Minimum system requirements? 3DGE not running

[Corbachu]

Sloped collision with slopes? That's in there already xD

Anyways, try this new build. Lots of optimizations made, plus Windows XP should now be totally supported. Please
take note that you need SP3 installed or 3DGE will not run on XP.

I took the time and beefed up the Wiki article on 3DGE's system requirements, so
make sure to take a look there if you encounter any problems. ^_^

It was pretty simple, but turned into a headache that lasted with me alll night. Turned out to be a trivial fix (and while I was at it,
I went ahead and updated a few external libraries), but now that it is in this mode, thank goodness I don't ever have to worry about
that fix again. What a nightmare. x_x


Good news is that we are this much closer to releasing another official 2.1.0 build. We are still planning on some major changes
so the next SourceForge-oriented build will probably be 2.1.0-RC1. There's still a few annoying bugs that I still want to get around
to patching up before we make the jump to 2.1.0 Final.

[Marscaleb]

Sloped collision with slopes? That's in there already xD

What? No, I said "Fix Heretic." That's exactly what I said, go back and look at the post.

So that latest version you just posted will actually run on that computer, complete with that new sparkly intro. Yay!

Although while I was playing around with it, I noticed a bunch of settings won't stay changed between sessions. Every time I ran the game, bloom was turned back on, as well as basically every other setting I tried on that menu page. It did retain my actual resolution though, as well as the various settings I changed on the "screen" page, but not the ones on "video."
(Side note, I'm a bit displeased with bloom; it needs some tweaking. I mean it would be cool if lights and outside environments used bloom, but since it just picks up anything that's bright it gets thinks like blood on corpses.)

Also while toying around with that latest build, I found that that machine didn't properly use the "melt" if I use 32-bit color depth AND disable all HQ2x scaling. Under these conditions, the screen melt turns partially transparent. Actually it looks really cool that way, especially since it didn't use a straight transparency but rather some effect like multiply or add, so darker colors were more transparent and brighter colors were more apparent. Maybe you could make a new effect where as the screen melts it turns transparent. (As it currently does it, I can barely see anything dark in the melt.)

And since you asked (and since it might be important to this melting thing) these are the specs for that desktop. It was quite the gaming machine back in the day.

[Corbachu]

Sorry I misquoted your post with the Slopes -- I must have been looking at different threads on here in different tabs. LOL #scrambled brain #ADHD

Anyways, well I'm very glad XP support works and is retained!

Bloom actually has quite a few CVARS, but we were just trying to get the base Bloom shader working at the time -- I'll tie the others into a CVAR
system and add them as a new submenu in Advanced Video Options so Bloom can be totally adjustable. Default values are probably not that
great, and I apologize for that!

New Bloom CVARS will be:

r_bloom_amount
r_bloom_exp_scale (exposure scale)
r_bloom_exp_min (minimum exposure)
r_bloom_exp_base
r_bloom_exp_speed

So, I'll just add those today to give it a little more customization. As for adding them into the Advanced Video Options -- it might take me a little bit
on that part, so at the very least I can just add the CVARS to play around with ^_^

[Marscaleb]

Hmm, so does bloom only work as a whole-screen post processing effect?
Dang, I was thinking it could be sweet if we could set exactly what texels we want bloom to work off of, like reference a second texture/sprite that indicates which texels should bloom. Then we could set up something like an emmisive channel, so we could create a bloom-glow from lights, or glowing objects. Have lights on the side of my gun, or glowing eyes from an enemy, or make mystic artifacts glow... Man that would be so boss.

[Rachael]

Without high-dynamic range support it's not possible to selectively bloom only certain things.

Of course, the main difference between 3DGE and GZDoom is Coraline tends to be more open and accepting to crazy features, so HDR may actually be possible simply by unclamping the lights and somehow (possibly through scripting) allowing >255 light levels.

[Marscaleb]

Well, I don't know how it all works behind the curtain, but I was thinking along the lines of a "bloom mask," where you have separate textures to indicate what is viable for bloom, and when the scene is rendered, it would effectively create a mask of the output image, a separate layer of rendered data which is not actually displayed on the screen, and then bloom from that.

Of course, while I'm sure its technically possible, (any code is technically possible if you can describe it in absolute terms,) if that's not how the existing functionality works, I imagine it would be a very expensive operation, all just for one post-processing effect.
It would look rad as hell if someone actually built their mod to utilize the feature, but still, pretty expensive on the system, I'd imagine.