STraTOS 1997 April & May/STraTOS 1 - 1997 April & May.iso/CD01/INTERNET/SITES/RAND/ALL96.LZH/t0226/text0015.txt

Text File | 1996-03-07 | 5.6 KB | 142 lines

> Some points to get Bad Mood look alot smoother, even though
> of no higher framerate.

Go for it...

{
(*) Point one
I tried the mousemovent for the first time today, and WOW! It
really, really made the whole thing feel twice as smooth, or even
more! This due to the "realtive movementspeed to fps" the mouse
does. Very nice, indeed.
This made me feel that making the steprate for the keyboard
control relative to fps is very important. I guess that would
make Bad Mood several time better to stear (a mouse isn't really
nice to move around with..) Ofcourse, to implement this feature,
some sources wouldn't really hurt.
}

Ok, sources sources - I'll have them ready pronto. I've already
promised them imminently to Bertrand & Laurent.

{
(*) Point two
Another thing I tried was pressing 1/2 buttons at an ok rate,
to emulate doom style of walking. It wasn't very easy, and I
hit the floor several times before getting the hang of it. But
once I managed to walk around a bit, pressing 1/2 at a nice
rate, everything seemed so much smoother. You don't just concentrate
on the floor movement scrolling before your eyes (12-15fps scrolling
sure isn't smooth), but also on the movment up/down. I think
adding this feature is made in an hour or two, we just need some
sources.. (where did I hear that before?).
}

:,

I'm getting a definite pattern here - something to do with sources....

:)

{
(*) Point three (ye ye, it's the last one)
The textures.
As simple as that! Smoother textures does a whole lot, take my word
for that. I've been experimenting alot with textures for various
demos that we (dhs) have made. Among the effects I've expeimented with
is (ofcourse..) zoom-rotators, which could be (sort of) compared
with the pixel scaling/rotating/zooming Bad Mood does.
A bad texture can easliy make a demo-effect like that look several
times worse that it has to do, or the other way around; a good texture
can make it look wonderful.
Making smoother textures, does not only make the whole thing feel
smoother, but will also remove alot of the flicker you see far away
where the graphics is being heavliy scaled (espcially noticeable in
the lower resolutions).
}

Ok, I agree. Some nice textures would make all the difference. But
we are not gong to manage that with DEU. It's SUCH a painful program
to use - even on the best of PC's. The software is just so flaky and
unstable.

By the looks of that legal message you posted, DEU is not going to be
around very long anyway...

:/

{
(*) Summary (oh no, a long one is it too.. but please read)
Reading this makes it clear the sources would be quite nice to have,
and also a WAD generator that can have a different palette for each
256colour texture (this will do wonder for the graphics not being
limited to a fixed 256 colour palette).
PC DOOM WADs are being restricted to a fixed palette like that,
and I don't think I surprice anyone by saying "it really shows".
We here have the chance to litterary kick the shit out of Doom
or whatever 256-colour PC WAD-style game in the terms of colourful
graphics. If we can't beat the speed, let's beat it at another basis.
}

Well, if you don't mind the immense amount of ram needed to store all
those palette tables, I don't see why not. I sent a message to Bertrand
recently containing a number of suggestions based on expanding the
truecolour nature of the palettes - coloured lighting and Predator style
visible-spectrum selection, as well as photon-bombs which flash bright
like a strobe, leaving all the monsters blind.

{
Ofcourse, there's negative stuff to have a new palette for each
texture, as the shadow tables will grow quite fast (32kb for each
texture just in fading palettes). But that's the story if we use
64 levels of shade, and is that really needed? I don't think so, but
as usual, it's my opinion.
}

I think we could get away with 32 levels, as the extra green bit is not
that fantastic, and tends to add a 'slimy' tinge to the display in places -
particularly where greys dominate. Dropping lower starts to look really
bandy and grim - the light level drops off using an inverse-cube-distance
curve, so you would get some rarther thick ugly bands in the mid distance.

{
So why not go for a tiny little preference-setting where you tell
how many lightning steps you like? In this way the owners of lots of
RAM could use the 64 steps, while others (like me..) with only 4mb
perhaps could live with 8 or 16 steps of shading (will only use
4kb for 8 steps and 8kb for 16) If we store all 64 steps of shade in
the WAD file, it would be very easy for the texture loader to "filter"
the shades needed for the current selection.
}

Hmm, easy enough programming wise, but it means lots of hassle-ridden
flags and variables and stuff for the colour index generators. This would
make the code REAL nasty looking and hard to maintain. Once we have
a more complete system we can add user-options like this, but I'll leave it
for now. It might be wise to keep an unblemished 'original' version of the
source when we start hacking around with it later - just in case!

{
Okey, that's it for this time.. I don't see thoose suggestions to be
placed in the "dreamers" list, as they are quite easy to generate,
just given the sources and a WAD editor (isn't one being done?).
}

Nope - seem like reasonable suggestions to me, and it's even got
a scientific basis! (Psychovisuals & Computer Graphics - Siggraph '92 or '93
I think - psychological impact of motion & detail redundancy).

Some light reading for you!


BTW, sorry about the curly brackets, but I don't seem to have a 'quote'
button at this end. :/

Cheers,

Doug @ BSS <[e-mail]>