Grayscale Spectres (partially invisible pinky demons)
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.
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
The closest tracker issue is probably #1416.
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.
https://manual.dengine.net/ded/thing?s[
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.
But I still think making the same sprites just blank and white and then transparent on top of that, would at least make it harder to see and closer to the original. It may not look like the original, but at least it would be colorless. I don't recall the original spectre having any trace of pink, or any color for that matter.