THT: Threnody - released!

[dobu gabu maru]

Breezeep said:

(BRB stealing Mek's sky textures to use for my future wads)

You're not the only one doing this ;)

[Mechadon]

Feel free to use these however you see fit guys! I'm glad you like them and it would tickle me to see any of them in some new maps :). I've got skies scattered across different projects and unused stuff that I really should organize and release some time.

Anyways, here's round two. 14 new skies this time, though most are just variants so don't get too excited :P. I've also cleaned up the titlepic so it is ready to use if you guys like it enough. The test map has been updated as well, and it might be best to rip the skies from it since they are named in series.

Get the wad here: http://mekworx.the-powerhouse.net/mekastuff/wads/ty/newskytest2.wad

Here is the cleaned-up titlepic graphic. I actually made this variant with a few stars in the background. But I wasn't sure if you guys would prefer the bleakness of having no stars. I can upload the no-star variant if you would prefer.


I made an attempt to create a different kind of hazy fog sky here. The base image was more contrasted so I tried to make some colored variants. These aren't the best, though the grey version might be ok for a foggy sky. These wrap vertically by the way.




Some brownish mountain skies. These came out quite well actually, especially the mountains. I made a more saturated brown variant just to see which I liked better, and it turned out I liked them about the same. So you guys get to pick :P



These orange hazy skies are based off of my first attempt at the current grey hazy sky. I thought perhaps something more akin to the retres.wad orange sky might be something you guys would prefer since this is a tribute project, and this came out very well. I'm leaning more towards the orange/red variant since it has nicer contrast.



This is meant to be a hellish cloud sky; something with more stilted details so it looks a bit more alien and abstract. This may work better than the cliche 'red clouds'.


So these are meant to be my interpretation of the TNT starry sky. I tried googling to find the original galaxy graphic that was used in the original sky. But what you see instead is the closest I could find. I took a few creative liberties with it and I think it looks pretty good. By the way, the variant just has some colored stars in the background for variety. I wasn't sure which was better so I've uploaded both.



Another starry sky, but this time I remade the Saturn sky from retres.wad. Believe it or not, I think I found the original graphic of Saturn that was used in that sky texture! I thought about using that one when making this updated version, but unfortunately it was a bit too low-res to get details out of. So I opted for a more recent photo. Anyway, like the other starry sky, this one has a colored star variant.



And this is just a plain ole starry background, which were the bases for the previous two starry skies. The starry sky from Cutthroat isn't very good, so I'd use this over that one if you guys need a pure starry sky.



Lemme know what you guys think! I'm still up to making any changes or requests on any of these (if possible), so let me know. At the worst, I think there's enough to choose from if you guys decide to just use 3 skies instead of using MBF sky transfers.

[Fonze]

Wow Mech those are some beautiful skies! I took a look in both PrBoom+ and zDoom, but noticed a problem with the skies in PrBoom+. Their full height was not shown; the bottom halves were cut off, tiling instead the upper portion again.

I'm not big into adding custom resources, so that's out of my ball park, but I found that strange.

In zDoom, everything worked fine, so I took a better look in there.

That Red Dusk sky is f*cking gnarly. That thing turned out awesome in-game.

I also really liked the Hell sky and the red clouds.

The first (non-brown saturated) mountain sky turned out awesome as well. I was a bit worried at first that I'd like some more snow up on the mountain tops, but in-game you can see it better and it looks great! Those mountains look foreboding and desolate.

I really liked the colored variant of the TNT space sky, but perhaps it's just a tad bit too much color in the stars? Somewhere in-between I think would have been a bit better, but then again, that's just nit-picking; they are awesome as-is.

I really liked all of the skies; they are all sweet. The one's I mentioned were just my favorites of the bunch, but I would be thrilled to see any of them in both others maps and my own. Great job once again man! We will definitely be using some of these for our map.

Also, great job on the Titlepic; looks fantastic.

[Mechadon]

Thanks for your input Fonze, glad you like them overall!

PrBoom+ use to have some weird behavior with tall skies and where it places them on the horizon. It seemed to be fixed in whatever version I'm running...but maybe it was some sort of compatibility thing that I ticked and forgot about. I'll have to make sure I have the latest version of PrBoom+ and see if that problem came back...or if there is some sort of option that fixes this.

For the mountains, I forgot about that little sliver of snow. The original graphic had a lot more snow nearer the bottom of the mountains, and I had planned on including that. But as I usually do, I made them too tall so I had to cut them off, along with a lot of the snow. It seems to look ok still though...if anyone does think it looks weird, I can just get rid of the snow entirely.

