VOGONS


First post, by kjliew

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You must be kidding ... that anyone is still working to improve OpenGLide in year 2021 ... 🤣

Yes, outside of Windows, OpenGLide remains the only Glide wrapper for Linux and macOS. Anyway, the improvements are universal across Windows, Linux and macOS. So the improvement we have today addresses the issue that "some 3Dfx games are too dark" on modern platforms. It is an issue on modern platforms, such as XWayland & XQuartz, that do not expose simple APIs for gamma correction. The compatibility king Windows, offers SetDeviceGammaRamp() on Windows while the old X11 clutch has XF86-VideoMode APIs for gamma correction. While Windows/X11 gamma correction APIs can get the job done, they aren't doing color correction right at the framebuffer. So capturing screenshots or streaming video footages won't capture the effects of color correction. The modern, state-of-the-art trick is to do something called shader-based gamma correction in additional postprocessing stage after rendering. No games from the late 90's or early 2000 would do something like this.

So OpenGL introduced sRGB visuals which provide a fixed gamma correction at 2.2 for any legacy OpenGL application. When enabled, it would have OpenGL rendered at sRGB color space into the framebuffer and brighten up games which typically require gamma correction. The visuals look great for those playing on high quality IPS/OLED panels or on laptops with good calibrated display without jacking up the brightness. Great for streaming game videos in real-time or posting game screenshots on VOGONS 😁 as the color correction reflected precisely into any screen recorders without sophisticated setup or footage editing.

Here's an example with Nightmare Creatures on MacBook Air M1 retina display
Left - sRGB and 4x MSAA visuals
Right - Default

NightmareCreatures.png
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The default from the perspective of those actually looked at the screen wasn't exactly that bad because one can always turn up the brightness, but not for viewers watching captured videos or screenshot unless one retouched the screenshot or edited the video footage.

The work to get to sRGB visuals also paths the way for MSAA, so we also get MSAA support for any 3Dfx Glide games using OpenGLide. I believe dgVoodoo2 and nGlide already have their ways of doing anti-aliasing, so there isn't anything special here that Windows already enjoyed for long time. Personally, I am not a big pusher for anti-aliasing when the games support 1024x768 native rendering. The difference can hardly be noticeable, but of course I don't have expensive 8K HiDPI screen to play good old games.

Reply 1 of 1, by fcbarros

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Hey, I am Fabio Barros the original author of OpenGLide. Where did you commit your code?
I am migrating the code from SourceForge to Git. I would like anyone that has made any changes let me know where.
thanks!