Do you think GZDoom should have texture filtering on by default?

[Edward850]

45 minutes ago, Gez said:

TV screens were for a much larger distance between screen and viewer, and for watching movies so looking at the whole screen at once. Completely different requirements. In particular, having visible scanlines is not an issue when you're three-to-five meters away because they get blurred out at that distance. At one tenth that distance, however, it's a different story. 

Plus the video signal was entirely different. VGA has dedicated signals for red, green and blue, while TV composite and RF signals crammed both colour and intensity into the same scan. It was trying to reconstruct images with far less information.

[Doomkid]

I love how incredibly unanimous community opinion is on this. I honestly think there is not one other common opinion THIS one-sided in the realm of Doom. I love that there’s something we can all get behind and other then a few people clearly ‘avin a laff. 
 

Allow me to make that ratio 153 to 4 real quick.

 

(For what it’s worth, from the literal nanosecond this became the norm with the port, almost everyone has hated it. Some people even feared younger Doomers would think this stupid shitty blur was part of the game by default. Next minute..)

[RDETalus]

22 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

I honestly think there is not one other common opinion THIS one-sided in the realm of Doom.

Then why the hell is it still default? Who's fault is it?

[Devalaous]

22 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

Some people even feared younger Doomers would think this stupid shitty blur was part of the game by default.\

 

A warranted fear, as pretty much every retro game rerelease these days almost ALWAYS has filtering on by default, and some games have it unable to be turned off. Sonic Origins for example has only 'blurred' and 'even more blurred' as options, so I modded the game to have Sonic Mania's filtering options and now its clear pixels all the way, or Mania's CRT filter if I feel like it.

[RataUnderground]

4 minutes ago, RDETalus said:

Then why the hell is it still default? Who's fault is it?

The people who make GzDoom don't work for us. They do all that work because they want to, without any obligation to anyone. So they default to the way they like to see their sourceport.

[Individualised]

3 hours ago, Manny84 said:

Glad I wasn't the only one who made the connection between GZDoom defaults and TVs with motion smoothing. I have to fix every TV my mum buys or it looks like total arse in a way that she can't quite articulate or understand.

Modern TVs are fucking ass in general. A TV should do one thing; display an external video source, whether or not that's a terrestrial broadcast or through something I've plugged into it. We don't need all this extra shit with colours or motion blur or half a second of input delay. It's like we've regressed.

 

2 hours ago, RataUnderground said:

There is a lot of confusion with this. CRT VGA monitors that were standard at the time Doom appeared had a clean, sharp image. The CRT filters that you find nowadays in emulators imitate CRT televisions, which are a different thing.
A current flat monitor displaying Chocolate Doom presents an indistinguishable image from a CRT monitor of the 90s without the need of any shadder.
On the other hand, the idea that any resolution higher than 320x200 needs HD assets to look good is absurd. If you have texture filters turned off, you'll still see pixels at the correct size. Simply put, when an object is zoomed out, the resolution will allow the definition to be maintained at a greater distance.

I wouldn't say this is totally true. A CRT monitor would have much better colour reproduction than a modern LCD or OLED (the latter of which I think does not look very good for the record, with its over-saturated colours and graininess)

[RataUnderground]

13 minutes ago, Individualised said:

Modern TVs are fucking ass in general. A TV should do one thing; display an external video source, whether or not that's a terrestrial broadcast or through something I've plugged into it. We don't need all this extra shit with colours or motion blur or half a second of input delay. It's like we've regressed.

 

I wouldn't say this is totally true. A CRT monitor would have much better colour reproduction than a modern LCD or OLED (the latter of which I think does not look very good for the record, with its over-saturated colours and graininess)

 

There are currently several flat panel technologies with different priorities. Some maximize hertz to present a large number of frames per second, others contrast like many OLEDs, and others color fidelity, though often at the expense of Hz. 
Because of my work all my monitors are IPS, which is a color fidelity-first technology, although almost all models are 60hz, which doesn't make them "ideal" for gaming according to many fans who believe they are able to see the difference between 100 and 60 fps.

