Gradient Buster

Does anyone have a shader that will kill this gradient effect?

What is it?
- If it's a texutre, I'm afraid there is no way to fix it.
- If it's the lightmap, you'll need 24bit lightmaps.
- And if it's a model/sprite, use a 24/32bit TGA image.

It's a texture on a MAP entity.

Ah well.

have you tried converting the backed textures to the level pallete and see how they look? Just seems like a pallete problem.

I hadn't thought of that Wade. I'll give it a try.

Are you talking about the spherical gradient in the back? If it's just a texture then there's no need for shaders, merely run a blur filter on the texture. If it's due to lightmapping then you will need to add more light source nearby to blur the edges.

I saw the same effect when I produced and used baked textures I made in Gamespace. When I got it over to 3DGS, I used a video_depth of 32 and no point lights in WED, since they aren't needed for baked surfaces.

Like I mentioned over in that other thread, it might be banding because of the conversion from 24 bit to 16 bit with level textures. If the engine were to support 24-bit level surfaces then I would think that would go away. Perhaps I'm mistaken. Even so, with normal textures and lightmaps, I still see banding using 32-bit color depth and 24-bit lightmaps(regardless of intensity of light or quantity). That's on top of quantization errors.

Marco, this is the texture. I made it as a surface baking test. It is applied to a wall on a map entity. :



As you can see, there aren't any gradient lines on it until it is put in a WAD and applied to geometry. I'll try blurring it and seeing if that helps, though I'll also loose some detail in the texture.

I like Orange Brat's solution. Is it possible?

The gradient effect is caused because 3DGS takes perfectly good 24 bit textures, and munts them down into horrible 16bit ones when it adds them to the compiled map. Bluring the source image will only make it worse.

WED used to show the banding untill they upgraded it to use 24 bit textures loaded from a folder, unfortunatly, the compile process takes those and converts them into efectivly a 16bit wad file encapsulated in the map.

Its the single most annoying aspect of the engine for me, and the sooner we get true 24 bit textures, the better. (also kind of makes a mockery of saying its a 32 bit renderer... "Technically" its a 32 bit renderer.... visually its not in my opinion.

So, to answer your question, there sadly isnt a lot you can do, except start hounding conitec to make 24bit textures a reality.

Regards

Tone

I'll post in Engine future and see if something can't be done about it.

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I'll post in Engine future and see if something can't be done about it.

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I've made it before, and I think the crickets are still chirping. Seriously, though here's an old post where jcl mentioned that things would be overhauled to allow 24-bit and compressed textures:

Thread

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The Gamestudio wad format will change quite soon in order to support 24 bit level surfaces and compressed textures. If that is done, we'll publish the wad format. At the moment it's similar to the Quake and Halflife wad format with the exception that the Gamestudio wad contains 16 bit textures rather than 8 bit.

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