Revenant100
Member
Posts: 266
Registered: 07-04 |
Greetings, Doomworld forums! I'd like to share with you all the release of a small project I've been working on. To keep a long story short, I recently came across Perkristian's high-res sound effects pack. I like the idea of enhancing Doom while remaining as pure (and compatible!) as possible, so I pondered what other areas this line of thought could be applied to. Perkristian's pack is pretty definitive when it comes to the sound effects, and the music has been dealt with in many ways over the years, but what about the game's art? Of course, I wouldn't dream of recreating the art and thinking it an improvement, but I have noticed tiny little errors in the sprites that seem trivial to fix. Why not go ahead and make those fixes?
Hence, I bring you the Doom 2 Minor Sprite Fixing Project. The three main goals of this endeavor are as follows:
1. Adjusting sprite offsets - This comprises the bulk of the project. You may have noticed some enemies jitter back and forth during their animations, such as in the angled firing frames for the Commando and Cyberdemon. This was likely the result of an auto-center option used by id's artists when importing the sprites into the WAD file. These are obvious candidates of errors that can be easily fixed with slight sprite offset adjustments, but I decided to go a step further. I very closely examined all of the monster animations paying close attention to how they were drawn or how the physical clay and latex models were posed when digitized. It turns out Doom's animations are pretty damn smooth, but it's hard to tell since most sprite offsets were simply auto-centered. Therefore, I went ahead and re-aligned a great number of sprites. I believe the end result accentuates the fluidity (believe it or not) of the animations and is more representative of what the artists intended. You can now clearly see things like the Revenant pivoting on his front foot as he punches his target or how the Arch-Vile leans back and forth during his attack. I also made sure the transitions between different animations and even rotations went smoothly as well. For example, the position of the Cyberdemon's feet no longer radically shifts around between his firing, pain, and death animations. This may seem like a lot of personal guess work, but I tried to remain as objective as possible consistent with id's approach to the art.
2. Small image edits - There are a number of trivial errors found in Doom 2's sprites. These mainly consist of transparent pixels or visible garbage pixels that were overlooked. If I could conclusively identify the issue as being an error and the fix would be as minimally intrusive as possible, I went ahead and made the edit to the sprite.
3. Restoring missing graphics - This basically just means bringing back the sprites that were cut for optimization/memory reasons. For the most part, this pertains to the missing rotation sprites in the full 8-sided set. Unfortunately, we don't have access to much official artwork than can be restored, but the early Doom alphas and shareware versions still possess some useful content.
As for how to use it, this WAD in its current state works with Boom-compatible ports. However, vanilla doom2.exe compatibility simply requires some DeuSF work. With that in mind, you can pretty much use this WAD with any other level or mod as I can't imagine any conflicts. Simply run it with the lowest priority in the add-on hierarchy. Most newer source ports have an autoload feature, so I recommend using that. I personally have this WAD autoloaded while playing Zandronum (if you see Balls of Gold, say hi!) and I haven't come across any issues.
Here's the current download of v1.2 (released 1/1/13):
http://www.mediafire.com/file/wrvha...id/SPRFIX12.rar (1.28 mb)
This is the Doom 1/Ultimate Doom compatible version:
http://www.mediafire.com/file/zz3vf...k6/D1SPFX12.rar (738 kb)
The complete changelog including the 1.2 edits can be viewed here:
http://pastebin.com/MdeKjpjA
Now if you've made it this far, you probably just want to see some screenshots of the changes in action. Well, truthfully, it's rather difficult to showcase the end result outside of the game since many of the effects must be seen in motion. If the idea interests you, I suggest simply downloading the WAD right now and autoloading it during any future Doom sessions. I know this sounds cheap, but some changes are subtle and I think it would ruin the point to explicitly search for the differences. Nonetheless, here's a sample of some of the fixes:
http://img846.imageshack.us/img846/9233/cleanpixel.png
http://img171.imageshack.us/img171/5002/animheavy.gif http://img259.imageshack.us/img259/1756/animimprotate.gif
http://img96.imageshack.us/img96/7498/animarch.gif http://img651.imageshack.us/img651/4370/animrevpunch.gif
http://img812.imageshack.us/img812/5631/animhoovesnewer.gif
http://img29.imageshack.us/img29/5362/baronpants.png
http://imageshack.us/a/img31/4666/hangingcorpses.th.png (clickable thumbnail)
Phew, with all that done, I'll end by saying that this project is still very much a work-in-progress. I'm open to feedback on the current release as well as potential ideas for further changes.
Last edited by Revenant100 on 01-02-13 at 07:18
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11-28-12 08:51 
