Blaze is a retro/minimalistic styled sci-fi first person flight/shooter action game. The game can be played almost single handedly with just mouse. It's about shooting a lot of alien things (in semi-randomized missions?). The alien things are trying capture all your base, and have already captured at least half of it. You have to defend the base and capture the alien controlled areas back. Or something like that...
Posterized
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Description
So I was just checking what can be done with Post Processing filters. Eventually I managed to make some user adjustable "Posterize" effect. The screenshot shows 32 colors.
My goal is/was to get the game palette to be used with the Post Processing. Maybe I try if I can do that later...
NOTE: Colors are screwed up in the preview...
Kinda cool...
Is this an engine effect?
If so, what activates it?
First I did a r_glsl_dumpshader and then edited the default.glsl, replaced the #ifdef USEPOSTPROCESSING part with:
dp_FragColor.r = int(dp_FragColor.r * UserVec1.x) * UserVec1.y;
dp_FragColor.g = int(dp_FragColor.g * UserVec1.x) * UserVec1.y;
dp_FragColor.b = int(dp_FragColor.b * UserVec1.x) * UserVec1.y;
Then r_glsl_postprocess 1. And I think this screenshot was r_glsl_postprocess_uservec1 "4 1"
The first parameter is how many levels for the Posterize and the second parameter is some form of intensity, and should be 1 or below, otherwise it will burn.
Game Brightness / r_hdr_scenebrightness can also alter the way it looks. Very dark game levels + few levels for the Posterize may need some boost here.
Minimum for the first parameter is 1, which makes the game have 8 colors. Less than 1, makes everything black.
HUD and Menu are not affected by any of these...
lol would be cool if you could make it look like a gameboy.
something like this =)
I.imgur.com
I really don't like the retro look. Limiting the number of colors you can see on the screen is like taking a step backwards, especially when you need to devote extra processing power to do it. Not trying to rain on the parade, but if these post-processing filters do get released with the final game, I'll try to find some way to disable them.
This posterize effect seems to work just fine without any framerate drops.
I tried to get the game palette to be used, but that didn't work so well. The way I did it, made the framerate drop to 2-5 seconds per frame. Need to find a better way to do it.
I have 60fps normally. I think if it drops below 50fps, then it's a too big drop. It's possible that some action heavy scenes might drop it below 50fps if using rt lights.
Extreme color altering or performance requiring effects will be disabled by default.
maybe it would be cool if you could choose to have it or not. its cool. but you're original artwork is good too. either way i think im happy.
Yea, this sort of extreme color filters should be optional. If I make all gfx with 256 color palette.. but then make the default setting to display max 32 colors.. what was the point in using 256 color palette?
Although Posterize is one of my favourite color altering filters in image editing...
And at one point I was considering the game palette could be a bit like this: 6 shades on RGB, and it would be total 6*6*6=216 colors. This is the max on a 256 palette, with equal amount of every color and has pure greys. There would be 40 empty colors (or duplicates for quake compatibility).
It creates a sort of a cartoon/painting like look. At some point I did want to make game that looks like oil painting... This stuff looks pretty much like that with texture filter on.
i like the filter, but i dont think everyone would.
Yea, probably. I think it could fit better for some top down vertical scrolling space ship shooter.
Also the low color settings create pretty steep steps in the shades, which can make some darker areas totally black easily.
Maybe I could tweak it so that it would display more darker shades, not much change in the mid shades, and less brighter shades.