schru
Arcane
- Joined
- Feb 27, 2015
- Messages
- 1,143
Darth Roxor, here are the same screenshots without the C.R.T. filter, but the dithering stays, as it certainly should be there to prevent the 16-bit colour banding, in fact even more pronounced than in these screenshots, if a resolution like 640 x 480 were to be blown up to this size (it's rather possible that Voodoo cards may have had a subtler way of doing it). This is emulation of the first Voodoo chipset, this time without any brightness increase, and it matches promotional images and what are supposed to be accurate, updated Direct3D and OpenGL renderers, save that the gamma is a bit darker here.
As you can see, the skies are still pretty smooth and the image isn't darkened and sort of low-contrast, as the case may be with certain configurations.
Perhaps what alerted me in your screenshot was just the undithered look, but I would still encourage you to check what those day-time skies are like, because when I switch dgVoodoo to emulate Voodoo 2 without dithering, the castle level looks very much like in your screenshot; even the shade of the paved road seems to be the same:
Now, it's not clear if there's any problem here apart from the lack of dithering, but if I switch to the second level with the same rendering settings, the broken sky mentioned above appears:
It's the same way if nGlide, which is pre-installed with the GOG version, is used, since it emulates Voodoo 3, but it doesn't seem like you're using it, since it always forces 32-bit colour mode, regardless of the input from the game:
Well, this is the state Epic left the game in after releasing patches in 1999 that added or changed support for Voodoo 2's two texture mapping units in collaboration with 3dfx. It's doubtful that this look was supposed to be a new feature, though, as those later patches changed the appearance of some skies on later Voodoo cards entirely and added white smudges where there were none in promotional and front-cover images. The readme for the game recommends both Voodoo and Voodoo 2 for high-end systems, without making a distinction between them. I suppose it was a bit like the 3dfx patches for Shadow Warrior and Blood, which added hardware acceleration to begin with, but broke a bunch of things.
As you can see, the skies are still pretty smooth and the image isn't darkened and sort of low-contrast, as the case may be with certain configurations.
Perhaps what alerted me in your screenshot was just the undithered look, but I would still encourage you to check what those day-time skies are like, because when I switch dgVoodoo to emulate Voodoo 2 without dithering, the castle level looks very much like in your screenshot; even the shade of the paved road seems to be the same:
Now, it's not clear if there's any problem here apart from the lack of dithering, but if I switch to the second level with the same rendering settings, the broken sky mentioned above appears:
It's the same way if nGlide, which is pre-installed with the GOG version, is used, since it emulates Voodoo 3, but it doesn't seem like you're using it, since it always forces 32-bit colour mode, regardless of the input from the game:
Well, this is the state Epic left the game in after releasing patches in 1999 that added or changed support for Voodoo 2's two texture mapping units in collaboration with 3dfx. It's doubtful that this look was supposed to be a new feature, though, as those later patches changed the appearance of some skies on later Voodoo cards entirely and added white smudges where there were none in promotional and front-cover images. The readme for the game recommends both Voodoo and Voodoo 2 for high-end systems, without making a distinction between them. I suppose it was a bit like the 3dfx patches for Shadow Warrior and Blood, which added hardware acceleration to begin with, but broke a bunch of things.
