Getting Doom 64: Retribution to look as close to Doom 64 as possible

[HeyItsDuke]

Could anyone recommend any GZDoom settings to help me accomplish this? I've been mostly fiddling with this myself and I can't seem to get it right. The only thing I've got is the texture filtering and sprite edges. Doom 64 also seems to have this cel shading effect on the first person weapons?

 

Doom 64:

 

None of the recreations, or EX, have that effect.

 

EX:

 

Retribution:

 

Any idea how I could replicate it in GZDoom?

[-TDRR-]

IIRC that outline on the weapon sprites is because of a N64 sprite rendering quirk, there's no way to recreate it in GZDoom without using shaders.

[Dark Pulse]

Yeah, the outline is due to the three-tap bilinear filtering, which is actually a bit different from normal PC bilinear filtering.

 

Lighting is likely to be at least a little off no matter what as well, since it's simply not being rendered identically to the N64, for obvious reasons - namely, that we're not rendering it on an N64.

 

Also remember the default gamma setting on Doom 64 for the US is at its minimum, while default for EU/JP was middle of the range. So you could try turning your gamma down some if you really want that extra darkness, but it's so dark that even the devs agreed it was too dark (and according to @Hyde was because they did all their testing in a windowless office - they learned a lesson, apparently).

[HeyItsDuke]

5 hours ago, -TDRR- said:

IIRC that outline on the weapon sprites is because of a N64 sprite rendering quirk, there's no way to recreate it in GZDoom without using shaders.

4 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

Yeah, the outline is due to the three-tap bilinear filtering, which is actually a bit different from normal PC bilinear filtering.

 

Huh, that's really interesting!

 

Quote

Lighting is likely to be at least a little off no matter what as well, since it's simply not being rendered identically to the N64, for obvious reasons - namely, that we're not rendering it on an N64.

 

Yeah, for the most part it seems to be accurate enough (probably even better looking.) So It's fine. :)

 

Quote

Also remember the default gamma setting on Doom 64 for the US is at its minimum, while default for EU/JP was middle of the range. So you could try turning your gamma down some if you really want that extra darkness, but it's so dark that even the devs agreed it was too dark (and according to @Hyde was because they did all their testing in a windowless office - they learned a lesson, apparently).

 

Oof. If the devs even say it's too dark, than maybe I shouldn't.

Edited April 30, 2019 by V0idH0und

[Nevander]

Another thing to remember about Retribution is it does not use the correct color and lighting yet from the original game. Hopefully eventually it will, if I ever get around to it or have the ability to make it happen. I don't think it's possible to be 100% exact yet even in current GZDoom versions, so there's that.

[HeyItsDuke]

5 minutes ago, Nevander said:

Another thing to remember about Retribution is it does not use the correct color and lighting yet from the original game. Hopefully eventually it will, if I ever get around to it or have the ability to make it happen. I don't think it's possible to be 100% exact yet even in current GZDoom versions, so there's that.

Good thing it still looks great then huh? :)

I'd be willing to write a shader to reproduce that effect if i had any experience doing that. (Assuming it can be reproduced correctly) But I'm mostly just a novice decorate coder. :/

Edited April 30, 2019 by V0idH0und

[Dark Pulse]

6 hours ago, Nevander said:

Another thing to remember about Retribution is it does not use the correct color and lighting yet from the original game. Hopefully eventually it will, if I ever get around to it or have the ability to make it happen. I don't think it's possible to be 100% exact yet even in current GZDoom versions, so there's that.

Well, you should be able to pull the values from EX and have them in the UDMF maps now - GZDBBBF supports it.

 

Whether they'd be rendered the same or not depends on GZDoom, basically.

 

And we'd still need a solution to the ACS Specials that change/fade lighting, unless that's been implemented or you found one since the last time I poked into it.

Edited April 30, 2019 by Dark Pulse

[Barefootstallion]

Correct me if I'm mistaken, as I really have no idea, but might it not be the graphics chipset the N64 was using?

 

Case in point, when I replaced my last ATI card with an nVidia, the same games I'd always had on my PC looked radically different.  Different shading, different rendering.  If that is the case, it might be all but impossible to have GZDoom, on any PC, render exactly the way it did on the N64.  Either way, from what I saw of your screenshots, V0idH0und, I'd say you had it remarkably close.

[Dark Pulse]

3 hours ago, Barefootstallion said:

Correct me if I'm mistaken, as I really have no idea, but might it not be the graphics chipset the N64 was using?

