Voxel Doom Port!

DooMAD said:

In all honesty, if I stopped being a perfectionist it would probably be done already. The problem lies in the fact that the chaingun should (based on the hudsprite and the former commando's sprites) have more than 4 barrels, but there isn't actually enough room on the pickup sprite for more than 4 unless they're not round, or the gun itself isn't round.

But I doubt people are going to be looking that closely, so I should just make it with 4 barrels and quit making excuses, heh.

Well the voxel for the riotgun which looks like a chaingun in the shadow warrior game only has 4 barrels so it would be best to do the same thing I guess.

I know this is way to late but a Chocolate-Doom build with voxels would've been awesome! Hmm... watching vanilla demos with voxels, so cool.

But anyways, may I make a suggestion? I tried out zdoom_vox and it's great but could you make an option to disable the rotating items? It's kinda annoying to me.

It seems there are some voxels with do not show up ingame, e.g. the barrel or the switches - at least in GZDoom. Anyone knows what's wrong there?
In ZDoom, I have a weird error with voxels floating above ground, depending on your viewing angle (i.e. their floating height changes when you look at them from different angles). Is this some problem with more recent (G)ZDoom builds maybe?

@Archy:
If you want to make the voxels stop rotating, my suggestion:
1) Get a WAD extraction tool, like unwad (http://code.google.com/p/unwad)
2) Use it to extract contents of voxel_test.wad
3) I am not an expert in how to proceed, but there is a file "voxeldef.txt" included with all the items and "droppedspin"/"placedspin" entries. if you put all these values to 0, it might do the trick
4) Repack the whole thing to a wad file or just zip it and load it

NightFright said:

@Archy:
If you want to make the voxels stop rotating, my suggestion:
1) Get a WAD extraction tool, like SLADE 3
2) I am not an expert in how to proceed, but there is a file "voxeldef.txt" included with all the items and "droppedspin"/"placedspin" entries. if you put all these values to 0, it might do the trick
3) Save and exit

Fixed it for you. :p

Or just delete the droppedspin/placedspin lines altogether, like the columns and other such decorative items.

BTW, did you apply any pattern when deciding which items rotate and which not? OK, it doesnt make sense that lamps rotate for example, but maybe it's more consequent to say placed items rotate and dropped ones don't, or the other way round. Here, it seems to be rather random, however. :)

I should imagine we'll have a discussion on that before the final release, nothing's set in stone. Although it's easy enough for people to edit if they prefer it set up a different way.

The Chaingun is done, unless you guys want me to make any changes.


But, then again we could always use the Duke Nukem Ripper that i made if you guys really want too.

That Doom chaingun looks EXCELLENT (and the ripper too BTW, but it's better for the Duke3D project, shouldn't be used here)! Hope to see that in a new release soon!

And I see the pattern behind rotating items now. Placed weapons don't move in general - probably because most of them are rather long and might clip through walls if rotating (especially bad when hidden in tiny secret areas). It makes sense if dropped shotguns or chainguns (those are the only ones standard Doom monsters drop anyway) rotate while the others stay put - IMHO. ^^

Maybe someone can check the barrel and switches again, for me they really don't show up ingame (at least not with latest [G]ZDoom versions).

Excelent voxel model!
New version of zdoom_vox? I hope!!!

Looks great - props!

Well, on my list of stuff I would still like to see are:
> Armor helmet
> Sphere powerups (Soul/Mega)
Ofc there is more stuff missing still, but if you can give us a new test version with just the new chaingun added, it'd be great!

The monsters I think that arent nice with voxel (super dificult, like everything with movements), but the dead monsters, the meat rest meaby would be cool. Every with voxel, only monster in movement with pixel... dreams are free :P

The problem is that a sphere made of little cubes is less convincing than a circle made of little squares. Or to put it another way, round things don't look very good after voxelization; at least not at the low resolution these items have. It's less of a problem with sprites because you can "cheat" with colors to give the impression of smoother forms -- antialiasing, in other words. With a volume, you can't, because for every angle at which it looks fine, there's 359 others at which it doesn't.

Also, voxel corpses for monsters might look good, but unfortunately it'd probably look odd to have monsters voxelize themselves when they die. Or, if they don't, to have a mix of sprite corpses (player-made) and voxel corpses (already placed).

Love it. Way better than my attempt would have turned out, I'm sure.

I spent a bit of time playing with the armour helmet the other day, but for some reason it didn't save my changes, so I guess I'll have to redo it. Still not overly happy with it anyway.

Gez said:

The problem is that a sphere made of little cubes is less convincing than a circle made of little squares.

Not so much. The main problem is that the sphere powerups mostly convey the image of something inside a sphere, whereas with voxels, we're forced to wrap the image around the surface of the sphere.

