DRD Team

I'm messing around with a horror project which I've always wanted to pull off ever since regular ZDoom, and now that GZDoom is here, I can finally make use of ZDoom's editing features PLUS dynamic lighting and put together an atmospheric horror experience.

Problem is, even at 0 brightness, the sectors are still kind of bright and visible.

Is there anything I can do to achieve pitch black darkness?

Since 0 isn't totally dark in software mode either I capped the minimum light level so that WADs that use 0 light according to software mode are still playable. Right now there is no means to create complete darkness except for using a black texture.

Hmm. I'll guess I'll just tell the users to turn their monitor brightness down for maximum experience, or something.

This annoys me somewhat. I have some maps that use dark corners to hide monsters, but this trick no longer works since my 32 and 64 brightness seem to be as bright as ~100, and now you can see the monsters from far away instead of when you are very close

Also have an area where you enter a tunnel, the lights go out and you are covered in darkness, while a monster is spawned behind you. This looks awesome in software mode because you see the demon as a black silhouet against the bright room outside the tunnel, but now it just looks dull

The only difference between brightness 100 and lower is the density of the black 'fog'. If you have disabled this you won't be able to see any difference at all. Aside from that the software renderer's fade isn't replicable with a hardware renderer and you must not forget that in True Color the color resolution in dark areas is significantly higher than in software mode. Sorry.

Maybe a sectyor special could acheive total blackness. Unfortunately, it would only work if you wanted to see nothing at all. Plus, Zdoom wads using 0 as pitch black that fade in wouldn't work. Maybe the special could only work on a totally dark sector?

Everything else looks better in OpenGL so I guess I can live with it.

Although it is a very annoying problem when doing cutscenes... Nonetheles, there's always camera switching.

A horror wad? I can't wait, I love those

Yeah, unfortunately, nobody seems real interested at the Zdoom forums.

I'm trying to create some horror atmosphere in some of my maps too, which usually includes plenty of dark areas. In these areas it's easy in software mode to make a patch of extra dark area, but the general atmosphere is just more scary in OpenGL, doom brightness and depth fog.

I don't like completely black areas so I'll not go there.