Split screen scaling artifacts on new console ports

[Linguica]

When I looked at the demo units of the 4 player co-op / DM that they had on display at QuakeCon, I noticed that the scaling looks totally bizarre:

 

 

I haven't seen anyone else mentioning this. Apparently it's present on all three consoles, and it looks so bad I don't understand how it was approved.

[wheresthebeef]

That is hilarious.

The Xbox 360 port had it just fine in split screen.

The original Xbox Doom 3 collector's edition had it fine.

Doom 64 didn't have split screen, but Hexen 64 did, and judging by a video the dimensions look fine there too.

[fraggle]

It looks like the bottom "50" is overlapping the "300". 

 

I'm guessing they're first using NEAREST scaling with non-integer scale factors, which usually gives a clumpy/non-even scaling of pixels like this, but I think there must also be something messed up about how they calculate the sizes of individual patches as well.

 

For example suppose you have a a 1 pixel-tall patch that you scale up by 2.5x. That gives a patch that should be drawn 2 pixels tall in some places, 3 pixels tall others. But if you do it naively, the patch always gets scaled to 3 pixels and you get overlap like this. Of course the real solution here is to do something like what Choco does - internally scale up patches using NEAREST, then draw the scaled-up patch using LINEAR.

 

Sadly this is the perfect example of the kind of detail you can never trust a commercially developed port to get right. Looks horrible, and to us it's apparent immediately that something is horribly wrong, but if you haven't spent hundreds of hours staring at Doom's status bar, chances are you won't notice. I think they messed up the aspect ratio as well - another good example.

[Linguica]

1 hour ago, fraggle said:

I think they messed up the aspect ratio as well - another good example.

 

Yes, all the ports are presented in 16:10 square pixel aspect ratio, with - wait for it - pillarboxing! But I am so used to modern id / Bethesda not caring about pixel aspect ratio on classic Doom products that I didn't consider mentioning it.

[Quasar]

This in particular is caused by trying to scale each post from the patch separately from the top to the bottom and from left to right. You have to be more sophisticated and scale based on the graphic size from the middle using a frac/fracstep sort of system. Eternity Engine had this problem in ancient versions and looked almost identical.

[Linguica]

Digital Foundry agrees with me I see.

 

 

[Eurisko]

Wow after watching that I'm glad to have not bought these ports. 

[seed]

Well okay, I learned something new today about those ports I guess.

 

Didn't know they messed up stuff in the status bar and the games are still being capped at 35fps. But I'm glad DF mentioned the muffled audio, it seems like not enough people are bringing up this problem. The audio is so much clear in Chocolate for instance, and even in the original X360/PS3 version.

 

Also, after hearing the side-by-side music comparison with Choco, I think this one is also hitting some wrong notes (some that are too low).

Edited July 31, 2019 by seed

[wheresthebeef]

Wow, the Bethesda login error message popping up every 10 seconds when putting the console to sleep is probably the worst thing about this entire port (besides the required login in the first place, but at least that can be bypassed the first time you do it.)

 

Surprised I haven't heard anything about that.

 

The audio issues remind me of Duke's World Tour which had badly compressed audio at launch (which only got patched on PC, not on consoles)

Edited July 31, 2019 by wheresthebeef