r322 lights+doomfog+shader+sprites+distance oddness

[Enjay]

With sector light mode set to Doom and shaders enabled for fog, sprites can change appearance inappropriately as you get closer to them. It seems to be dynamic light related. All other lighting modes seem OK. Fog can be standard or radial. Switching the shader off fixes it.

Here are a few screenshots.

[spoiler]The first two are from a map that isn't mine, and which isn't out yet so I've deliberately picked an area that doesn't give much away. This effect happens in many areas of the map and affects all kinds of sprites, not just corpses.
Corpses fine (but look at the small chunk near the player).

Get closer and they are black


This time on map04 of Doom2
Corpses fine.

Closer and the one in the dynamic light is glaringly bright.
[/spoiler]

GeForce GTX285, latest drivers (182.50) Vista Home Premium 64.

[Edward850]

I am also seeing this problem. At first I could never figure out what exactly caused it to happen.

[Graf Zahl]

Does this still happen?

[Enjay]

Yes.

From a distance:


Close up


r512


BTW, I notice that the shaders menu has gone. I assume that this is deliberate but what does GZdoom do now? Does it interpret my videocard/drivers and set things itself or does it still rely on ini settings (ie, will it be reading any settings that I had applied before the manu disappeared)?

The reason I ask is that when checking this I went in to my ini to see which shaders were enabled and some seemed to be whilst others were not (ie my old settings) and I edited them manually to turn them all on.

[Graf Zahl]

On modern card (SM4 compatible) shaders will always be on now. The options were creating just a bit too much overhead and aren't really needed on such modern hardware.

Concerning the bug, can you post a map and savegame where this error is easily visible? I've never seen it and unless I do there's no chance I can fix it.

[Enjay]

Certainly. I've attached 2 saves. save10 is in the distance where the sprites appear dark. save11 is nearer where the sprites are bright. Interestingly, the preview screenshots in the saves do not show the problem but I see the problem in game. These are just with map04 of Doom2

saves.zip

(142.07 KiB) Downloaded 62 times

Also, just so that you can get an idea of what it looks like in game, try the following video. It shows map04 from the same game session as the saves were made and the other level that I originally reported this about. I can't send you that map because it's too big and it's not mine to send anyway but, aside from the fact the sprites in it go dark rather than bright, I'm pretty sure that it's the same bug.

http://www.zen64060.zen.co.uk/brightsprite.wmv

[Graf Zahl]

The savegames don't work. What are you autoloading? I suspect the cause for your problems is in there. Starting MAP04 normally I get no problems.
Also please post your ZDoom.ini.

As it is I have no idea what goes wrong here.

[Enjay]

I can get the problem with nothing autoloaded except lights.pk3. I also generated a completely new ini and set nothing but the critical things. These seem to be light mode Doom (I think others show it but Doom seems best), Fog mode radial and ambient light 0.

Without changing the ambient light setting, the effect is visible but as you approach 0, the effect gets stronger.

I also tend to have my dynamic light intensity set at 0.6 and my light size at 1.2. I think setting the light size to 1.2 instead of the default 1 is why two corpses in map04 get lit up instead of just one as they did in the first pics that I posted.

To get the save games and the pics, all I did was start a game, warp to map04, type "kill monsters" then go and look at the corpses.


I also investigated the other map where the problem exists and, again, the ambient light setting seems to be critical. At the default value, the effect wasn't particularly obvious, but it was there. As the slider got closer to 0, the sprites got brighter and brighter but when the slider hit 0, unlike in map04, the sprites went completely black.

Slider 1 notch above 0:


Slider at 0:


settings:

[Enjay]

The savegames don't work.

When you say "don't work" do you mean that they won't load or that they don't show the effect? If it's that they don't load, could it be because of the paths where my files (IWAD etc) are loaded from?

[Graf Zahl]

The savegame produces an error message.

[Graf Zahl]

I get some other glitches with gl_light_ambient set to 0 which isn't surprising considering what it does (some dark areas become totally black) - but the lighting in MAP04 still looks ok for me.

[Enjay]

OK, I've just sent you a PM with the other map in case that helps shed any light (ahem) on the problem.

The savegame produces an error message.

Strange. Is it looking for missing files or is it something else? the saves work for me.

[Enjay]

Hmmm, this is much improved (but not totally fixed) in r515. In r515 map04 looks about right and most of the sprites in the problem area of the other map seem about right too. Here is the only obvious problem that I noticed on a quick check

Ambient light set to 0, only one sprite on the right of the screen is too bright. the others seem to be lit pretty much as they should be given the levels of lighting around them:


However, turn the ambient lighting up 1 notch and a few more sprites now look too bright:


I didn't notice any black sprites like before though.

[Graf Zahl]

Interesting. I get the problem ony in a release build.

And no wonder I haven't seen it before. This map is rather special. It almost exclusively uses dynamic lighting. The static light levels are generally set to very small values that result in blackness.

[Graf Zahl]

With r644 it's finally fixed (twice the revision number as the report. How fitting! )