But I'm going off the deep end. All this has nothing to do with the common belief that pixel art traditionally took advantage of the lack of definition in monitors to create effects. It is true only in some cases. In those in which the game was intended to be viewed on a TV, as in the case of arcades and consoles. But not so on PC. So the use of CRT shadders is absurd unless you want to emulate something like Doom for PSX.

[SuperPIter_DoomWorldthe2nd]

I'm surprised that there's still people who want the texture filtering on by default, when it's really just a trigger for the "so retro" meme that sparked in popularity the past few months in the art community. Said meme doesn't need any introduction aside from this one image.

[PKr]

I have a good eyesight despite playing games for my entire life. Texture Filtering ON + Depth of Field ON + Some Blur/HDR ON (top of that) is how I imagine people with the bad eyesight see the world.

[Redneckerz]

2 hours ago, RDETalus said:

Then why the hell is it still default? Who's fault is it?

I used to recall a post by Graf stating the reason why but i can't find it at the moment. But it was something along the likes of that GZ is a modern source port for modern systems, extending beyond Doom, thus it makes it logical that it was turned on.

That GZ is primarily used for Doom forfeits this train of thought, but in the light of indie games using GZDoom as a basis, it makes a lot more sense. Its just that this is used interchangeably.

[jazzmaster9]

1 hour ago, RataUnderground said:

The people who make GzDoom don't work for us. They do all that work because they want to, without any obligation to anyone. So they default to the way they like to see their sourceport.

I always think about this when people discuss about GZDoom defaults "Be the change you want in the world and develop a new fork"

Because if it didn't change 5-10 years ago, there's little chance it will change now, cuz graf isn't just gonna hand over GZDoom.

[SuperPIter_DoomWorldthe2nd]

1 minute ago, Redneckerz said:

But it was something along the likes of that GZ is a modern source port for modern systems, extending beyond Doom, thus it makes it logical that it was turned on.

That's about as logical as "Emulators are made for Modern Systems, this it makes it logical that Texture Filtering is turned on by default.", just saying.

[Individualised]

3 minutes ago, Redneckerz said:

I used to recall a post by Graf stating the reason why but i can't find it at the moment. But it was something along the likes of that GZ is a modern source port for modern systems, extending beyond Doom, thus it makes it logical that it was turned on.

That GZ is primarily used for Doom forfeits this train of thought, but in the light of indie games using GZDoom as a basis, it makes a lot more sense. Its just that this is used interchangeably.

I think a lot of people don't understand that GZDoom's default settings are the way they are because a lot of old ZDoom mods that didn't specify that things like mouselook or jumping needed to be turned on rely on them. Enabling filtering by default I think is a bit too far but I get the reasoning behind it (also the fact that, as Graf says, it just makes sense to turn it on by default when other modern features are, even if it looks awful for Doom)

[Individualised]

2 minutes ago, SuperPIter_DoomWorldthe2nd said:

That's about as logical as "Emulators are made for Modern Systems, this it makes it logical that Texture Filtering is turned on by default.", just saying.

This doesn't really work as a comparison, it's also not what Graf meant when he said that. Not that I think the filtering should be on by default though.

Edited July 2, 2023 by Individualised

[Mr Masker]

Did the maths, only 0.030487805 of voters said that Texture Filtering should be ON by Default.

(as of writing this post)

Edited July 2, 2023 by Mr Masker

[Shepardus]

This has me wondering what the forum thinks about anisotropic filtering...

 

13 minutes ago, Redneckerz said:

I used to recall a post by Graf stating the reason why but i can't find it at the moment. But it was something along the likes of that GZ is a modern source port for modern systems, extending beyond Doom, thus it makes it logical that it was turned on.

That GZ is primarily used for Doom forfeits this train of thought, but in the light of indie games using GZDoom as a basis, it makes a lot more sense. Its just that this is used interchangeably.

I can understand where that comes from, but ironically the standalone games I've seen using GZDoom have opted to turn off texture filtering.