 

Case in point, when I replaced my last ATI card with an nVidia, the same games I'd always had on my PC looked radically different.  Different shading, different rendering.  If that is the case, it might be all but impossible to have GZDoom, on any PC, render exactly the way it did on the N64.  Either way, from what I saw of your screenshots, V0idH0und, I'd say you had it remarkably close.

That's basically what I'm getting at by saying we won't ever be exact, yeah. A (very close) approximation is about the best we can do.

 

This was in the Era where all console stuff was coded to the metal and graphics APIs were barely a thing on the PC yet, much less consoles. It'd take about another seven or eight years before something resembling a graphics API turns up (on the OG Xbox), and another twelve or so before we actually get consoles powerful enough to use PC-style APIs.

 

And even then, it was only with this most recent generation that consoles more or less just began running the same APIs as PC games do.

[iori]

Your top image is from an emulator, which is why the HUD and weapon pics look like shit.

Doom64 didn't filter HUD or weapon graphics, only textures and sprites were fed through the N64s 3-point filter. N64 anti aliasing appears to have still been applied to the scene pre-HUD if you scrutinize captured footage and look at the sprites (from Framemeister/other RGB N64 mods, thanks to @FirebrandX).

 

 

@Kaiser was working on a 3-point filter and a fix for sprites clipping into floors/walls which looks amazing. Just need a way to turn off HUD and Weapon filtering and we would be as close to n64 as possible with EX. Fingers crossed...

 

As for conversions to other ports, their goals are drastically different which makes recreation projects for them much more difficult and diminishes the returns.

 

[Nevander]

8 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

Well, you should be able to pull the values from EX and have them in the UDMF maps now - GZDBBBF supports it.

 

Whether they'd be rendered the same or not depends on GZDoom, basically.

 

And we'd still need a solution to the ACS Specials that change/fade lighting, unless that's been implemented or you found one since the last time I poked into it.

Three issues:

 

1) The colors don't work underneath 3D floors in the space below it. Glows also don't work when used on a 3D floor control sector. I use 3D floors extensively instead of the original hacks. This means worst case scenario, those sectors will be lacking the correct colors.

 

2) The colors can't be changed mid-map with ACS. There hasn't seened to be any progress on making this happen despite repeated feature requests. This is critical because it's used many times in the original game. It needs to be able to interpolate between 2 sets of colors over a duration of tics.

 

3) There are no additive lighting based sector effects. This means I can't reproduce the original's bright almost white flickering while still keeping the right colors.

 

Until these happen, it can never be done right.

[Gerardo194]

22 hours ago, V0idH0und said:

Could anyone recommend any GZDoom settings to help me accomplish this? I've been mostly fiddling with this myself and I can't seem to get it right. The only thing I've got is the texture filtering and sprite edges. Doom 64 also seems to have this cel shading effect on the first person weapons?

 

Doom 64:

 

I'm gonna ask my brother @Erick194 if he could add that effect to our [GEC] GZDoom Master Edition Doom64 project for next updates. Maybe it will be unnecessary to do it as Doom 64 played in a real N64 hardware (I own both) creates some cool shading effects in some areas, you could see it in Burnt Offerings level when reaching the blocking scrolling bars.

I think adding that is too much to ask for, as others users said here, N64 has a different filtering than PC.

[Dark Pulse]

3 hours ago, Nevander said:

Three issues:

 

1) The colors don't work underneath 3D floors in the space below it. Glows also don't work when used on a 3D floor control sector. I use 3D floors extensively instead of the original hacks. This means worst case scenario, those sectors will be lacking the correct colors.

 

2) The colors can't be changed mid-map with ACS. There hasn't seened to be any progress on making this happen despite repeated feature requests. This is critical because it's used many times in the original game. It needs to be able to interpolate between 2 sets of colors over a duration of tics.

 

3) There are no additive lighting based sector effects. This means I can't reproduce the original's bright almost white flickering while still keeping the right colors.

 

Until these happen, it can never be done right.

Yeah, I figured out 3 when I was trying to implement them into 1.3 like over a year ago.

 

As for the other two, I suppose that would be a question for @Graf Zahl or possibly @dpJudas. And we'd definitely need them for the additive lighting stuff either way, even if the other two are somehow possible.

 

Otherwise, yeah, we'd be depending on @Erick194 implementing them into his forked GEC build. Really would prefer not to have to do that, but it depends on not just the features being added, but someone being willing to code them.

Edited April 30, 2019 by Dark Pulse