Week 38/2013: Appearance profiles
Last week I was finishing up my work on the UI framework for 1.12, added a couple of built-in renderer appearance profiles, and DaniJ was making improvements to the id Tech 1 map hacks support.
I started the week by taking a brief look at how the UI is performing in the profiler. It turned out there were a couple of easy-to-fix issues there, related to looking up UI style color information. As a result of these optimizations, I noticed an FPS increase of 5-10% when updating a complex UI like the sidebar editor.
I also moved a couple of the renderer settings around: the player weapon 3D model mirroring option is now included in the renderer appearance profile, and the multitexturing/precaching options are labeled as affecting the behavior of the renderer rather than appearance.
There is now a console command called 'rendedit' for opening the renderer appearance editor sidebar. It does not have a default binding at the moment.
I spent a few moments fine-tuning the dynamic lighting default values, as this can now be easily done in-game using the sidebar editor. When using the new defaults, lights are slightly brighter and halos are also slightly more intense. (Note that you can reset your renderer appearance profiles to defaults in the profile selector's dropdown menu.) While working on this, we realized that the current lens flare/halo implementation is rather lacking and should be redesigned. Some of the settings for halos/flares seem to be broken, too. We will return to this later; for now we are trying to simply extract the best results out of the current system by adjusting the appearance settings.
As I mentioned earlier, there are now a couple of built-in appearance profiles provided for convenience. They are called "Defaults", "Amplified", and "Vanilla":
Defaults
Amplified
Vanilla
In other news, you may have noticed that the Deng Team MP test servers have been down for several days now. This is deliberate, as the servers were being rather underutilized and since it costs money to run them, I decided to take them down until we can put more focus on the MP development work. You can naturally still use the Shell to run your own servers, though.
The 1.12 candidate phase is ongoing, and we are planning to make the release in the end of the month.
I started the week by taking a brief look at how the UI is performing in the profiler. It turned out there were a couple of easy-to-fix issues there, related to looking up UI style color information. As a result of these optimizations, I noticed an FPS increase of 5-10% when updating a complex UI like the sidebar editor.
I also moved a couple of the renderer settings around: the player weapon 3D model mirroring option is now included in the renderer appearance profile, and the multitexturing/precaching options are labeled as affecting the behavior of the renderer rather than appearance.
There is now a console command called 'rendedit' for opening the renderer appearance editor sidebar. It does not have a default binding at the moment.
I spent a few moments fine-tuning the dynamic lighting default values, as this can now be easily done in-game using the sidebar editor. When using the new defaults, lights are slightly brighter and halos are also slightly more intense. (Note that you can reset your renderer appearance profiles to defaults in the profile selector's dropdown menu.) While working on this, we realized that the current lens flare/halo implementation is rather lacking and should be redesigned. Some of the settings for halos/flares seem to be broken, too. We will return to this later; for now we are trying to simply extract the best results out of the current system by adjusting the appearance settings.
As I mentioned earlier, there are now a couple of built-in appearance profiles provided for convenience. They are called "Defaults", "Amplified", and "Vanilla":
Defaults
Amplified
Vanilla
In other news, you may have noticed that the Deng Team MP test servers have been down for several days now. This is deliberate, as the servers were being rather underutilized and since it costs money to run them, I decided to take them down until we can put more focus on the MP development work. You can naturally still use the Shell to run your own servers, though.
The 1.12 candidate phase is ongoing, and we are planning to make the release in the end of the month.
Comments
1. However, I notice that we can't open the renderer appearance menu when we select one of the built in profiles on the renderer menu, to view their settings. But if we change the profile to one of the built in ones on the renderer appearance menu itself, we can view their settings.
2. A tiny little visual thing, but with the Vanilla profile specifically, I notice three options in the renderer appearance menu are still brown (i.e. on); interpolate model frames, glow visible on walls and use realistic halos. Though they have no affect due to other options being turned off, it might look a little better when a user views this profiles settings, if they are turned off so they are greyed out, like the rest of the options.
3. Perhaps the numbers for sharp edges for sprites cvar should be reversed (i.e 1 is smooth edges and 0 is sharp edges). It just seems that with all other visual options, that 0 is no enhancement to the original graphics and 1 is on.
4. Something I would like to also ask about is a button for mass expanding/un-expanding all renderer appearance menu sections at once?
5. A tiny little consistency thing that goes back to the old control panel and has been carried over to the renderer appearance menu; we disable many things like models and dlights with a checkbox. But we disable material glows and halo's by moving sliders to 0. A user may prefer to be able to disable these things without losing their preferred strength and number settings for them.
6. Can I also ask about the possibility of a cvar being added to disable the font filtering effects? And the resulting cvar being added to the renderer appearance menu?
There are two notable visual differences between Dday and Vanilla Doom, the font filtering and distance shading. I know the latter is not a trivial matter to add an option to mimic.
But based on the fact that there are options to disable the filters on seemingly every other graphic, I imagine an option to disable the filter on font's is very possible; for that more complete 'Vanilla look', one might want an unfiltered font. Or one might not like that some detail of the font is blurred by the filtering.
That's a good point. To fix it, we'd have to add new on/off type cvars for all affected settings, though. It's not difficult, let's see if there's a suitable opportunity at some point...
I'm keen to introduce vanilla-like distance shading, but it goes rather deep into the map renderer and to do it properly we'll need to use GL shaders. We'll get there sooner or later.