I can look into making the colored stars a bit less prolific if people vote on those over the white ones. I thought the colored stars might look a bit too cartoony, but then again maybe that's because too many of them are colored :P

And glad you like the titlepic! I didn't do too much to it other than making it color-friendly in Doom's palette, but it really is an awesome graphic for this project. If Chris wants me to make an interpic/etc with the other two, I can try my hand at those as well.

[Chris Hansen]

@Mechadon:
Man, I have a hard time choosing which ones to use by just looking at the images and the test wad you provided! Awesome stuff! I'm going to try and modify some levels to see what works best. What would be the best (fastest) way to go about this? Transfer actions like you use or...? Since there's 13 maps in total so far, it has be a somewhat easy method ;)

Go ahead and try to make an interpic out of the 1st picture of the three. The middle one probably has too strong a space theme to go with this project. Someone else mentioned this earlier and I agree. The 1st and 3rd are the best ones. Also, might I suggest that we cut some of the dark areas away from the current titlepic? I'd like to get a little more detail on the floating figure/person. Only, if it isnt too much a hasle ofc! It's perfectly usable as is.

@Fonze:
I can't see in any problem in your idea with the worms. It sounds cool! As long as it doesn't interfere with any existing textures/flats, then please procede :)

[Mechadon]

The quickest way to test them might be to use ZDoom and the 'changesky' command. Open up the test wad, delete the map entry (so it doesn't conflict), and then note down each sky texture name (the patches have the same name as the texture). Then just load up each map and use 'changesky' and enter the sky texture name next to that. You can cycle through each sky pretty quickly that way and see which ones you like the best :)

For the titlepic, at this point it might be easier if I up-scaled the floating person from the original graphic and pasted it onto the current finished background. I'll see what I can do.

[Mechadon]

Alright, here's a stab at an interpic as well as an updated titlepic.



The interpic seems passable...I had lots of trouble getting it colored using the desaturated browns. It killed most of the details (again, a lot of dark, low-contrast details in these). It may work better with some more saturated colors, but its hard to say. The buildings and people on the hill came out looking pretty good though.

By the way, I've updated those bubbly haze cloud sky textures. I cut their sizes in half and they actually look useable now.





I've updated the test wad with all of this new stuff too: http://mekworx.the-powerhouse.net/mekastuff/wads/ty/newskytest3.wad

Also I swear I'll get back to work on my map soon :3

[Chris Hansen]

Yeah, you'd better! We wanna see that map! Lazy git! :P

Nah, seriously, thank you so much for all your hard work. It's much appreciated!

Before you linked those three skies, I'd already taken some screenies with the skies from Mechadon and what I think look good with the various levels we have so far. Here's how I think it should be (which is totally up for debate ofc!):

Spoiler

Note: The order of the maps listed here are not set in stone yet and may change

MAP01-04: Eirene, Rockage, Manly Hatred and Cut Throat
SKY: SKYBUBL3




MAP05-09: Fort Halderman, Forgotten Reaches, Fightnancial Crisis at Enwrong, Parallel Dimension and TY45-15.
SKY: SKYSTAR1




MAP10: WormHell
SKIES: SKYCLDHL, SKYSTAR1, SKYMOUN1



MAP11-13: Tyvivec, Fallen Steward - Eternal Archieve and Sky Pillar
SKY: SKYCLDOR

Let me know what you think and speak up if you want another one of Mech's awesome sky textures! :)

[dobu gabu maru]

Oh yeah I love that starry sky with my map, good eye Chris. That yellow sky is especially gorgeous.

[Fonze]

Man, I think those skies all look awesome with all of the levels!

As for WormHell (and of course we need to know what Z0k thinks about these as well) I'd be thrilled to have the skies you picked out. But I do really like that Red Dusk sky... I'm torn between the sky you took a pic of, the Red Dusk sky, and the Red Clouds sky for the Hell Realm...

Ultimately I'm happy with any of them, but here's a couple more shots, y'all pick.







Also, I looked into the sky problem from earlier a bit more. I have the most current official build of PrBoom+ which in 2.5.1.3 and I see no options to mess with the skies' tiling. However, in GlBoom+ if mouse-look is enabled the skies will appear correctly, though turning off mouse-look makes it tile again.

I'm really not sure how I feel about this now. If some skies will appear screwed up in demos that's a major bummer, but it's such a minor thing at the same time that I'm still thrilled to have such awesome skies for this project.

