Decal support?

Also I was thinking that the tech that you've got in retroquad would make for a great 8 bit paint. Not very many programs let you paint with a palette with opacity. 

Proper decals would take a lot of work to implement, and would slow down the renderer even more.
A more possible alternative would be to implement stainmaps similar to the ones in Darkplaces, but it's not in my plans yet.

Hmm, I didn't think about using it for 8-bit painting before. Nice idea.

The closest I had thought about was to create a modified version of the texture compiling algorithm as an alternative dithering method for quantizating standard 2D images (converting TGAs to PCX, etc.). It would be interesting to compare against usual 2D dithering methods such as Floyd-Steinberg. 

if you're still using a surface cache, you could try painting your decals into that. That should make them free other than for adding/removing them(or when dlights are around).
I believe this is the way halflife did them.
(stainmaps suck)

regarding 8-bit painting, increase the lightmap resolution and just megatexture the entire map! 

Retroquad's surface cache only contains light levels, not texture data, and because of this there's no way to paint a decal texture into them. Lighting & textures are combined in realtime, per-pixel.

Also, decals aren't strictly necessary to achieve a cohesive visual style - they're an addition, not an improvement per se. Part of my main focus is on making the engine easier to produce content for, not on raising the amount of content to work on.

But it will always be possible to use sprite-based decals like the ones in Scourge of Armagon. 

RetroJam 6 map: The Legacy of Giants, by khreathor. Edited version with soft-depth sand.

screenshot 

Pretty nifty. 

 

that's a clever use of soft depth effect, i've usually only seen it for liquids/smoke.

question, does it look good in motion or does the parallax give it away? 

It looks good in motion because it's dithered in screen space, using an ordered dither. 

 

Noice 

any chance of a video? 

:)

http://imgur.com/uFjgmQk
http://imgur.com/5mylH0z
http://imgur.com/iboj5ZK 

 

 

Mankrip I mean, will you be able to see that the sand is either floating over the floor or sunken beneath it, due to parallax? 

http://i.imgur.com/Dj5X1G8.jpg 

Are here any worthy screenshots:
http://i.imgur.com/90sPB7K.png
http://i.imgur.com/bW9vqW2.png
http://i.imgur.com/cXuLMWp.png
http://i.imgur.com/kHITt10.png
http://i.imgur.com/CTVbjrE.png ? 

Looks very interesting. Unique geometry and feel to these. That rotunda in the first few screens reminds me of a roulette wheel. 

That is some crazy central cylinder thing you got going there. I also like that sewer shot with an apparent gold key door. Nice work, keep us updated! 

Yes, it looks a bit floating over. But if you look from an angle parallel to the floor, the sand will look fully opaque, because there won't be any surface near it from behind. The depth is calculated from the view plane.

I have an idea for properly multitextured surface blending, which would be way faster to render, but it's also too complicated to try at this moment. 

drow: It looks good, but you could use different texture themes for each side (medieval/metal/etc.), instead of changing the colors only.

Kres: Really bloody good. Water in Quake doesn't look good enough in pitch black areas, though. 

It may look better if you try to align your rivet textures in the floor grid in the first shot: they should follow the angle of the metal pieces that make up the shape (dodecagon?).

Other than that, it is looking good. 

I'd be more inclined to use a more basic texture to avoid filtering seams and sliced rivets. There's a metal texture that's the same background but without rivets that might work better. Or is that one I made myself? 

I've got no time to finish this at the moment, but I'd really like some opinions:

download

screenshots

The floor on the exit to Shub-Niggurath's Pit is crap, I was doing an experiment that turned out bad and scrapped it. Also, the lava texture is wrong because there was a custom texture wad in the BSP compiler path.