 

14 minutes ago, jazzmaster9 said:

I always think about this when people discuss about GZDoom defaults "Be the change you want in the world and develop a new fork"

Because if it didn't change 5-10 years ago, there's little chance it will change now, cuz graf isn't just gonna hand over GZDoom.

You certainly could, but it feels kinda silly maintaining a fork for a one-line change that accomplishes the same thing an ini or autoexec.cfg file would.

[RataUnderground]

5 minutes ago, Shepardus said:

You certainly could, but it feels kinda silly maintaining a fork for a one-line change that accomplishes the same thing an ini or autoexec.cfg file would.

 

Sounds easy and troll enough for someone doing it for the lulz. 

 

BESTGzDoom sourceport. 

Edited July 2, 2023 by RataUnderground

[Bauul]

1 hour ago, Redneckerz said:

That GZ is primarily used for Doom forfeits this train of thought, but in the light of indie games using GZDoom as a basis, it makes a lot more sense. Its just that this is used interchangeably.

 

With the ongoing development of VKDoom (my understanding is that it has a good chance to become the defacto choice for indie develop rather than base GZDoom) this is even less of a factor.

 

I always understood that texture filtering was on by default because Graf personally likes it.

 

54 minutes ago, Shepardus said:

This has me wondering what the forum thinks about anisotropic filtering...

 

Anisotropic filtering is pretty important if you're using a higher resolution, if you don't want distant textures to turn into a soupy mess.

Edited July 2, 2023 by Bauul

[scwiba]

2 hours ago, PKr said:

I have a good eyesight despite playing games for my entire life. Texture Filtering ON + Depth of Field ON + Some Blur/HDR ON (top of that) is how I imagine people with the bad eyesight see the world.

It is. As someone with garbage vision, I can confirm that turning off texture filtering in GZDoom has exactly the same effect as putting my glasses on.

 

2 hours ago, jazzmaster9 said:

I always think about this when people discuss about GZDoom defaults "Be the change you want in the world and develop a new fork"

Because if it didn't change 5-10 years ago, there's little chance it will change now, cuz graf isn't just gonna hand over GZDoom.

I would laugh so hard if someone forked GZDoom and the only difference was that texture filtering was off by default. Call it GGZDoom -- Good GZDoom.

[indigotyrian]

4 hours ago, RataUnderground said:

The people who make GzDoom don't work for us. They do all that work because they want to, without any obligation to anyone. So they default to the way they like to see their sourceport.

 

This isn't a problem that can be fixed by just making another source port. GZDoom is pointed to quite often as a "gateway drug" for new Doom players for its wide range of support for Doom wads and mods. A lot of people start playing Doom with GZDoom. Making a fork of GZDoom would do nothing as the crux of the issue is GZDoom's position as a beginner source port; a fork would be practically invisible to the people who need it.

[Arsinikk]

Personally I've always thought Texturing Filtering should be off by default in GZDoom. While I happily endorse that such a feature should be included in the port, it being enabled by default has always been a strange choice to me. I suspect that part of the reason it's enabled by default is to showcase the feature as a sort of developer flex. In my opinion, the defaults of a source port should reflect how a game would generally look straight out of the box, but with the bonus of it being easier to run on more modern systems. Extra visual things like processing effects and filtering should be included but be extra options and not default.

 

I think part of the reason much of the community is annoyed about Texture Filtering set as the default, is because many newer users of the port think that DOOM was meant to be played with Texture Filtering on, and don't realise that the original DOOM had no such filtering. Regardless of what anyone says, DOOM wasn't designed with Texturing Filtering in mind. It is up to the individual person whether they enjoy the look of Texturing Filtering or not. My argument is that a port's default settings should be representative of the original source material.

 

I really do hate the strawman argument that source ports developers can do what they want because they do everything for free. While I do emphasise and appreciate developers' unpaid hard work, that argument shouldn't be used as a deflection of criticism. After all, what makes a source port popular is the users that use it. If a source port dev makes a decision that leads to users no longer using it, that's on them for not listening and respecting their user base.