[Mechadon]

Hey not bad! They look a lot nicer against some actual maps :). The wider/taller version of the bubbly cloud sky actually seems to look ok. So if you like the wider/taller version better than the smaller one I made, definitely use it!

Fonze said:

Also, I looked into the sky problem from earlier a bit more. I have the most current official build of PrBoom+ which in 2.5.1.3 and I see no options to mess with the skies' tiling. However, in GlBoom+ if mouse-look is enabled the skies will appear correctly, though turning off mouse-look makes it tile again.

I'm really not sure how I feel about this now. If some skies will appear screwed up in demos that's a major bummer, but it's such a minor thing at the same time that I'm still thrilled to have such awesome skies for this project.

This is really confusing me. I've actually brought up this problem before but haven't checked to see if it was ever explained or addressed. The confusing part is that I've tested this in PrBoom+ (I'm running 2.5.1.4) and it's working ok for me now.



If you compare that to this sky rendering in Zdoom WinMBF versus the same sky rendered in PrBoom+, then you can see that there's something funky going on with where the sky is on the horizon. But this was taken a couple of years ago, and I've since updated PrBoom+ (probably did it when I moved to this new PC). So I thought perhaps the issue was fixed when testing these new skies out...guess not? And I don't see any options in PrBoom+ that might affect this either.

*edit*

Whoops, forgot that the old ZDoom shot in that comparison thread is actually from WinMBF. Still gets my point across though :P

*hey another edit*

Here's a more recent post I made concerning the sky rendering behavior in PrBoom+.

[Z0k]

holy mother of guacamole, that looks really epic dunno which one its my favorite but probably im going with the first sky that one with small touches of yellow in the red clouds.

in general i liked those new skies. and i hope mechadon dont mind if i use only the gray mountain from the brown+gray mountain sky, those mountains looks better than the ones we use in darkmoon.

[Mechadon]

Sure thing Z0k, feel free to use any of them!

[Chris Hansen]

I'm experiencing the same problem as Fonze. Here's how one of your mountain skies looks like in dobu's map:





@Fonze and Z0k: I'll let you guys decide which red sky to use. If I don't hear anything from you, I'll just go total dictator on you and pick one! ;)

[dobu gabu maru]

Fonze said:

Ultimately I'm happy with any of them, but here's a couple more shots, y'all pick.

I like Red Sky more because its bright highlights work well with the white stones on the ground, though it depends what you're going for. The Red Clouds feel more sinister but the Red Sky flows with the map better.

[Fonze]

Dobu, you're talking about the red dusk sky with the orange/yellow hits; the one from the first of the two screenies I posted before or the Hell sky that Chris posted a pic of before?

If the one in my screenie, then yeah, I agree; that background is just gnarly-looking.

But I'm cool with any. I guess right now Z0k and I are both leaning towards the Red Dusk sky, though.

[dobu gabu maru]

Yup, the Red Dusk one.

Also I approve of the TITLEPIC

[Chris Hansen]

Mechadon said:

Alright, here's a stab at an interpic as well as an updated titlepic.

Allright, just took a look at them, and while I dig the Titlepic, I'm not to keen on the Interpic. I don't mind the colors, but it's the very pixelated look to it that I'm not in love with. Can something be done about it or should we maybe try and find another image? If so, what colors would work well, or which should I avoid?

@Fonze and dobu: I can see why you like that sky too and I'll put it down for WormHell for now.... until Z0k throws a veto into the mix, which ofc he doesn't ;) It looks really cool. But don't they all!? :D

[Mechadon]

Just to make sure everyone is on the same page regarding the sky rendering issue, I'm using PrBoom+ 2.5.1.4.test from this page. I did a clean install of this version versus version 2.5.1.3 on Sourceforge to make sure I didn't have some unknown option enabled.

The problem appears to be fixed in 2.5.1.4.test (perhaps a result of it getting vertical mouselook), but remains in 2.5.1.3. I got a bit confused thinking 2.5.1.4 was a new stable release, but it is actually just a test build. At any rate though, the issue has been fixed and hopefully there will be a new official release of PrBoom+ soon.

Chris Hansen said:

Allright, just took a look at them, and while I dig the Titlepic, I'm not to keen on the Interpic. I don't mind the colors, but it's the very pixelated look to it that I'm not in love with. Can something be done about it or should we maybe try and find another image? If so, what colors would work well, or which should I avoid?

Yea the colors just don't exist in the palette to keep most of the details of the original image. A different color range might work better, but I'm not exactly sure what would work well (maybe a combination of the saturated and desaturated browns...). I used a custom desaturated brown range to try and stay faithful to the original image's colors, but actually that range of colors is pretty difficult to work with.

