Blood decals and disappearing bodies

One thing that bugged me in Doom 2016 was the lack of sizeable blood decals and shit, and I've seen so many times in this gameplay video where a GIGANTIC dismembered slab of flesh slams onto the ground from like a Mancubus or something and doesn't leak even a pint of blood. Also a little disappointing that bodies still disappear so you can't see the path of annihilation you've carved into the environment like you could Doom 1 or 2.

        I wouldn't mind them bumping down the environment details for features that make the game world feel way more impressionable and responsive to the player, like I'm the one causing all the carnage and bloodshed instead of it all being there before and making it marginally worse: something (imo) Doom '16 completely forwent, getting carried away with excessive amounts of scenery gore.

I know these are just, like, perfectionist nitpicks, but the gore and ultra-violence is one of the main selling points of both Doom 16 and Eternal and it could be done so much better! I've wanted to see it improve for a really, really long time -- ever since I beat Doom '16 -- and I don't want them to miss that opportunity in the case they *might ( *probably :( ) won't have a modding community!

I dunno, maybe it's just me to find it that important.

Still excited as fuck for this game to come out, though, the rest of it looks absolutely fabulous aside from some other tiny little nitpicks I have with it (like, "if they're gonna go full classic design with the plasma gun, that sound is pathetic and should be more like that original weird-ass noise it made with some added bass punch to it and the projectiles should be a bit bigger and enemies should explode in a brighter flash", shit like that.)

Disappearing corpses are bullshit.

I really hope that this game allows mod support to solve this crap. 

Welp that sucks, wonder how they're going to let the Archvile revive corpses now, probably will be a lame reskinned Summoner with a slightly different attacking behavior. or maybe they only allow corpses to remain in specific situations.

What if the Archvile heals staggered enemies now?

Yeah, seriously screw disappearing corpses, those suckle arse. 

As for the Archvile's relationship with the Summoner - it's more than likely not as mobile, and its attack is probably going to hurt way more. Harder to kill too.

As much as I’d like to think that some measure of corpses that last longer may be in the game, that would seem highly unlikely.

Keep in mind that everything is subject to change, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up, not even for a “Nitro Gore” mod (for those out of the loop, Nitro Gore is a Doom 3 mod that prevented zombies from gibbing and demons from disintegrating when killed). 

I’d love for there to be lasting corpses, or at least corpses that last longer (at least until I leave a particular area), but then I’d probably get dogpiled by a dozen other people telling me how it would melt my RAM and that not even supercomputers would be able to keep DE at 60 FPS if there wasn’t a gore janitor working overtime. 

I remember that just like in D2016, the amount of time a body would remain would be slightly inconsistent, ranging from about 2-5 seconds until those gibs/corpses despawn. Here in DE, it actually looks like corpses actually burn away before they even hit the ground or complete their death animation, and sometimes they even appear to stay longer than in D2016. At least, smaller gibs stick around for quite some time before fading. 

All of this makes me doubly concerned for how the Arch-Vile is going to be used. If we still have disappearing corpses come the final release, I see one of two scenarios:

Scenario 1- the Arch-Vile is basically the same in function as the Doom 3 Arch-Vile or the Summoner. Hell, the latter was actually called the Arch-Vile in pre-release documents. 

Scenario 2- the Arch-Vile is basically given the Cyberdemon treatment, in which instead of a recurring enemy, is basically reduced to a one-time boss (probably in an arena full of corpses it can resurrect). What’s especially pitiful about this scenario is that the D2016 Cyberdemon was actually meant to be a recurring enemy (and thus was shown in several different locations), but nope, just pump them full of lead and then dump them like a lead balloon. 

However, I do see a third scenario in which instead of resurrecting dead demons, the Arch-Vile actually heals wounded demons, but I’m not too sure about that possibility. 

I’m not too concerned about the blood effects due to the fact that they’ll get added as further development progresses. 

