Creaphis
I will deliberately take a contrary position just for the sake of writing incredibly long arguments
Posts: 3953
Registered: 10-05 |
myk said:
An imp looks about as tall as the player if you get close to it and a baron of hell looks taller, with its horns going off the screen. You seem to be basing your assessment on something in the textures, or maybe also the pick-up items, rather than the size of the animated sprites and the relative dimensions between them and map structures or the view height and field. The texture graphics and pick-up items aren't necessarily consistent with the sprites and area dimensions; they are over-sized to be identifiable and detailed enough in the low-resolution world. I don't think that there's an intuitive size for the stuff in the game, and what conclusions you reach may depend on what aspects you highlight when looking at it, just like reading a text is modified by what a person has experienced or read beforehand.
Again, it's not so much that I'm consciously, rationally choosing some set of elements of the game's art to make my assessment of size. It's that I'm looking at the gameworld naturally, holistically, and letting the various visual cues do their work. (You're right that the visual cues given by the textures are largely to blame.) There is certainly an "intuitive size" to the game world, as the brain demands to make sense of patterns and disparate information, but different people may arrive at different senses of scale. The result, for me, is the unavoidable impression that 64 units = ~3 feet, and that the Doomguy is a midget. The Doomguy is a tiny man who runs around shooting tiny monsters, lest the forces of tiny Hell take over the tiny, tiny world.
This actually damage Doom's image in my mind, at all. I just think it's funny.
myk said:
Look at the columns at the start of E1M1. Do they really seem to be one and a half feet across to you?
More like fifteen inches.
myk said:
Also, keep in mind the 56 units of height need to be multiplied by 1.2 because of the pixel stretching. This makes the marine 6.3 feet tall.
This means that I should intuitively feel the Doomguy to be 1.2 times taller than I would feel otherwise. Maybe I do, but it's not obvious.
myk said:
This talk of dimensions got me thinking that the player can normally run over a height of 2.7 feet.
Impressive, isn't it? In fact, it's rather ridiculous that any staircases would require such olympic-quality thighs. Thus, our familiarity with real stairs makes the stairs in Doom into another important visual cue. I'm left with the sense that the tallest stairs in Doom are around 1.5 feet tall, because real stairs don't get much bigger than that.
Related to the above, haven't you ever noticed how difficult it is to make a table in Doom? By the time the Doomguy isn't running up onto it anymore, and more importantly, by the time it seems high enough to be a table, it's almost at the Doomguy's eye level.
Gez said:
Something to remember about the DoomGuy's midgety stature or not is that the camera isn't set at eye height, but somewhere on his chest.
This contributes to the midget impression, but does not fully account for it.
Last edited by Creaphis on 02-11-10 at 16:11
|
02-04-10 15:04 