I could try experimenting around a bit more since I did that pretty hastily. Maybe if I play around with the brightness and contrast a bit, and manually paint in some highlights and shadows in lower contrast areas, I can make it look better.

If you have any other candidates for this image though, lemme know and we can see if they work better.

[Chris Hansen]

Cheers, Mech! I'll try and see if I can maybe find another candidate. Feel free to wait for me before you start working too hard on the excisting Interpic. No need to waste precious time when you could be working on that map of yours! ;)

I actually have the 2.5.14 test build of PrBoom installed because I previously had sound and fullscreen issues with 2.5.13. Oddly enough I either unknowingly fixed it or it did it by itself (which of course, we all know that software tend to do! :P). I agree with Fonze, that it would be a shame using skies for this project if they don't look right in version 2.5.13, as I have a feeling, that many people use this particular version. But on the other hand, it would be a damn shame if we had to scrap some of those fine looking skies just because of that. I mean, it works fine in every other port! What to do, what to do....

[Mechadon]

Alright, sounds good. I'll hold off on messing with the current interpic until you find some other candidates :)

Also I agree with Fonze about the sky issue as well. Its the reason why I was hoping it would get fixed by bring it up a couple of years ago; basically all of the personal project I'm working on all use tall skies and are compatible with PrBoom+. I'm hoping its truly fixed in 2.5.1.4; I was actually expecting the bug to still be there when I was testing out these new skies, but was surprised (and a little confused) when it seemed it was fixed.

[Fonze]

Well I don't envy you Chris as having to be the one to really make the call, but since I have the freedom to say whatever... heh.

Nah, but seriously, I'll back whatever call you make.

As for my two cents; well, I've been giving it some thought as I've been grinding this hamburger...

So 2.5.1.3 is the most current "real" version of PrBoom+ and the skies don't work quite right. 2.5.1.4 is the new test version and they do, but that could be because of mouselook(?). In zDoom (which many people prefer to play for non-demo SP) they work as well.

However, this project was not designed for zDoom, nor should it require an unfinished test build of PrBoom+.

Therefore, my thoughts are that the skies should be made compatible with the current "stable" build of PrBoom+, however (and this is a big however) it would be such a shame to cut off pieces of those beautiful skies, not only making that extra work go do waste (as far as this project is concerned) but asking for more work on top of it. There is no easy decision on this, but perhaps at the very end of the project we could release a "current stable version of PrBoom+" version (with the skies trimmed) of this project and a "PrBoom+ future build/zDoom/other, cooler-looking skies" version.

That's just my two cents; I'll back whatever decision is made.

[Mechadon]

Hmm, well personally I'd think it depends on how far out the next release of PrBoom+ is. Since this is [mostly] an aesthetic issue, and not a gameplay related one. The issue is really minor (even if it drives me crazy :P), and its compounded by it actually being fixed in a test build.

Releasing a 'tall sky' version of the project later on actually seems like it would be the worse option. Then there's two versions of the same wad floating out there for what amounts to a minor aesthetic fix/change. That could create some unnecessary confusion for such a minor thing.

What I'm trying to say is, I don't see the bug being big enough reason to have two versions of the wad; instead, a note in the readme should suffice if the bug-fixed version of PrBoom+ isn't released between now and then. Just something that says "the tall sky textures may look misaligned in versions of PrBoom+ 2.5.1.3 or lower" or something to that effect. For me, its better to have my ports updated than to release multiple versions of a wad.

That's just my take on the situation though. I am happy to make some 128px tall cropped versions of the skies if that's how you guys want to handle it :)

[Fonze]

Those are some great points Mech and I agree with you on that, but I think that critical thing for me is the timing of the next "official" release. If it comes out before this is completed and also fixes the skies like the test build does, then yes, we have no reason to not go for them at that point.

The only thing that gets me is a little pet peeve of mine when people release a project for some unofficial test build of a program that winds up being totally necessary and also totally unfindable at a later date, though that's typically a (G)zDoom thing. Forcing players to upgrade to the most current, real version is one thing, but a test build is another, to me. Of course, once again it comes down to the timing of that new "official" build for PrBoom+.

Take all of this with a grain of salt, of course, as this is something that's, like you said, a very minor visual thing (about on-par with a slime trail in my book, or maybe ever-so-slightly worse) and is something that most players likely won't notice. If anyone notices a sky here it's gonna be a "Wow; that thing looks cool!" rather than a "Huh, the mountains are cut off... meh" sort of thing.

