Why were some console maps chopped down?

If you look at comparisons between the maps for PSX/Saturn Doom and the PC originals, you'll notice that some of the Ultimate Doom maps are quite heavily edited. Mostly it's squaring off rooms that were shaped like an old man's penis, or reducing the number of stairs, but some maps have entire sections cut out.

Command Centre, Spawning Vats, House of Pain and Pandemonium are particularly obvious examples. Basically half of Pandemonium was chopped and Spawning Vats seems almost completely different, despite having a large section of the map sharing similar architecture.

However, on the PSX in particular, many of the most complicated Doom 2 and Final Doom/Master Level maps were not so heavily edited. In fact I spotted a couple of maps where the PSX version seemed to have rooms that were slightly more complicated than on the PC, although these rooms are few and far between.

If Lunar Mining Project could survive about 90-95% intact, mainly losing cross-shaped ceiling sections in the main corridors, why should House of Pain lose its weird crusher room? Why did the Spawning Vats map deviate so much? Did Williams run out of time when editing maps, then they realised "Oh, maybe we don't have to take so much out" and by the time they got to Final Doom they were aware they could basically leave it all in?

I believe PSX Doom is descended from Jaguar Doom, so maps that were altered for Jaguar Doom appeared in the same edited form in PSX Doom.

Yeah, they converted Jaguar maps instead of converting the original maps. When they ran out of Jaguar maps and had to fall back to the PC maps, detail level went up instantaneously.

Reconverting the maps derived from the Jaguar port has been discussed by the PSX TC Lost Levels team.

Well, if the game had room to keep one or two big complex maps intact for example, those maps may take up a lot of space, so cuts need to be made on other maps.

My room can fit a double bed in it...but it can't fit another one in, but I can squeeze in a single along with it, it's the same principles with PSX Doom I imagine...that and what has already been said, the PSX version is a port of a port in essence which also had to make cuts to fit it on the console

MajorRawne said:

rooms that were shaped like an old man's penis

That is... the most bizarre description I have ever read about the IWAD maps.

MajorRawne said:

However, on the PSX in particular, many of the most complicated Doom 2 and Final Doom/Master Level maps were not so heavily edited. In fact I spotted a couple of maps where the PSX version seemed to have rooms that were slightly more complicated than on the PC, although these rooms are few and far between.

Huh, really? I would be extremely interested to know where all of these spots are, as it would be useful for a map tweaking project of mine. If that's really the case, that's a pretty awesome find.

Gez said:

Reconverting the maps derived from the Jaguar port has been discussed by the PSX TC Lost Levels team.

By that you mean converting the PC Doom 1 E1-E3 maps to PSX style? Sorry to ask what is probably an obvious 'yes' answer, but the lost levels thread is very long and I don't have the time to find the exact part where they discuss this (unless it's early or late in the thread).

Xegethra said:

My room can fit a double bed in it...but it can't fit another one in, but I can squeeze in a single along with it, it's the same principles with PSX Doom I imagine...that and what has already been said, the PSX version is a port of a port in essence which also had to make cuts to fit it on the console

Eh, it's not that much of a concern when you've made a warehouse your bedroom. Of course, that analogy does apply to the Jaguar version (they had to fit the game on 4MB of storage space), but not when you've got 650MB to work with. It's either laziness or time constraints that they used the Jaguar maps instead of reworking the PC ones. I kind of wonder if it started development as just a straight Doom 1 port before they decided to go all ambitious by including the rest of the official campaigns, and they didn't have the time to go back and redo the levels they already had versions of. If they planned out the way the final product ended up from the start, than you can probably attribute it to laziness (unless their schedule was tighter than a sardine can).

Gez said:

Reconverting the maps derived from the Jaguar port has been discussed by the PSX TC Lost Levels team.

But that's unPSX's job :(

I wonder if there were any "exclusive" maps that didn't make the cut.

MajorRawne said:

If Lunar Mining Project could survive about 90-95% intact, mainly losing cross-shaped ceiling sections in the main corridors, why should House of Pain lose its weird crusher room? Why did the Spawning Vats map deviate so much? Did Williams run out of time when editing maps, then they realised "Oh, maybe we don't have to take so much out" and by the time they got to Final Doom they were aware they could basically leave it all in?

Knowing just exactly how much content you need to take out in order to avoid any and all potential problems, is a fine art. I find it normal that at first, they were over-cautious and erred on the safe side, "chopping down" levels quite harshly. Later, with more confident and experienced "remappers", they might go out on a limb and allow apparently "lavish" detail to remain intact.

Even on the PC, with its "limitless" (compared to consoles, at least) potential for loading complex levels with huge blockmaps, node trees, etc., it is still possible to cause limit breaks or trigger disk trashing.

On a console, crashes are much more less acceptable, there are no real-time savegames, RAM is much smaller than on the PC and there's no "swap drive" concept, so all static data that can't be dynamically unloaded, like the level data itself, has to be made as small as possible. Plus, Doom has structures whose size is hard to determine a-priori, like e.g. the size of a BSP tree. Just because you removed 20% of a level's nodes, that doesn't mean the BSP tree or blockmap will also become 20% smaller.

