Func_Msgboard: 16 Vs 32 Bit. For All You Engine Coders Out There.

16 Vs 32 Bit. For All You Engine Coders Out There.

Posted by ptoing on 2014/08/14 16:46:46

First of, hello everyone. I have been playing Quake for a long time, on and off, since QTest. Just been getting into it again, still loving it and even more so with all the cool user made content to wade through.

I am somewhat of a purist when it comes to how I set up the looks. No texture filtering and all that.

I really like how Quake looks with the Colormap, since it makes it look a lot more gritty than with 32bit. Also you get funkier colour transitions which help the atmosphere of the game imo. Also with 32bits the game becomes brighter and less contrasty, which I am not a fan of.

Now I was wondering if engines could include a middleground. Where instead of just making stuff 32bit the Colormap could still be used, but interpolated. So you would get smoother transitions but keep the relative colours and brightness dictated by the colourmap.

#1 posted by Spike on 2014/08/14 19:34:18

QuakeForge's glsl renderer is meant to use quake's colourmap for a 100% faithful software look while being hardware accelerated. I've not used it myself, but the screenshots looked right.
Yeah, nearest filtering (like sw) rather than linear like glquake.

With post processing glsl and 3d textures, you can create almost any sort of colour mapping you want.
details: http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ColorGrading.html
you can achieve this in fte by using the features provided by csaddon.dat - install it then just set the ca_colourtint cvar to the name of your LUT (steal one from the article I linked or something, or create one as it describes).
This is basically the only sane way I can think of applying colour distortions with linear texture sampling.
Probably you would want a slightly more polished version where everything was automatically provided by the engine itself with just an on/off setting... meh. :P

also, quake was 8-bit, not 16-bit.

#2 posted by Spirit on 2014/08/14 19:51:41

Checkout engoo, qbism's and makaqu.

Spike

#3 posted by ptoing on 2014/08/14 20:57:01

Yeah that looks pretty good.
I know that Quake was 8, not 16 bit, but the settings in modern ports are 16/32 bit. 16bit is pretty much needed to not make fog and coloured lighting look like total ass.

Spirit: Will do, thanks :)

Man...

#4 posted by ptoing on 2014/08/14 21:23:49

Those software render ports are pretty unique, to put it nicely. 8bit coloured lighting looks pretty bad.

Quakeforge seems pretty halfbaked atm. Where are the menus and all that. But from screenshots the GLSL shader looks pretty much like I would expect. Would be nice if that was implemented into Fitzquake/Quakespasm. One can hope...

18-bit

#5 posted by lei-lei on 2014/08/14 22:12:40

:P

Post-DX10 video cards scrapped their 16-bit screen dithering functions. It is going to look more "ass" on new cards than those cards where 16-bit depth was only supported. There's no "Vs" about it.

#6 posted by ptoing on 2014/08/14 22:45:57

I am sure that screen dithering could be done with some pixelshader, same as with colour indexing.

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