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As of TDM 2.08 I believe we set most of the r_postprocess cvars to 0 but there are already tonemapping features in there if you wanna tinker. I think that the decision to stick with 0 was to prevent the GUI menus from being over-bloomed. As for specular? We need to ensure that specular and diffuse response always adds to 1: https://cientistavuador.github.io/articles/1_en-us.html

Currently Darkmod does not utilize the full potential of its high dynamic range rendering. When light gets bright colors get clipped. As I mentioned before, this makes highlights hard to manage and makes bloom option less useful (in my opinion). At least that's what I see on my old ass monitor that doesn't support HDR. I'll preface this with a disclaimer, that I have no idea what I'm doing. I also do not claim, that this code is ideal, or even good. I simply asked MS Copilot to modify the tonemap.frag.glsl file for me. It added a new color curve, that can be modified: Alternative set of ABCDEF values, should give slightly more contrast: All the footage and screenshots below were done with bloom set to the max.

This was an interesting mission! It surprised me many times.

well everything except mac builds build now... for mac the __cpuid is quite different as it seems to reserve the ebx register so we have to hack around that argh... slowly got rid of whitespace changes in the code also. ill probably have to add a few new forks as daniel prefers to have the GLSL hybrid renderer in a seperate branch. i guess i should have known it would not be that easy since i doubt darkmod was ever ported to mac

IIUC, the problem isn't that much with bloom itself, it's more about the specular response. I remember there are lines that makes specularity stronger than usual, reducing effective texture intensity range to something like 0-192 instead of 0-255. (If you turn postprocessing off and use specular map with values above RGB 192, the specular hotspot will get overblown, while it shouldn't.) Also I believe there's either some fresnel term there as well, or a code that increases specular intensity at grazing angles. IMO all of that should be removed first, before we fiddle with bloom. Also, when it comes to bloom, maybe we could have better controls over it? Right now, we can control bloom only by going over RGB 1 in emissive textures (10 seems like a good starter value). But that makes the whole surface glow like a neon lamp: While in engines like UE3/UDK you can set up bloom to be stronger without loosing surface details that much, something more like this (top right example): There are some cvars related to bloom, so maybe we just have to play with them more: seta r_bloom_blursteps "2" seta r_bloom_downsample_limit "128" seta r_bloom_weight "0.3" seta r_bloom_detailblend "0.5" seta r_bloom_threshold_falloff "8" seta r_bloom_threshold "0.7" seta r_bloom "1" Edit: the UDK docs mention something like bloom kernel size, that's what we're probably missing in our cvars. https://docs.unrealengine.com/udk/Three/Bloom.html

I feel attacked!

If you make zfighting less obvious, how are you supposed to find it and correct the underlying cause?

Had my own fun with the new turrets already. They should be featured in the new FM I'm working on. Figured I'd post this here as well for the fun of it.