 

I feel that the defaults of a port are especially important for beginner Doomers. It'd be stupid not to say that GZDoom is one of the easiest and most convenient ways for people to get into playing DOOM. Creating a fork for source ports, while possible, is just a stupid idea when it's only one setting that's changed. What happens when the main port is updated? Now you have to wait for the fork to get updated as well, just for one setting to be changed. It still wouldn't help beginner Doomers, as the forked port would be lost in favour of the main one in searches. It is this exact reason why it annoys me that certain features have been cut out of DSDA Doom. While some people will say to just use PrBoom Plus, that port is now severely outdated compared to DSDA Doom. There is no fork based on PrBoom Plus that includes the features that DSDA Doom has, while also being for a more casual audience.

[indigotyrian]

28 minutes ago, Arsinikk said:

I really do hate the strawman argument that source ports developers can do what they want because they do everything for free. While I do emphasise and appreciate developers' unpaid hard work, that argument shouldn't be used as a deflection of criticism. After all, what makes a source port popular is the users that use it. If a source port dev makes a decision that leads to users no longer using it, that's on them for not listening and respecting their user base.

 

Agreed. In a vacuum, the argument that "well, it's their project and theirs alone, they have the right to do whatever" makes sense, but in the greater context of things GZDoom has become the flagship of playing classic Doom today. When you reach that kind of position, there's a certain set of responsibilities involved, and whether you like it or not you have to meet those. Imagine if Linus Torvalds decided that the Linux kernel going forward would drop support for x86 architectures as he believes in his heart of hearts that the future lies in ARM/Apple-based architectures. So much shit would be under threat of just utterly breaking, but technically the Linux project is his, and he's the captain, and he can do whatever he wants, right?

Edited July 2, 2023 by indigotyrian

[SuperPIter_DoomWorldthe2nd]

28 minutes ago, Arsinikk said:

In my opinion, the defaults of a source port should reflect how a game would generally look straight out of the box, but with the bonus of it being easier to run on more modern systems.

I honestly doubt that GZDoom is "easier" to run on modern systems if we were to consider the... Ahem, slightly non-existent optimization for hardware that ain't exactly that strong that... quite honestly, a pretty big part of the population here on Earth has. Hell, there are times i could barely run MyHouse.wad with a consistent framerate, specially in the Poolhouse with all that fancy reflection stuff on the floor.

Spoiler

I wonder what sort of Butterfly Effect would happen if GZ lent more into having the minimum hardware requirements of Source... Just a thought, y'know.

 

[ReaperAA]

I'll be the Devil's Advocate here (slightly) and say that I don't have GZDoom's texture filtering options set to "none" (aka Nearest Neighbor), but rather set to "none(Trilinear)". Basically have square chunky pixels at close range while also having no shimmering at long distance textures. For me, it's the best of both worlds.

 

Although if I have to choose between complete unfiltered pixels vs filtered default GZDoom look, I will definitely go with former. Sprites in games like Doom, Duke3D etc look terrible when filtered. I also even have filtering turned off for Doom 64.

Even in Quake 1, I turn off texture filtering. Quake 2 is the oldest FPS where I am torn whether I prefer filtering or not. For games like Unreal, Half-Life and other games like those from 1998 and onwards, I prefer texture filtering on.

[roadworx]

16 minutes ago, ReaperAA said:

Quake 2 is the oldest FPS where I am torn whether I prefer filtering or not. For games like Unreal, Half-Life and other games like those from 1998 and onwards, I prefer texture filtering on.

honestly, quake 2 is an instant "off" for me. the texture filtering looks terrible in that game, and i hate that it's on by default

 

hl and unreal definitely look better with filtering on tho

[Darkcrafter07]

I would support the statement GZDoom needs a lot of optimizations made to make it run on par with something like DSDA-Doom or Helion. But nobody does it for free, thus I can't wait for an optimized fork. I asked it hundreds of times why it is that.

