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hardcore_gamer

Why wasn't Quake ported to the PlayStation?

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DASI-I said:

Although, come to think of it, I just realized why sprites weren't used, It would use too much memory, unless you reduce the amount of frames but then that would result in poor choppy animation.

The main reason:



The alternative:

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Doom doesn't have any top/down frames for each monster because none were needed, since the id-tech 1 engine can't change the pitch of the camera to begin with.

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Just watched some video of Mario 64 and it looks like the camera stays stable enough that extra angles aren't necessary. I couldn't detect any.

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Yea, I don't know. You cant control the camera in Mario kart. But I remeber you can look up and down in MDK and there are sprite frames for that. So I guess MDK is a better example of this. The only thing about MDK is that only the player is a 2d sprite whereas the enemies are not. Again, I think 2mb on the PSX can't allow for alot of sprites which is probably why....Oh yea, we were talking about quake on PSX. LOL How did that happen?

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There likely isn't above/below sprites in MK64, as they'd almost never be seen. The idea of them seems utterly repellent anyway, they'd look hideous.

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I just found out that only the PC version of MDK has top/down sprites, not the PSX version. This backs up my memory limit theory.

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Sprites are not nearly as flexible as 3D models. The idea of having an insane number of frames for every possible angle seems very awkward to me. Even if we forget about memory constraints.

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Da Werecat said:

How many unique sprite sets were available in Mario Kart 64 for different camera pitches?



Not many.

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Da Werecat said:

Sprites are not nearly as flexible as 3D models. The idea of having an insane number of frames for every possible angle seems very awkward to me. Even if we forget about memory constraints.

Yeah, there is just no way that many sprites would have been practical at the time. 3D models caught on because they're so much more memory efficient and easier to work with. Even today, most games with 2D artwork use about the same number of frames, the art is just more detailed. The fact that early models were a bit ugly compared to the sprites in the games that came before them is a small price to pay for all of the advantages they bring.

And really, Quake's models are no worse than Doom's sprites. They're a different style, but they're still nice and detailed. I'm not a big fan of the weapons, due to their lack of animation, but that's hardly a limitation of using models.

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Da Werecat said:

Sprites are not nearly as flexible as 3D models. The idea of having an insane number of frames for every possible angle seems very awkward to me. Even if we forget about memory constraints.


Tell that to the many poor souls that tried to start yet another "Doom hi-res sprite project" -some of them quite adamant about being able to pull it out, and the "best" result that even came out of such a project was this:



Compare that with any of the Doom Ascension models:



Quite honestly, the "hi-res sprites" don't look any better than a good quality 3D model, and that's after the author worked his ass off to manually retouch every rotation of a single monster. And in the end you're still stuck with 8 rotations, while a model has infinite plus infinite posturing options. It just isn't worth it to work with sprites at this level, let alone adding more rotations to them.

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3D Pinky looks stupid. If anyone ever re-releases a 3D mod to doom, I hope they make him look more like his original design.

...I take it we're done talking about Quake on Playstation? :P

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Maes said:

Quite honestly, the "hi-res sprites" don't look any better than a good quality 3D model, and that's after the author worked his ass off to manually retouch every rotation of a single monster. And in the end you're still stuck with 8 rotations, while a model has infinite plus infinite posturing options. It just isn't worth it to work with sprites at this level, let alone adding more rotations to them.

Perkristian's smooth weapon animations are beautiful. Why would the same kind of thing be pointless with monster sprites?

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DoomUK said:

Perkristian's smooth weapon animations are beautiful. Why would the same kind of thing be pointless with monster sprites?


First of all, that pack only increases the number of frames, not resolution, if I understand correctly. Second, with weapons you don't have to worry about rotations.

Most "hi-res sprite projects" are (were?) about, well, hi-res, not smoother animation, but I'll get to that.

If you boost sprite resolutions to, say, 4x, actual disk and memory size skyrockets 16x, and that's still with 8 rotations, so you get a huge memory hit compared to full 3D models, and still with the same elementary animations.

Throwing in more frames? And rotations? No fucking way. Imagine pre-rendering enough frames for each monster to have at least 4x as many frames of animation and 16 rotations, let alone HOW you would produce them, exactly. 3D models? Painstaking hand-drawing? Photoshop rescale filters? That would be a huge memory killer, and it would look like ass compared to a fully 3D port with models. Capisc'?

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DoomUK said:

Perkristian's smooth weapon animations are beautiful. Why would the same kind of thing be pointless with monster sprites?

Because it would look just jarring.

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Maes said:

Tell that to the many poor souls that tried to start yet another "Doom hi-res sprite project" -some of them quite adamant about being able to pull it out, and the "best" result that even came out of such a project was this:



Compare that with any of the Doom Ascension models:


Quite honestly, the "hi-res sprites" don't look any better than a good quality 3D model, and that's after the author worked his ass off to manually retouch every rotation of a single monster. And in the end you're still stuck with 8 rotations, while a model has infinite plus infinite posturing options. It just isn't worth it to work with sprites at this level, let alone adding more rotations to them.


Wow, I wasn't aware that somebody was working on a new 3D project for Doom. After visiting the website however it turns out that there are no downloads yet and the site doesn't even appear finished. Does that mean this project was started only recently or is it just dead?

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hardcore_gamer said:

Does that mean this project [Doom Ascension] was started only recently or is it just dead?


It's not really recent, as it's around since 2011 at least. In the beginning, the author (NiuHaka) had produced quite a lot of complete models (all of the 5 you see on the webpage), but yeah, no official downloads.

See also:

http://www.doomworld.com/vb/wads-mods/51845-doom-ascension-my-3d-monsters-items-objects-image-heavy/

http://www.doomworld.com/vb/wads-mods/54379-doom-ascension-mod-recruitment-announcements-image-heavy/

In any case, the problem seems to be the same as with the -failed- 2D hi-res sprites projects: at a pace of 1 frame per day, you'll be done in 10 years. If you use models and rotations are not a problem, maybe in 1 year, if you work nearly full-time on it. That project started out quite promising -much more than anything else before or after it- but now it's pretty much dead/stalled.

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