Grayscale Spectres (partially invisible pinky demons)

edited 2020 Jan 25 in General
Have you ever tried applying a grayscale filter to the Spectres, before the alpha channel change?

As I understand it, right now you use the same texture as the pinky Demons and adjust the alpha channel. But I think removing the color saturation entirely and going grayscale would make them harder to see and more in line with the original look and feel. This could be a game option (or just console variable).

As for coding the grayscale funcion in C, no idea. I was thinking of making a fork to try it out, but I think it's above my programming pay grade. I did find that there are various algorithms to convert to grayscale, with different "visual" results:

http://www.tannerhelland.com/3643/grayscale-image-algorithm-vb6/

So would be interesting to see which one fits the Spectre better. (ignore the vb6 tho)

This would apply to any other partially invisible enemies in Heretic/Hexen? but idk, I don't play those. I guess it would apply to Marines in multiplayer if they pick the power-up.

Comments

  • This is something I've been meaning to do for a while. Now that shaders are used for rendering everything you see, it is possible to use a special shader for the spectres to make them appear as in the original Doom.

    The closest tracker issue is probably #1416.
  • I've wanted to test this myself somehow, but I don't know how to code it.

    So as an alternate I made my own custom WAD using SLADE. I used the built-in Colourise function and used white for the color. This allowed me create my own b&w pinky sprites, with just one quick batch job.

    Of course regular pinky demons were affected too, but ignoring that, I could see a live demo of how a b&w semi-transparent spectre would look like.

    I think I like the change, but TBH I couldn't really ignore that the regular demons were black and white too. It was too much of a distraction.

    IDK if there is a way to further customize the wad so that regular demon and spectre can point to different sprites. Then the whole thing can be tested seamlessly.
  • edited 2020 Mar 9
    To change the spectres sprites you have to define new mobj states for it because by default it shares the same states as the Demon.

    https://manual.dengine.net/ded/thing?s[
  • I have no idea how to do this.

    But yes, if I could separate the sprites it uses then maybe i can rename them on the pwad and have it only affect spectres, leaving the regular pinky untouched.
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