If the final game comes and we still get disintegrating corpses, let’s just hope mod support can fix that up. What really sucks about it (especially in D2016) is that the corpses themselves are extremely well-detailed, and you can only see them for maybe a split-second before they fizzle out. Plus, once you clear out a room full of demons, it feels less like you’ve mopped the floor with them and more like you’ve just blinked them out of existence Thanos-style, the latter being less satisfying overall. 

Maybe the AV summons some new type of reanimated demon that is made from different corpses?  So like a necromancer?

I actually think decals might be broken right now because there were flat out no blood decals to be found from gibbing at all.

On 8/12/2018 at 3:02 AM, Doomslayer88 said:

Disappearing corpses are bullshit.

I really hope that this game allows mod support to solve this crap. 

13 hours ago, Xfing said:

Yeah, seriously screw disappearing corpses, those suckle arse.

Agreed: I say only "a little disappointing" because I'm not surprised.

Disappearing corpses, especially in a Doom game, bug the fuck out of me. They had last time to figure out how to modernize the Doom formula, now all I want them to do is refine it: not add more new shit like Heaven, lore, new weapons/demons, or whatever they're doing, I got more than enough of that last time. They should just focus on the core Doom elements they had last time and make them feel better (optimizing the game so corpses don't disappear to improve killing, better shooting sfx, faster movement speed, more varied and interesting level design, etc.) and not adding stupid shit *like* the runes and upgrade points and lore and stuff we got last time.

This may have something to do with the disintegrating corpses:

Now whenever a lower-tier enemy like a Former Human or an Imp suddenly loses a limb or body part, the bloody stump now appears to flash orange-red but only for a split-second. It's the exact same color as the burning ashes whenever a body disappears. It's most noticeable when the player is doing that "sweep the leg" glory kill to decapitate a Former Human (seen about 3-4 times), and the bloody stump where the head used to suddenly glows that particular color.

6 hours ago, Zemini said:

Maybe the AV summons some new type of reanimated demon that is made from different corpses?  So like a necromancer?

Would seem redundant to have a unique monster that just spawns in another unique monster. Just combine them into one monster if that was the case.

I'm betting the Archvile is a one time boss just like how the Cyberdemon and Mastermind were. It fights you along with two barons of hell, when the barons die their corpses stay and the Archvile resurrects them throughout the boss fight while also attacking you with fire. Also, the arena starts off all pristine and throughout the stages of the fight, more shit is blown up and on fire, eventually looking like a satanic ritual took place in it.

1 hour ago, wheresthebeef said:

 

Would seem redundant to have a unique monster that just spawns in another unique monster. Just combine them into one monster if that was the case.

 

I'm betting the Archvile is a one time boss just like how the Cyberdemon and Mastermind were. It fights you along with two barons of hell, when the barons die their corpses stay and the Archvile resurrects them throughout the boss fight while also attacking you with fire. Also, the arena starts off all pristine and throughout the stages of the fight, more shit is blown up and on fire, eventually looking like a satanic ritual took place in it.

Redundant how?  Basically kinda like a Pain Elemental or Summoner.  If we could get a true AV that raises enemy corpses then I would be all for it.  Still better than the Arch vile being a one time boss.

So, they made a "damage system" for all the demons but they decided that the demon corpses need to disappear?

In the case of the Arch-vile, are they going to fucked up the original concept of this monster like in the previous game and Doom 3?

What a joke.

The damage system changes textures it doesn't add polygons. This is why you can do some things and not other things. As I understood the main issue here is to have more polygons. I assume what happens when a level is loaded is that all the environment and actors are loaded at the same time and then the game load more of them as they're needed. This is why there are so many arenas with monsters spawning from thin air, because they're a "on request" polygon generation. Then they die without leaving any trace and they free polycount to load more monsters when they're needed. I also noticed in several instances monsters spawn in waves, meaning they probably do that not to make things easier for the player but to keep the polycount capped at a certain level. Get monsters in, get them out, load more. 

Regarding the environment details, I doubt it spike the polycount so much. Usually environments are extremely low poly and count on textures and tricks like bump mapping to appear more detailed than they really are. Dynamic lighting and shadows do require some computational power but are still made with lots of optimization tricks and are really far away from a real cycle render model where textures fall away in favour of specific material caratheristics and light bouncing in iterating cycles. 

