Like the looks of that stone bridge and blue strog wall lights Daya. 

Looking good, nice and moody! 

That looks spiffy as well! Definitely fitting of the AD tool set! 

Rockwork is better...makes me think some enormous arcane force has levitated the structure, foundations and all. 

also trying to figure out how to make a proper gif. these are ~2.3mb, so that kinda sucks... need to work on that.

water & caustics energy 

Ooh prettay! 

 

 

Did you get Darkplaces to look:

1) remotely normal, and then basing on that
2) that good? 

(Disclaimer: I am a Quakespasm user, with gl_nearest and square particles. My only real sin is that I don't turn model interpolation off).

It's not that hard to make DarkPlaces look fairly vanilla. Even the default settings in a fresh installation aren't that bad; once you've changed filtering to gl_nearest (which one would have to do in most engines anyway, I guess?) and turned off the blood stain effect, you're not that far from a vanilla aesthetic. Most of the garish bells and whistles aren't enabled by default. This is what a default DP installation looks like where I've only changed gl_texturemode to gl_nearest_mipmap_linear" and adjusted the resolution to my monitor's; nothing else.

And using DP doesn't mean you're automatically using "high res" replacement content. Every instance where I've seen DP look "bad" (from an old-school purist point of view), it's been where the user has enabled all the optional extras and used replacement content. 

I know it's possible to make Darkplaces not look completely offensive, but I've never actually seen anyone go ahead and do it...until now I guess. 

DP supports basic (single stage) q3 shaders, that's what you're seeing.

The engine isn't perfect, I have my own short list of bug fixes and feature additions, but I never quite understood the hate it receives. Given that it's free and fairly easy to use I'm inclined to appreciate its existence :P Same goes for FTE. Cool/pretty shit has been made DP (xonotic, steelstorm, etc.)

However, DP is more of a developers/hobbyists engine than a quake players engine IMO. 

Good stuff killpixel, love the water effects! 

 

Very nice! 

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.

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.

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 don't get it. I presume the grainy effect is deliberate? 

Shambler - shhhh. It's a journey of discovery to learn, pixel-by-pixel, why graphics cards were invented. 

The grainyness is inevitable, and I like it. 

I don't even understand what you're doing....but I want to.

Oh okay comparing the two same images side by side, yours looks a lot better. Why do they both show a fine grainyiness that one presumably doesn't see in game? 

Why do they both show a fine grainyiness that one presumably doesn't see in game?

It is seen in the game.

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.

It's all rendered in real time, in 256 colors. Take a look at the palette of those screenshots.

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. 

Concept Map - The Bridge Crane
Music by Devastus and cool cameras by QMM 1.7!