exactly like classic except without some visual glitches involving sprites and floors sloped at large angles and so on.) Even if polymer isn't amazing now (which it is) all it needs is a bit of time.

[Fox]

I don't think sprites should suffer perspective. They are sprites afterall, you must use your imagination.

Besides, things like trees or round lights would look weird in perspective.

[Jimmy]

Micky C, on 04 August 2011 - 04:39 AM, said:

IMO this classic vs polymost discussion is void, because polymer is the future, both for modern, realistic effects, and for imitating the functionality of the classic renderer. I'm under the impression they're even going to hook up the shade tables to the highpalookup system to get classic shading of 8-bit textures, which means the only thing polymer won't be able to imitate would be the vertical distortion (although I'd wager even that could implemented except it'd be pointless because it'd look exactly like classic except without some visual glitches involving sprites and floors sloped at large angles and so on.) Even if polymer isn't amazing now (which it is) all it needs is a bit of time.

I agree. I haphazardly brought it up, and Plagman wanted to know what I was talking about. I quite like Polymer, myself. As soon as it can support all the 'features' of classic I'm switching my mod over.

[Hendricks266]

Micky C, on 04 August 2011 - 04:39 AM, said:

IMO this classic vs polymost discussion is void, because olymer is the future, both for modern, realistic effects, and for imitating the functionality of the classic renderer.

It's not void yet. Until Polymer is optimized or most computers are new enough to run Polymer (whichever comes first), Polymost will remain a viable alternative and should be kept in mind. Polymer is surely the better renderer for many reasons simply because of its construction, and that's not even counting dynamic lighting or anything to do with 32-bit resources.

[Danukem]

Hendricks266, on 04 August 2011 - 11:32 AM, said:

Until Polymer is optimized or most computers are new enough to run Polymer

It's not just a question of performance. Polymer does not support the showview command, it does not render voxels, it handles fog/light interactions terribly (to the point where you basically cannot use fog), and has other bugs as well.

[Gambini]

It also can´t show more than one parallaxed texture. And breaks geometry in savegames (sometimes). I´m quite excited though about the idea of OpenGL once replicating all the classic renderer characteristics. But wanting to include the distorted look up/down view is nonsense. That´s like adding a dial disk to new cellphones just for the sake of nostalgia.

[Kyanos]

Gambini, on 04 August 2011 - 03:50 PM, said:

That´s like adding a dial disk to new cellphones just for the sake of nostalgia.

GREAT IDEA!! Patent that one and your a rich man LOL

[Mblackwell]

DeeperThought, on 04 August 2011 - 12:38 PM, said:

It's not just a question of performance. Polymer does not support the showview command, it does not render voxels, it handles fog/light interactions terribly (to the point where you basically cannot use fog), and has other bugs as well.

I wish this wasn't the case. Beyond performance problems just issues with z-ordering and a few lingering differences in behavior (that are intended to be fixed but aren't) make me not use it. I have projects that could benefit greatly from using it full-time, and one of them it was in fact intended to have that be the case that it would run Polymer almost exclusively but it's just not possible.

Things keep improving though, but I definitely would say it's okay to design for Polymost with enhancements for Polymer. Having a viable fallback/alternative is still important at this point.