Are the graininess and sieve effect caused by your 8-bit conversion? The grain could be cool, like a filter of sorts, but the sieve looks weird IMHO. 

@mankrip: Does the dithering animate, like film grain? I imagine that would look nice. 

hey boys doing my yearly 1on1/2on2 map creation. Here's what I have so far:

http://i.imgur.com/kNhUBo6.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/mJcdK81.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/SQ3tAJu.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/0POm7Fq.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/NUuxIWK.jpg

quakeworld.nu forum thread for download:
http://www.quakeworld.nu/forum/topic/7023/105506/pipe-up-1on12on2-dm-map

Any critiques or suggestions are welcome! 

mfx: Thanks, I feel a bit unsure about the quality of the alphamasking.

Mugwump: The graininess is caused by multiple stages of dithering from several different parts of the renderer.
The sieve effect is due to the palette. The closer to the palette a 32-bit image is, the more balanced the colors gets (example).

#14014: I've tried this once, and it didn't look good. At first it worked well, when I was using only one 2x2 kernel for the texture and another 2x2 kernel for the lighting, but once things got more complex it got too distracting. 

@mankrip: I might be wrong, but that sounds like it might be due to the noise distribution. You perhaps could try "blue noise" as described in the two articles below. Though I have no idea how well that would map to software Quake's case, looks great either way :)

http://gpuopen.com/vdr-follow-up-fine-art-of-film-grain/
http://gpuopen.com/vdr-follow-up-grain-and-fine-details/ 

The noise in those articles is for modifying channel intensity; this requires a RGB framebuffer, but Retroquad's renderer operates in 8-bit indexed color all the way (all RGB color operations are precomputed upon loading).

Even if I were to try implementing that as a brightness modifier only, all the different dithering kernels in Retroquad must stay aligned in a very specific way for all the different blending and smoothing operations to work properly; some of the kernels took me weeks to figure out their best layout. And shifting the layouts of all kernels together gives abrupt results, which doesn't look good when animated. 

The most effective way to achieve an animated grain look would be to blend an animated texture over the framebuffer; this way, the kernels would still be static, and kennel alignment would be preserved.

But of course, this would slow down the rendering some more. 

 

"i should post a screenshot. first im gonna do some touch ups"

repeat ad infinitum

ill try and break the cycle in the next few hours... 

Don't be shy.

This screenshots thread is for unfinished stuff. To get feedback about unfinished stuff, there's no need to finish it. 

I conquered a massive design block the other day so my confidence has gone up quite a bit.

I think i bit off more than i can chew in regards to scale. Ive only two out of five areas done and im already 5k units in size...i thought my whole map was gonna be this big.. 

http://imgur.com/IlLznKN
http://imgur.com/WWkCW9S

itll be a bit before i get some compiled shots.

AD mod, of course. Necrokeep inspired, if ya couldnt tell...:P 

 

That looks fantastic man, nothing to be self-conscious about!

The front facade looks great, if you are looking for criticism perhaps add some background brushes past the rock wall so it doesn't just cut to skybox.

Look forward to more of your progress! 

Really good looking, interested to see how you're going to use those wide-open areas, a lots of flying monsters I assume* (If I can see correctly, there is one soulless placed already). 

Looks awesome pal, keep it going! :) 

Thanks everyone!

@bloughsburgh exactly whats in store once the main bits are nailed down. the rockwall will get some hefty vertex manipulation as well. trenchbroom has given me a lot more confidence in my brushwork with the clipping tool and vertex manipulation. all my prior experience was in hammer, and as great as it is, I always felts weighed down in some ways. I imagine it was that I was trying to map for Counter Strike and it requires too much "realism". Every room had to have a purpose and a rhyme and reason. Quake has been a breath of fresh air to map for.

A big thanks to the Sock and the AD development team for all the fun stuff to play with! Also, sleepwalkr for Trenchbroom! 

Looks well nice, apart from that rock texture. Good stuff. 

https://i.imgur.com/RpnGmsP.png 

Looking great btw, try changing the rock texture as shambler already said.
Go map! 

Also really digging your screenshots, mukor! 

Stop being so good at quake mapping 

a derailed train? 

https://i.imgur.com/rVwwupt.png 

You really are hyping up something incredible here man!