But I think that you're also correct that a second version could possibly cause confusion, especially if both wind up playing in Boom.

Perhaps your last point would be the best way to go; just putting a note of it in the text file and calling it a day. But that, again, comes down to do we know if it really will be fixed in the next "official" version and what's the timeline on that thing.

Thank God I'm not Chris right now; I have no idea what to do. At this point I'm just throwing sh*t at the wall and seeing if anything sticks.

[Chris Hansen]

As Mechadon says, this is a "minor" visual bug and because of this, we will be releasing it "as is" with a note saying, that we recommend people use prboom ver. 2.5.14 if they want to experience the levels the way we imagined.

However, what if we could fix it all together and avoid all of this? Mech, you said that you could make some 128px cropped versions instead. Would that fix it? What is the downside to that, as I presume there is since you didn't do it in the first place?

And btw. it affects all skies. Here's Fort Halderman in prboom and zdoom respectively:




It looks much better in zdoom! But how would it look with 128px cropped versions of the skies? Equally worse? If that's the case, then no thanks! :)

[Mechadon]

Well, there are upsides and downsides to making the skies 128px tall. It would fix the bug in PrBoom+ 2.5.1.3, but at the cost of making the skies repeat vertically whenever mouselook is enabled (which doesn't exist in 2.5.1.3, but it does exist in 2.5.1.4.test and, I'm assuming, any future versions).

And this would affect all ports that support mouselook, meaning we'd trade the minor/temporal visual fix for PrBoom+ for a loss of tall skies in every other compatible port which uses mouselook. This would also effect those void-like maps which have sky floors; you have less sky to play around with and so they will tile more often.

For reference, I believe I know what is happening in PrBoom+ 2.5.1.3 with the tall skies. Instead of placing the bottom of the sky texture at the horizon, it appears to be placing it using the top of the texture farther up in the sky space (if that makes sense). So what you see is the upper part of the sky, and then it gets cut off at the horizon. At least that's what it looks like to me, there could be something else going on there.

Now having 128px tall skies AND having the tall skies for mouselook ports could work in one instance. And that's if we ditched MBF sky transfers and just kept the normal vanilla skies (so basically replacing the predetermined skies with new ones). This is what's done in Btsx; there are 128px skies for SKY1, SKY2, etc, and then tall versions of those skies are then defined in MAPINFO, etc. What this means is that whenever someone plays the maps in ZDoom or similar ports, the tall skies are used in place of the shorter ones. This method isn't without its downsides though. You lose MBF sky transfers (since there's no way to override MBF skies with MAPFINO, that I'm aware of anyway), and your left with the vertically repeating skies whenever the next version of PrBoom+ drops :P.

I wonder if we can get a word on when the next version of PrBoom+ is supposed to come out. Because I honestly think that we should wait for that instead of trying to design around [what I think is] a bug.

[Chris Hansen]

Thanks for the explanation, Mech! I think I understand. I read your post in the prboom thread and I agree that it would be really cool if they released ver 2.5.1.4 as a stable release before we release this. Since we're not in a hurry, I guess it would be a good idea to wait for it. Unless of course it takes a year or something before that happens. I'm not impatient but that would suck a bit :( We'll keep the big skies for sure, I think we can all agree that it's the best way to go.

And, I would just feel like saying, that I'm super grateful at the talent we have in our small team! You guys are fantastic and I think it'll show in the final product. I'm not always able to keep track on it all, so if any of you feel like I'm skipping or forgetting something, then please let me know.

Last thing: Joe-ilya has given me permission to edit his map Rockage so that it may better fit in as a map02. I'll upload it in a day or two for you to check out.

[Fonze]

That's really interesting to know, Mech. It actually gives me a bit of an idea. But I need to think it through before posting what may amount to more confusion, so I'll be back later with that.

[Chris Hansen]

Here's my tuned version of joe-ilya's map: download

I've made many small changes to it that are barely noticable. The biggest change is, that I've extended a small cavern into a much larger path. The red key is now a bit harder to obtain. Other than that, I've aligned a lot of textures, changed some, added some and have generally made some slight tweaks to the opposition, so that the level of difficulty is more suitable as a map02. I also added some Boom brightness actions to various floors and ceilings, but that's probably only something joe-ilya might notice :) Other than that, I tried not to mess too much with it, so that it's still easily recognizable as his map. I hope you approve (especially you, joe!).

[Angry Saint]

I never liked blocks floating in the air, even if it is an hellish setting.
They look so unnatural.