Planet1 texture

Has anyone ever identified the original 4 photos used for the texture Planet1?

One of the alpha versions of Doom has a sky with blue mountains and earth hanging over the horizon. I'm pretty sure it was drawn and scaled down for the computer monitor patch. Not sure about the rest.

Looks like Mars, some nebula type thing, Earth, ?

I'd be surprised if they don't all come from the same source - maybe a book on astronomy that the id folks scanned with the NeXT camera.

The Mars one might be the easiest to find - there were almost no missions to Mars in the '80s, and at the time Doom was being developed the most recent probe (Mars Observer) had just arrived there in 1992. Unless the book they were using was a brand new one with data from the very bleeding edge of space exploration, any pictures from that mission are unlikely to have been included. If the photo comes from a probe it's probably from the '70s.

The alternative is that it might be from the Hubble Space Telescope that was launched in 1990.

You would think that the one in the upper left corner would be Mars, but I'm not entirely convinced that it is, it may just be Dooms pallet, but with that coloring it looks more like Venus or even Mercury. Upper right is some nebula, which one it is I couldn't even guess. Bottom left is obviously Earth. Then the bottom right is the Sun under some kind of filter, you can tell by the solar corona shooting off on the right side & I'm pretty sure the yellow spots are Sunspots.

fraggle said:

maybe a book on astrology

Or maybe a book on astronomy :P

You can see SUN, TEI (a fictional planet Tei Tenga), EAR (Earth), and something that looks like COA.

I have no idea what COA means.

Looks like COM to me. (or GOM / GON / CON)

EDIT: Well, looking at TSCRN6, it's probably actually COA. But possibly COM, anyway.

Hard to be sure about any of the variants. A are slightly different between the patches, with COA it would make at least 3 different versions. Personally, I would draw M closer to H.

I remember thinking that it has something to do with space COMmunications, although it doesn't make much sense in the context of everything else being some kind of a space object.

fraggle said:

Looks like Mars, some nebula type thing, Earth, ?

The fourth is probably based on an X-Ray picture taken during Sunspot Cycle 22.


Solar Cycle Prediction [Public domain], by David Hathaway, NASA, Marshall Space Flight Center (http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/predict.shtml), from Wikimedia Commons

This texture is one of the big reasons to stick with Doom 1!

Best I can come up with at the moment for the nebula is that it kinda looks like a segment of the one surrounding Eta Carinae

I'm not entirely convinced though.

Top left I'd say is Mercury, rather than Venus
edit: Actually I retract that, only one spacecraft had been to Mercury when Doom was made, and I could only find one colour image, it wasn't this one.

Notice the different "A" on Earth, so the nebula is "GOM".

G is different in "Tei Tenga".

But the artist didn't care about consistency, even within a single patch.

Anyone has John's number? We ought to ask him.

Here's my hires version of that texture:


I'm pretty sure that for Earth id use the fameus photo taken by the Apollo 11 mission, the Sun is probable another classic taken by the Hubble telescope, I never find identical nebula but this is probably orion or batterfly. And the moon is probably Thetys.

Heh, you have CAR instead of EAR.

Also, I assumed that ACC is actually REC, because the alpha intermission image has Com, Lab, Rec, and SD.

ptoing said:

Or maybe a book on astronomy :P

God damnit