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.