Scuba Steve

It's one of the greatest tragedies of our time that there was no female variant Lightning Guard.

A significant chunk of the Doomworld crew are in rows H and I.

What's your seat assignment?

We're just a few weeks away from this year's Quakecon and, apparently, a lot of you knuckleheads are attending. There's no showroom this year, but it sounds like it's going to be a sizeable number of Doomworld members at the event. So who's going?

"Do you play mini golf?"

If you ding dongs would stop trying to add your two cents and play peacemaker, it would be a lot easier to get @Graf Zahl to respond to my questions. I keep replying with the same points so my argument doesn't get pushed up... Graf chose to engaged with this thread and asked for proof people don't like it... The implication being that public opinion is the reason for the default setting. We know this now to be objectively untrue: 95% of people hate it and even John Romero things it should be off. All commercial games using the GZDoom engine hate it and turn it off by default. Carefully crafted artwork (particularly sprites) are ruined because a mathematical algorithm is arbitrarily blurring them and stripping them of detail. Remember, Graf chose to engage with this topic and then went radio silent when his question was answered. He's a big boy and can handle himself. Please don't reply to this, it's not directed at anyone else.

I'm still at a loss for words just how dumb all of this truly is. Not Nash's suggestion mind you, but the idea that we're actually contemplating having people write whole new routines and features to solve the most basic fucking problem imaginable... instead of changing a single variable from on to off (which everyone including the literal creator of the game himself) agrees should be done. If I sound frustrated, it's because I can't wrap my brain around how stupid the resistance is to the single most requested change in GZDoom's history... a change so easy, it would take less than a second to fix. Also, going radio silent so you don't have to defend anything.

I have to disagree about shelving it, but it does need to be more focused. Tabling discussion for the last 15 years is what has allowed this stupid feature to limp along as some zombie feature from the early days of hardware rendering... And it has allowed Graf to avoid engaging with the user base. This conversation can't end until the concerns of content creators are addressed.

Let's be fair; I am deeply invested in politics as well, but people can compartmentalize different things in their lives. This thread would be a lot more useful if there were fewer comments towards each other, and more direct comments about the disdain for texture filtering and waiting for a rebuttal from Graf. It would be nice if GZDoom handled sprite clipping like Strife VE so it rendered them closer to the real game, but I do recall a conversation with Nash about performance and problems with portals. GZDoom does have a "smart" setting which keeps sprites from clipping in the floor, but it does muck with animations and sprite vertical alignment, but overall looks a little better.

We haven't even started the actual conversation about texture filtering yet. A litany of objective truths have been presented which answer Graf's original question which was posed as a counter argument to turning it off. Turns out, he was wrong and everyone hates it. What's the next argument for retaining a feature everyone hates. Remember, Graf explicitly said the reason for not incorporating controller vibration is because there weren't enough people asking for it... so decisions are clearly based on end-user preferences. 96% of the over 300 people polled want it disabled. Imagine working as a software developer and retaining a feature despite a 96% disapproval rating... it's brain-meltingly asinine. Since Graf asked for evidence that everyone hates it, and now two separate polls have confirmed that, it deserves a response. GZDoom is not a one-man show anymore, there are many people behind the scenes to make the port even more feature-rich and it is a disservice to keep some shitty default setting despite everyone knowing it's wrong to keep it. Also, I would never respect anyone who was GOING to make an informed decision and do the right thing, but decided to do the wrong thing because someone spoke in a slightly aggressive manner.

The topic has been brought up on occasion, but there has never been real dialog about texture filtering and, even more important, there has never been an actual defense put forward on why gzdoom should default to something so obviously gross, unnatural, and disrespectful to the artists who create content for Doom. Personal preference is not a defense; once you make the choice to release something to the public, the public is allowed to criticize your work... and sometimes they're right, and you're wrong. If @Graf Zahl prefers texture filtering, he can turn it on himself. Everything I've said in this thread is objectively true; almost everyone—on Doomworld and the broader community—thinks it should be off by default, this is borne out by literally every poll anyone has conducted and the fact that EVERY commercial GZDoom game turns it off as the default setting... They're artists, like me, and know it looks like shit. It ruins the artistic vision of content creators by applying an ugly Photoshop blur filter to their work... And the broader gaming community just assumes it's supposed to look like garbage because the premier Doom port just "looks like this." Sorry, not sorry, but I didn't hide like a coward or claim "personal preference" when LGBT members of the community told me Urban Brawl felt pretty offensive, I realized they were right and made some changes. I didn't "cave," I just listened to people who had a better perspective than I did. Everyone is right and Graf is wrong: texture filtering is ugly and needs to be turned off by default. Either GZDoom can improve by listening to the artists and content creators who know best, or it can stubbornly continue to be the worst-looking port by default because someone with bad taste likes the way the blur tool looks.