Xegethra said:

Well, if the game had room to keep one or two big complex maps intact for example, those maps may take up a lot of space, so cuts need to be made on other maps.

PSX Doom was on a CD. It had all the space it wanted. A Doom map isn't that big. The 59 maps on the CD take up less than 3 megabytes; at this average size they could have put 1200 maps and kept room for much more.

Sodaholic said:

By that you mean converting the PC Doom 1 E1-E3 maps to PSX style?

obvious 'yes' answer

Well if PSX Doom could hold more than it's a shame it didn't. But like mentioned before, it could have been a laziness/time issue perhaps. I wonder what went down in order for them to decide on using other console ports as a base for it...maybe they just weren't confident to make the game bigger so they just altered a previous port.

I'd say they were worried about RAM more than disk space, they didn't want the console to slow to a chug, especially not early in the game when you want to put your best foot forward.

Sodaholic said:

I kind of wonder if it started development as just a straight Doom 1 port before they decided to go all ambitious by including the rest of the official campaigns

That seems very likely and I assume thats why the early maps were ported over, taking the 'easy route' as it were, then realizing it could become much better and utilize the capabilities of the PSX.

Gez said:

PSX Doom was on a CD. It had all the space it wanted. A Doom map isn't that big. The 59 maps on the CD take up less than 3 megabytes; at this average size they could have put 1200 maps and kept room for much more.

And how about RAM? The PSX had a mere 2 MB of general-purpose RAM, and with a CD you can't load/unload stuff all the time like you can on a HD. Plus you need memory for the executable itself, the gameplay code etc. etc.

On the PC and most "full" ports you need no less than 4 MB of addressable RAM to use the original IWAD resources "uncut".

Contrarily to PC Doom where everything was put in a single wad, each map on PSX Doom is in a different file. There's a big wad for resources (textures, sprites, etc.) and 59 separate wads for the 59 maps. I suppose this was done this way to unload the map data from memory, access the new map file, and load the map data into memory; a process during which the "LOADING" graphic would be displayed. It's also what allows to swap between the PSX Doom and the PSX Final Doom discs to get odd and quirky effects. In short, additional maps would have had no impact on anything.

There are several good reasons for doing this. The first is that some consoles had really restricted space for textures, levels etc. I remember that on the SNES version for example, the elevator texture is missing and one of the BIGDOOR textures is used in its place. So there are a bunch of changes to the levels that are needed in order to use the reduced texture set. RAM is really the key thing, and Maes correctly points out that the PSX only had 2MB: remember that PC Doom wouldn't even run with less than 4MB of RAM.

The other reason is that consoles in the '90s had pretty restrictive CPUs and probably struggled quite a bit with complex geometries. So there's a parallel incentive to simplify the levels to get better performance. Fewer linedefs, less variation in textures and light levels, etc. all help. You'll notice that the levels in GBA Doom for example have much less variation in light levels (a lot of the levels seem like full-bright everywhere). This reduces the number of visplanes on screen, which will improve performance.

Finally, there's the issue of controllers. Certainly gamepads/controllers nowadays are much better than they used to be, with analog sticks etc. that allow much more precise movement. But with the controllers on those consoles in the '90s it always seemed a lot less responsive or precise (the lower frame rate probably didn't help), and my experience is that nothing works as well as the keyboard+mouse combination does. I seem to recall noticing that the levels on some of the console ports were spread out a bit more - wider corridors for example - presumably because this helps make the game more playable.

So it seems that Williams had to cut certain things like excessive vertices and stick within a tight visplane limit, but it seems people agree that they may have erred on the side of caution while converting Ultimate Doom, then realised the Playstation could probably handle full levels with occasional framerate drops.

At the time, we had never used a PC except at school and they were crappy things that would no way ever have Doom installed, even if it would run on them, (in fact they may have been primitive Apple Macs). We were at school to learn, not to play Doom after hours on a network - not sure what they were doing at schools across the pond, but it wasn't happening in England - and we were all stepping up from the SNES, Megadrive and Commodore 64. So a game like Doom was a totally new experience to us, we were just too young to be fully impressed by the technical aspects. Any framerate drop was therefore not really noticed or was accepted as part of the experience. It certainly never bothered me and it gave the game a deliberate feel, giving you time to react and take your momentum into account.

I've just been playing the PC version of Spawning Vats and Halls of the Damned on UV. While I enjoyed them, especially Halls of the Damned, they just drag on too much. There are lots of additional areas with enemies and some bonuses/ammo that don't really go anywhere, meaning you need to backtrack, and a shitty crusher trap that is almost guaranteed to kill you. No wonder the crushers were removed from Ultimate Doom on the PSX, they don't really add much except frustration and you don't see them very often in custom wads.

By necessity, Williams made tighter and more focused maps with less backtracking and a much more coherent look. It's a matter of opinion whether the PSX's more limited and grittier textures are better or worse, but having seen Spawning Vats in particular, PC Doom is pretty ugly. I'd have thought it at the time too.