GL Sparkles

When moving around in Legacy GLMode I see all these sparkles and lines flickering all over the walls which are the same color as the sky. The only way to eliminate this is to use a real dark colored sky. Not that they go away but they're not as noticable. Anyhow it looks bad, espcially when you enter a dark area and you see a zillion of these specks. Whats up with this and will it ever be fixed? When I run the same map in JDoom I don't see this 'stuff'. Yeah I know, JDooM handles the GL stuff different. I was really wondering if the GL code will ever be improved to fix this sparkle effect? I know the Legacy team has a lot of things to do and are working hard to improve Legacy and I hope I don't sound bitchy. I've been wondering about this for quite awhile now and I just added an orange sky to my wad. The sky looks cool but the sparkles are really apparent, especially on dark textured walls. Just thought id ask about this since nobody else seems to say anything about it.. Maybe im just a Gl freak.

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----Linedef Technician and Sector Maker Upper----

Also I've noticed that dynamic lights tend to add Gl-hole looking cracks around the area of the lighting.

JDoom is DirectX. Even though thats close to OpenGL, you cant compare it in this case.
What you describe sounds like a z-buffer problem. What video card do you have? I dont have this problem and I have an old Diamond Stealth III S540 32MB AGP.


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Doom Connector - Your first class ticket to hell online!

I have a Radeon 8500 and I've seen the effect on my VooDoo Banshee as well.

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----Linedef Technician and Sector Maker Upper----

I think Hurdler explained this by that the lines were rendered several times or something, I can't say i understood it.

Hmmm, is it wierd that I don't seem to have that stuff? Everything looks fine for me.



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Member of Team DEIM
Webmaster The DOOM Editing Resource

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In a lot of maps it's not that noticeable. In others it can be quite sparkly. Maybe I'm going insane?

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----Linedef Technician and Sector Maker Upper----

I see it a lot, (Voodoo Banshee), I remember Stefirz telling us how to work around it in a thread for one of your recent releases DD, a few months ago. He suggested something like making the border of the offending texture slightly darker.

Its an annoying problem and one of the reasons I still have not released my Mummy Phuquers 3D partial conversion. I may just make that an episode in MysticMeg now.

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"One can't complain. I have my friends. Someone spoke to me only yesterday."
yahoo ID mysticandy13, MSN mysticandy@blueyonder.co.uk

The thing Stphrz was talking about was the flickering glimmer on some flats which can be fixed by smoothing / blurring the flats slightly in a Photo editing program. This method works great, especially on flats that have a lot of lines like tiled floors. It doesn't take much of a blur either to fix flats.

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----Linedef Technician and Sector Maker Upper----

As I recall, it's a coding issue of sorts - done differently in JDOOM. It uses OPENGL too.

IIRC one fix is to switch to OPENGL node as in JDOOM

Here's an idea. If we raise enough money to pay deepteam's bills for a month or two, maybe he'll write us a new graphics engine for Legacy!

I get the sparkles on my Mobility Radeon but I can't remember whether they show on my GeForce2. They are really nasty looking though.

I also get those GL cracks caused only by dynamic lights. You can sometimes reduce them by tweaking the settings on your nodesbuilder. They show up more around geometry with really fine details.

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"Once in a while a programmer really writes something he's proud of, a slick, elegant, blazingly fast routine that stands as a benchmark against which other code will be judged by. However, this is not the case with TED's fill routine. This slow, stupid algorithm will casually fill one plane of data in a painfully creeping manner. Press ESC when it gets confused." - John Romero on TED (Tile EDitor)

Aliotroph?.postCount++;

I don't get any Glcracks around lights so go figure.

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----Linedef Technician and Sector Maker Upper----

This picture doesn't illustrate it to well, but you can see two gray dots (E1 map) where the linedefs meet.



And here's the thing with the lights as seen in this part of Phobia.



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-DarkWolf

ooooooooooh is that what you mean!
Use ZenNode, it solves these problems. But if you want to use ZenNode on one of your IWAD's, make a copy first, because you cant use it to play online if the other doesnt have the same file.


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Doom Connector - Your first class ticket to hell online!

Zennode doesn't solve the former problem. It will sometimes get rid of the latter one.

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-DarkWolf

Yeah ZenNode can fix the lights thingy on the floor. I suspect that error has more to do with complex design / nodesbuilding rather than any problems with the lights. It looks to me like the nearby lights make the error more apparent. I've rarely had that error and always fixed it by making a few minor changes to my architecture. The other problem with the sparkles never clears with ZenNode.

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----Linedef Technician and Sector Maker Upper----

The other problem is fixed point arithmetic. I'm assuming Legacy did not convert to floating point - and this will cause a lack of "meshing". ZDOOM has similar issues and this is even true for stock DOOM.

Just looks different when the res is turned up

That whole switch has sparkles around it in the first pic.

Deepteam is probably right. ZenNode and DeepBSP don't fix that second problem all the time either. Sometimes you can reduce it by playing with the settings but it almost never goes away if it's there. Odd how it only show when the dynlights are there though. In a lot of maps you will never see those cracks until you fire a rocket there or something.

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"Once in a while a programmer really writes something he's proud of, a slick, elegant, blazingly fast routine that stands as a benchmark against which other code will be judged by. However, this is not the case with TED's fill routine. This slow, stupid algorithm will casually fill one plane of data in a painfully creeping manner. Press ESC when it gets confused." - John Romero on TED (Tile EDitor)

Aliotroph?.postCount++;

There may be 1 or 2 more in the first pic, but the sides along the switch are the DOORSTOP texture...

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-DarkWolf

I was playing Half-Life: Blue Shift earlier and I saw those GL sparkles all over the terrain just where the train enters the cave.

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"Once in a while a programmer really writes something he's proud of, a slick, elegant, blazingly fast routine that stands as a benchmark against which other code will be judged by. However, this is not the case with TED's fill routine. This slow, stupid algorithm will casually fill one plane of data in a painfully creeping manner. Press ESC when it gets confused." - John Romero on TED (Tile EDitor)

Aliotroph?.postCount++;