I reread it and Blutz is agreeing; we're not the primary users, but we have the most knowledge, which is why it's important that Doom ports take their cues from us, the die-hard fans and content creators, because we understand the aesthetics of Doom better than causal users who simply "turn on" GZDoom and say "Oh, this is what it's supposed to look like." I have no intention of retiring from this debate and I want to have that conversation with @Graf Zahl. I've laid out a half dozen posts respectfully articulating why it's such an awful, hideous, obtrusive first impression for newcomers, and I want legitimate reasons why it should be enabled by default. For twenty years I've exclusively made content for ZDoom and, when the time came, reworked my projects to work properly in GZDoom, because it was important for my work to be playable in the most up-to-date version of the port. But I can't begin to tell you how infuriating it is to watch someone play Urban Brawl with trilinear filtering in a YouTube stream which is mucking up artwork I spent years meticulously drawing. And this is not because they want it to look like this, it's because it's the default and they don't know any better. The content creators that keep GZDoom alive loathe texture filtering with the fire of a thousand suns, there is no good argument that can be made to keep it turned on by default. Remember, every commercial GZDoom game has decided to turn this off by default. The only sensible action is to make "Texture Filtering OFF" the default standard appearance for an engine which is still almost exclusively used as a DOOM port for DOOM addons.

I want to hear this for myself. I've made countless posts about the artistic failings of texture filtering in a Doom engine and how blurring sprites, which were never meant to be blurred, ruins the aesthetic and washes out the detail in all the carefully drawn artwork by real creators... but it's frustrating that none of this is even engaged with, merely glossed over. I want to hear it, I want it said "Yes, Scuba, you're right. Everyone hates it and turns it off, every commercial project disables it by default, and it does make everything look worse." And then I want a response to this question... "WHY should it be enabled?" I think that's the real question being lost here... "Because that's how it's always been" is the most meaningless, copout answer. If this were reversed and someone was requesting GZDoom enable texture filtering as the default setting, what evidence would you give in FAVOR of blurry sprites instead of nearest-neighbor? That's what I want... a defense of the now-currently-default terrible visuals.

I can't wrap my head around the idea that anyone would want a user's first interaction with your software to look like absolute dogshit. Texture filtering is viscerally disgusting and absolutely ruins the carefully crafted aesthetic of every single project made for GZDoom. The recent polls makes this clear; everyone who knows you can turn it off, turns it off... everyone. Every commercial GZDoom game available on Steam has this disabled by default. That fact that there is some stubborn insistence on not simply flipping a single setting from on to off in the default configuration absolutely boggles my fucking mind. Imagine buying a Ferrari and immediately spray painting some shitty flames on it because you think it looks cool... I mean, that's your right, but literally everyone thinks it's stupid. Look, I'm an artist by trade, not a programmer... so I always defer to programmers when they give me advice on coding. Why in the hell would you not listen to ALL the artists in this community when they can, and repeatedly do, give objective reasons why the filtering ruins our artwork? It's infuriating.

So has this stupid feature been turned of by default yet or what?

I just start the game on the hardest setting, warp to map 03, and noclip to the lower right corner and then enable clipping and run the 'gantlet' and jump into the helicopter.

I love the meta narrative that, in life, there are some people who are able to deal with traumatic events with relative ease and just keep moving forward.

What is going on with map06? It brings GZDoom to an absolute standstill.

Since it was brought to everyone's attention by the creator of the game, maybe it wouldn't hurt for someone to reach out in a private message and just let them know you made sure to credit them? Link the game in the credits?

That's why it's unspoken. None of the rules in this community are written on stone tablets and the archive would be mostly empty if we removed everything with unattributed, copyrighted material. When it comes to art by id software, most people don't credit "quake" same kinda goes for Raven assets and to a lesser degree, a lot of build engine stuff. The unspoken rule is that you always attribute anything you've used from someone within the community. In this case, were talking about a recently released indie game where the sprites have been directly used as textures... ...this just kiiinda feels like it runs afoul of using the work of an independent creator and not giving them their due, something that's generally frowned upon.

It's not only 'fine' it's the unspoken rule.

I know the Doom community has a rather laissez-faire attitude about reusing assets... but I checked the text document and there isn't even a mention that the sprites were taken from a recent indie game. That's a bad look.

@lunchlunch absolutely killing it again.

As long as the default preset has filtering/ambient occlusion/fancy rendering junk off.

As an artist, I'd prefer players interact with my work based on the criteria I have set. They can then critique my art based on the way it was intended to be experienced instead of lodging meaningless criticism based on an incompatible user setting. I've seen people play levels with the tonemaps ramped up to ridiculous levels and then complain that they "can't see anything" or dynamics lights disabled and argue the lighting in the map is too flat. Or god forbid the players who load up a custom gameplay mod and try to critique the experience. If you're choosing to engage with my work, I want that interaction to be on my terms.