If eventually all pickups and props (like the Demon Eye, hanging corpses etc) got completed, it'd already mean a lot. I doubt that HUD weapons or monsters would look good if voxelized, I guess HD sprites would be better for that. Over at the ZDoom forums, some folks have presented some progress regarding that topic already.

These voxels are as faithful to the original sprites as it can get, they should be the next best solution if you want to have something better than lowres sprites. However, for really big models/sprites it won't work, and I think voxel monsters would just look ridiculous. :)

reaperman said:

The Chaingun is done, unless you guys want me to make any changes.
http://i1216.photobucket.com/albums/dd375/Reaperman1/ChaingunPics.png

It looks great, but why does it have one barrel sticking out as opposed to six (or even four, as DooMAD mentioned earlier)?

Also, I might be nitpicking, but the grip on the chaingun looks too fat. *shrugs*

HavoX said:

It looks great, but why does it have one barrel sticking out as opposed to six (or even four, as DooMAD mentioned earlier)?

That's why.

reaperman said:

The Chaingun is done, unless you guys want me to make any changes.

I'd probably "lighten up" or "perforate" that front disk so that it doesn't look like a solid chunk of metal. Compare how the spider demon's or heavy weapon dude's chaingun look. I'd go with it having 4 distinct barrels, like the chaingun dude, and all of them being visible from the front (though only the top one sticks out, probably because it's a common/fixed muzzle brake for all barrels).

If you really want to go for ultra-detail, make the 4 barrels entirely separate, with a hollow frame. Of course this much detailing would only pay off if the chaingun voxel-sprite could be reused for an actual monster...

I definitely agree that it should more resemble what the chaingunner uses instead of having the metal plate over the front. Other than that it looks stellar

+1 for Maes' and Ralphis' proposal for extra holes.

Better? It has 4 distinct barrels now, and i toned down the brightness on the gun.

DooMAD said:
I spent a bit of time playing with the armour helmet the other day, but for some reason it didn't save my changes, so I guess I'll have to redo it. Still not overly happy with it anyway.

I could make the armor helmet pick up if you would like. I could probably get it done in a day or two from now.

Almost perfect ;-) Only one of the four barrels must stick out, but the others must have visible recessed holes in the metal ring, which is perforated for better cooling/lower weight.

Thing of the ring as a big bearing which is stationary and has a fixed muzzle at 12'o clock, while the barrels can rotate relative to it and they shoot only when they align themselves with it.

If you want to be ultra-anal about technical detail, I think you should add a central shaft (running parallel and exactly between the barrels) that connects the main body of the gun with the muzzle ring/bearing.

Of course, given the resolution of the model, this shaft may never be visible...

I think the latest chaingun is fine. The extended top barrel doesn't translate that well into 3D and I'd rather have the pickup sprite (vaguely) match the chaingunner's weapon.

Maes said:

Almost perfect ;-) Only one of the four barrels must stick out, but the others must have visible recessed holes in the metal ring, which is perforated for better cooling/lower weight.

Thing of the ring as a big bearing which is stationary and has a fixed muzzle at 12'o clock, while the barrels can rotate relative to it and they shoot only when they align themselves with it.

If you want to be ultra-anal about technical detail, I think you should add a central shaft (running parallel and exactly between the barrels) that connects the main body of the gun with the muzzle ring/bearing.

Of course, given the resolution of the model, this shaft may never be visible...

That is just a waste of time. Besides its suppose to look like the sprite.

If you look at the sprite, you only see one muzzle. If you add more, it's not true to the whole thing any more imho. It may look more like a chaingun if you add more muzzles, but then you start deviating from the original already. Anyway, just release it. It's looking great the way it is, and as far as I am concerned, it doesn't need to be changed. :)

Awesome reaperman!

You guys are doing a great job here, really. I have already said this several times, I know, but I can't say it often enough :) I am really impressed by the quality of the voxel models.

reaperman said:

http://i1216.photobucket.com/albums/dd375/Reaperman1/ChaingunPics.png

That's an excellent voxel chaingun.

Awesome chaingun, it looks perfect. 6 barrels would probably crowd it, and be less round.


I've been wanting a tool similar to Strip2Vox that could cut a model using 2 stencils, like the front and side Imp frames

but I went ahead and did it manually, to get a boxy imp:


http://files.drdteam.org/index.php/files/get/GteqEvfLKw/impstart.zip


By using strip2voxel on this strip: http://i.imgur.com/oTwkO.png

I did some edge-smoothing with the 45 degree imp frame as a guide, to round corners somewhat. The colors are from the front frame, so back and side colors are absent.

I'll probably redo it and edit the proportions of the strip, but then it needs to be made for every walking and attack frame, should be fun...
One cool use is also the creation of 16-angle frames for the imp, almost faithful to the originals, I did 1 to test, between angle 1 and 2:


Cleaned up from the uglier screenshot


One issue is the perspective difference of the forward parts, like the imp face, vs the further back body, so the 90-degree frame may be the best reference for original proportions.