DRD Team

A couple of questions if I may...

I had been noticing in recent versions that, in some maps, I could see tiny little speckles of light where there shouldn't be any (eg on walls and floors). These were most obvious in dark areas of maps particularly if the map had a bright (eg white/pale grey) sky. Changing the sky graphic to a dark one would make the problem much less obvious.

The problem was hard to screenshot because the little speckles shimmered and moved as your view changed but in a static screenshot they were much less obvious. Some of the early versions of timmie's ZdoomGL also had this problem.

For a while I had been dismissing it as me running in a significantly higher resolution than I was on my old machine but I had been meaning to try and create a map that showed the problem easily and submit a bug report. However, in recent versions (I'm not sure exactly when) the problem seems to have got much better if not gone completely.

So, I was just wondering, was this a known issue that was specifically addressed (and if so, what was it - if it's an easy explanation) or did it just happen to get fixed by "luck"?


And, whilst I'm asking questions, I noticed the r378 changelog:

"- Integrated texture code for new renderer into trunk."

Does this have any impact that will be noticeable to an end user or is it still just part of the reorganisation and preparation for the new rendering code?

Enjay wrote:A couple of questions if I may...

I had been noticing in recent versions that, in some maps, I could see tiny little speckles of light where there shouldn't be any (eg on walls and floors). These were most obvious in dark areas of maps particularly if the map had a bright (eg white/pale grey) sky. Changing the sky graphic to a dark one would make the problem much less obvious.

The problem was hard to screenshot because the little speckles shimmered and moved as your view changed but in a static screenshot they were much less obvious. Some of the early versions of timmie's ZdoomGL also had this problem.

Try setting the render quality to 'quality'. These are precision problems. But I'm surprised to see them on NVidia. This was mostly an ATI problem.

And, whilst I'm asking questions, I noticed the r378 changelog:

"- Integrated texture code for new renderer into trunk."

Does this have any impact that will be noticeable to an end user or is it still just part of the reorganisation and preparation for the new rendering code?

That code isn't active yet. I had developed it in a sub-branch but I won't be able to test it there.

Graf Zahl wrote:Try setting the render quality to 'quality'. These are precision problems. But I'm surprised to see them on NVidia. This was mostly an ATI problem.

Aha! that was it. I must have switched to quality at some point making the speckles disappear. Setting things back to speed brings them back again.

If you want to try and see if you get them too, I have found that Stronghold map STR07 shows them pretty reliably. With things set to "speed" go to X -179 and Y 116 (at the bottom of the steps at the opposite end of the power core corridor). Look up the steps and see if you get the effect. Here is a screenshot which has been cropped to be small enough for the forum. As I said before, it looks worse in game but at least this shows some of the speckles.



BTW, this has been with at least 2 different NVidia driver versions.

This problem has existed for a long time, even before nVidia became popular. It would be somewhat ignorant to say it's an ATI only problem.

I remember I had a 3dfx Voodoo 3 card, I was proud of that damn thing because it was the first 3D card I ever got that was supported by many games at the time. I had some ATI rage cards before, and they really damaged my impression of ATI because they didn't work worth shit. Wow things change.

Anyway, the Voodoo card had this problem in Unreal Tournament - in many parts of certain maps, you could see the "speckles."

I never said it was an ATI only problem. In fact, it was hideous on my ancient GF3 several years ago. But more modern NVidia cards are far less affected than ATIs and on my current GF8600 I normally don't see it at all.