Doom v0.3 Resurfaces

I had a look at the sprites using the 0.2 palette, and things look a lot more like they're supposed to:

http://orig10.deviantart.net/2d54/f/2015/217/8/4/0_3_graphics_in_0_2_palette_by_jewellds-d94arqn.png

No wonder they pursued Romero's design over Hall's, considering how butt-ugly and bland the stuff the latter was presenting. I mean, it got better as time went on but the chance for a good first impression was already had and passed.

Jaxxoon R said:

No wonder they pursued Romero's design over Hall's, considering how butt-ugly and bland the stuff the latter was presenting. I mean, it got better as time went on but the chance for a good first impression was already had and passed.

Let me put out a disclaimer: Tom Hall is a genius at creating complex, fun, energetic stories. None of these needed to be in Doom. Given what we know now that Doom was originally a quest-based game with RPG elements, including possible upgrades between levels (conjecture here), and multiple characters, places, objectives, and suddenly the arcade action of doom is pushed to the background.

Doom is a game that you pick up and play. It isn't a game where you try to figure out where the heart of lothar is, or if you have a sandwich equipped for a certain area (which implies a hunger meter, are you kidding me right now?). Tom Hall was attempting to break away from that wolf style yet the level designs still reek of the wolf days.

Doom is complex as much as it is simple. We spent years debating "swingshots" and "glides" in a game that was supposed to be so complex that it would need a hint manual to beat.

Maybe it's more than just coincidence that every time a Doom modder tries to recreate the Doom Bible, it fails. That shit is cursed.

Very interesting stuff, early design clearly shows the difference between Hall's maps and Romero's maps, the last one creating more open and free areas, Tom's maps were kinda claustrophobic, sure, you can tell that by other alphas, but here it shows even more.

Quasar said:

Are these accurate enough to use for wiki purposes?

Textures require delicate special treatment in regards to offsets in the alphas. To repeat a texture horizontally (for a wide wall), I think a unique texture entry had to be created with the patches repeated enough to cover the entire length of the wall! I think that's why you don't see really long walls, without texture changes, and/or borders and the like.

My memory may be failing, but that's what I recall. I once had a decent converter that produced results that visually matched what I saw the Alphas doing in DOSBox.

I suppose that method would be ok for a small level or two, but that's a lot of texture building work for a megawad!

kb1 said:

I suppose that method would be ok for a small level or two, but that's a lot of texture building work for a megawad!

Surely you could just split the wall into two or three walls?

Perhaps that's why there are so many decorative wall bumps.

andrewj said:

Surely you could just split the wall into two or three walls?

Yeah, one or the other. You either have to build big textures, or split the walls up into proper widths. I imagine, after a few maps of that, they were tired of doing either method, which must have led to the creation of the tileing and the offset functionality used currently. That's probably exactly why they did it (which is a kind of a neat discovery.)

That's what's so cool about having these alphas. You get to go into the developer's head at a certain place into the development cycle, and imagine the thought processes that drove the specific decisions made afterwards. You get to understand why they added tileing. I'm guessing that the multi-patch texture stuff was added to support Tom Hall's wall signs and arrows.

Da Werecat said:

Perhaps that's why there are so many decorative wall bumps.

Yep, that's what I was thinking: Wall bumps, posts against the wall, and the like. I am glad they changed it - that would have been a nightmare, or, at least, very boring.

Awesome, I never expected this to surface.

Glaice said:

So originally there were to be 4 types of armor..

Player colors.

Damn this wad seems so sick! I will definitely download this.

Any unique flats or patches worth grabbing out of the v0.3?

Nah, not really - Mostly MSpaint looking computer consoles, a lot of the stuff here was polished up for the later alphas before being binned altogether. The most amazing thing by far here (to me at least) is the multiple HUD choices (inside helmet, then the more "minimalist" HUD and the built in automap.

Works nicely for me under DOSBox. Good to see the functional HUD automap. Definitely interesting.

Linguica said:

Pretty much all the non-monster sprites in the WAD... offhand none of these seem new or different?

Probably obvious, but most of these were in the sprites dump Romero released a few months back.

Linguica said:

Guess who got it converted...

<img src=http://i.imgur.com/1TrX3vel.png>

level exit not working on level e1m1 is there a way to skip levels