 

1. All assets are sent to GPU every frame because this is the simplest way GZDoom handles "Dynamic doom geometry", HD assets worsen it up too;

2. All static dynamic lights and geometry receiving it also recomputed every frame;

3. All game logic is kind of much more complex than any source port out there with tons of additional checks;

4. The game logic is impossible to multithread to keep the same "Doom" behavior and break demos;

5. BSP and visibility check traversal, and especially big detailed maps with 3D floors, it's simply awful;

6. Portals and stacked sectors also contribute to killing performance;

7. There are no LOD for 3D models;

8. Lots of video cards ranging from 2000's to these days work best with DirectX API because this is where mainstream graphics and money are.

 

1 - the engine must mark static geometry as static and send it over GPU just once, when map is loaded. If the engine can not do this, let mappers mark it. Some simple dynamic objects like doors, stairs and bars can be all dumped into a set of static 3D models and lowered/raised;

 

2 - zdray probably could help to bake all static dynligts and static geometries and improve performance, even without shadows;

 

3 - it definitely can not run maps like nuts, I'm not confident enough to say how to fix that;

 

4 - demos are not even compatible a version to version, I wouldn't bother with them at all, I don't need exactly the same Doom behavior if it can be simulated to some degree of accuracy;

 

5 - a mapper or engine must mark some linedefs that need to be completely excluded from this expensive operation;

 

6 - alright, let's not pre-render portals from multiple angles, if only rendering those could be sped up by rendering portals far less often than the main screen (4 or 8 times less FPS for portals);

 

7 - introducing LODs could help mods like voxel doom, because just one such 3D model has at least 7000+ polygons and imagine what happens with hundreds of monsters on the screen. Also could help to improve performance in my map set with lots of trees and other details.

 

8 - DirectX9 would be the best tradeoff for a huge majority of video cards, if the whole material system could also be rewritten with this API in mind and bundled with basic shaders for all needs, this could be the best.

[Redneckerz]

6 hours ago, SuperPIter_DoomWorldthe2nd said:

That's about as logical as "Emulators are made for Modern Systems, this it makes it logical that Texture Filtering is turned on by default.", just saying.

That's not what i am saying. I am saying that, as GZDoom (though in practice is used to play Doom) can be used to create original games and supports a lot of modern eye candy, it makes more sense to treat it as a modern engine, thus including texture filtering to be turned on.

For the vast majority of users though, this does not apply, because they use it to play Doom with mods. Also echoing later statements that most original games that use GZDoom usually have the feature turned off. It only makes a lot of sense if a GZDoom game features models, where texture filtering would come in handy.

5 hours ago, Shepardus said:

I can understand where that comes from, but ironically the standalone games I've seen using GZDoom have opted to turn off texture filtering.

Most standalone games still use sprites for enemy and gun design and not so much 3D models (Which would benefit from texture filtering)

4 hours ago, Bauul said:

With the ongoing development of VKDoom (my understanding is that it has a good chance to become the defacto choice for indie develop rather than base GZDoom) this is even less of a factor.

It would take studios time to switch over, and, at the behest of introducing new visual features, would also raise the system requirements, no GLES renderer i reckon! But yes, i love to see this happening either way, lest the fact that GZ will also include a lot of the niceties that VKDoom promises.

[roadworx]

what it feels like to play with filtering on

 

[Individualised]

3 hours ago, roadworx said:

honestly, quake 2 is an instant "off" for me. the texture filtering looks terrible in that game, and i hate that it's on by default

 

hl and unreal definitely look better with filtering on tho

I can't really agree. With filtering off it looks like an impressive but unwanted DS port.

Edited July 2, 2023 by Individualised

[JadingTsunami]

Instead of arguing about defaults, it would be more productive to create a minimal "mod" for this.

 

Anyone can put their preferred settings into an config file and distribute it along with a batch file to launch with those settings (e.g., gzdoom -config doomier_defaults.ini).

 

If one were so inclined, a small script could modify or append the user's INI/autoexec settings to accomplish this as well.

 

Users figure out how to install mods and other content on their own when they see them in use all the time; this would be the same.