New(Stuff) Review Center at Doomworld

The /newstuff Chronicles is a "weekly" feature article that reviews all the new wads uploaded to the idgames archive. Until recently, articles were handled by assigned reviewers at their leisure, but now any user can contribute.

To begin reviewing wads for Doomworld's /Newstuff Chronicles, register at the Doomworld Forums and visit the /newstuff Review Center to claim a wad for review. You may claim any wad listed as "Claim It" and submit a review, screenshots, game type, IWAD, and port. If a review is not submitted soon after claiming, another member may claim it. Do not review your own wads!

Becoming a contributing member of Doomworld and help review wads for the new and improved The /newstuff Chronicles.

/Newstuff 2: Reviews on Earth.

I like this setup.

IT should be noted that reviews are Revised before they are approved for publishing. So it's best to come up with some good reviews, not "OMG THIS MAP SUX". Also, Screenshots are great to add too. But make sure they're a good size. 1280x800 or 320x200 are not good sizes to use. 640x400 is what I use, and it looks pretty good, shows the details pretty well. For Vanilla maps, Chocolate doom, EE or prboom-(plus) seems to take the best screenshots. However, in EE, you need to change the format of the screenshots from PCX to BMP. This will be changed in the future to allow PNG.

on that note: MSPaint doesn't seem to support PCX anymore, and saving files as a GIF makes the screenshots take the windows 256 color palette, with positioned dithering. So if you wanna resize/change color information easily, and save files in a small format, use Photoshop, the GIMP, or Irfanview.

And finally, DONT USE JPEG, please. :(

Csonicgo said:

on that note: MSPaint doesn't seem to support PCX anymore, and saving files as a GIF makes the screenshots take the windows 256 color palette, with positioned dithering. So if you wanna resize/change color information easily, and save files in a small format, use Photoshop, the GIMP, or Irfanview.

On the other hand, MSPaint does support saving to PNG, and that should be more than adequate.

oh, it can do PNG?

*checks*

Heh. I completely forgot about that.

I always use PNG format for posting files on t3h 1nt3rw3bz, as GIF and JPEG formats have the tendency to screw up the color quality really badly, and BMPs are too big filewise.

Funny you would say that since PNGs are represented differently (wrong) in IE.

kristus said:

Funny you would say that since PNGs are represented differently (wrong) in IE.

Only if they have alpha transparency.

No. They show up darker in IE.

kristus said:
No. They show up darker in IE.

Solution: don't use IE.

Not coincidentally, this is also the solution to many other problems with the Internet...

I didn't say I use IE, But I don't use PNG, since a lot of people use IE. And JPG isn't even remotely as bad as people like to pretend they can see it is.

Although I think gifs are win for Doom screenshots, since (generally) they are only 256 colors anyway.

kristus said:
They show up darker in IE.

I was checking and the difference is negligible. I guess it might matter to people with particularly dark monitors a bit, but they'll have issues checking screen shots anyway.

Well, I was never really against using PNGs for screenshots. I was just responding to the absurdity of the whole JPG ... hate.

it's because png has a built-in gamma value that real browsers apply with and since IE thinks it's its own standard just refuses to do it. The actual PNG is dark.

IE is not the only software to ignore the gamma value in PNGs. Far too many viewers I've used do that. Even worse is that many graphics editing tools just ignore it and throw it away.

On a more serious note, I agree with kristus; there's nothing wrong with using jpegs. Now yes, I do know that some jpegs can look awful if the person saving them has no clue what they are doing and either over compresses it or uses it for the wrong image, however, the same can be said for 8-bit pngs or gifs. As a matter of fact, there's actually a perfect example of improper 8bit png usage in newstuff #313: GreyGhost's images of Stephen Whittaker's maps. You should never take a screen shot from a OpenGL port using filtering and compress it to 256 colors. The image needs way more colors than that.

Basically, IMO, if you take your screen shot in software mode, use a 8-bit png. If you take it in OpenGL mode with filtering, use a jpeg with a light amount of compression applied. If you take it with a OpenGL port without filtering, I've noticed that normal pngs typically produce better results at a smaller file size versus jpeg.

Thread split, no goddamn retarded browser arguments here.

Nuxius said:
Basically, IMO, if you take your screen shot in software mode, use a 8-bit png. If you take it in OpenGL mode with filtering, use a jpeg with a light amount of compression applied. If you take it with a OpenGL port without filtering, I've noticed that normal pngs typically produce better results at a smaller file size versus jpeg.

What he said. With JPEG you're going to have to crank the quality level to avoid artifacting on the sharp edges in software or GL_NEAREST* screenshots to a point where the file size isn't going to be much smaller than a PNG file...

I have currently no wad that i would wish to review, but i wanted to see the rec´view center. But when i log in to the doomworld forums, and then use the http://www.doomworld.com/newstuff/ -link, there appears this message:

You are not logged in to the Doomworld forums. You need to be logged in for this to work.

What do i wrong?

Greetings
Funduke

Nuxius said:

As a matter of fact, there's actually a perfect example of improper 8bit png usage in newstuff #313: GreyGhost's images of Stephen Whittaker's maps. You should never take a screen shot from a OpenGL port using filtering and compress it to 256 colors. The image needs way more colors than that.

The only problem I see with that image is that it uses dithering. If you reduced the pallette to 8-bit using no dithering, I doubt anyone would know the difference.

I always use JPG because PNG and BMP files are huge and GIF files suck 99.9 percent of the time...

With GZDoom, I don't think the JPG format has any problems. It's also easy to save as a JPG using MSPaint under WinVista.

I always play my maps windowed at 1024x768 unless I intend on not taking screenshots, then I go full screen at 1680x1050.

funduke said:

I have currently no wad that i would wish to review, but i wanted to see the rec´view center. But when i log in to the doomworld forums, and then use the http://www.doomworld.com/newstuff/ -link, there appears this message: ...

This helped for me:

Go to "user profile" -> "edit options"

than check

"Automatically login when you return to the site? (uses cookies)" = yes

the problem with GIF in general is that the standard was never followed. There IS a way to have true-color GIFs. (also, most GIF's look "bad" because the pallete is. MSPAINT can't really detect which colors are being used in the image and make a 256 color approx pallete with those.)

and for PNG being bad, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PNGOUT Check this out. it compresses PNG files the best that it can. and if that doesn't suit you, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pngcrush will. Or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OptiPNG . There's a bunch of them out there. :D

Joe Capricorn said:

... because PNG ... are huge

Then you are using shit software. Period.

didy said:

This helped for me:

Go to "user profile" -> "edit options"

than check

"Automatically login when you return to the site? (uses cookies)" = yes

That works.
Thank you!

Greetings
Funduke