I'm not much of an expert when it comes to 3d engines and I delved superficially in the matter, the the only solution I can think of is to make the demon model disappear anyway and replace it with a lower polycount version when he is dead. I think anyway, from a close perspective, the change in the model resolution will be quite noticeable. Plus, you could have corpses looking all the same like in classic doom. No matter from which angle you kill the monster, it always die in the same way (or get gibbed). I think quake used the same principle (need to double check this), but is a less than optimal solution in 2018.

Also the corpses should be non flippable, applying physics to them would be probably too taxing.

In a ideal world, we would like to have voxel generated polygons with infinite faces, persisting corpses with physics (just image, there is a corpse, you stomp on the head and it spatters, you leave bloody bootprints as you proceed forward) and lighting bouncing from various surfaces in real time, but at this point in time, is just not possible with the technology we have at our disposal. Realistic looking scenes you see made in computer graphics can take hours to render, we really can't ask to a game engine to do on the fly what a render program does in 30 minutes. 

The janitor working as soon as a specific area is left even if a bit weird when backtracking, can be a good idea but I don't think it's enough, as I said I suspect the waves of monsters where created since the engine could not handle all that monsters being placed at the same time. If you got the same principle in doom eternal, then you wouldn't be able to free computational power for the other wave if there are persistent corpses. I didn't see any wave spawned (apart the invasion) in the gameplay video, so it actually could be a solution. Invasion enemy corpses can disappear imho, since they don't strictly come from your game environment but from somewhere else.

It would be interesting to delve more deeply in the engine logic to see how certain things are managed (are all the actors places at the same time in doom eternal? Do they spawn when they requested? Is the map loaded all at the same time?) but I don't think we have this information available at this point in time.

they could put ashes where the demon was killed (since you know demons turn into ash),and when your done you could look at all the ash laying around... But that's not as satisfying, isn't it. On the plus side arch-vile's can resurrect enemies.

also kinda related, i didn't really care for the arch-vile's resurrection ability, in fact i hope the arch-vile has something different like partially turning the doomslayer into a deformed demon thing that hinders your combat effectiveness.

It would be nice if he could resurrect corpses biut not gibbed enemies so that gibbing weapons or glory kills would be an effective way to control the arch vile effectiveness, but persisting corpses are needed in the first place.

2 hours ago, Kaos said:

The damage system changes textures it doesn't add polygons. This is why you can do some things and not other things. As I understood the main issue here is to have more polygons. I assume what happens when a level is loaded is that all the environment and actors are loaded at the same time and then the game load more of them as they're needed. This is why there are so many arenas with monsters spawning from thin air, because they're a "on request" polygon generation. Then they die without leaving any trace and they free polycount to load more monsters when they're needed. I also noticed in several instances monsters spawn in waves, meaning they probably do that not to make things easier for the player but to keep the polycount capped at a certain level. Get monsters in, get them out, load more. 

Regarding the environment details, I doubt it spike the polycount so much. Usually environments are extremely low poly and count on textures and tricks like bump mapping to appear more detailed than they really are. Dynamic lighting and shadows do require some computational power but are still made with lots of optimization tricks and are really far away from a real cycle render model where textures fall away in favour of specific material caratheristics and light bouncing in iterating cycles. 

I'm not much of an expert when it comes to 3d engines and I delved superficially in the matter, the the only solution I can think of is to make the demon model disappear anyway and replace it with a lower polycount version when he is dead. I think anyway, from a close perspective, the change in the model resolution will be quite noticeable. Plus, you could have corpses looking all the same like in classic doom. No matter from which angle you kill the monster, it always die in the same way (or get gibbed). I think quake used the same principle (need to double check this), but is a less than optimal solution in 2018.

Also the corpses should be non flippable, applying physics to them would be probably too taxing.

 

In a ideal world, we would like to have voxel generated polygons with infinite faces, persisting corpses with physics (just image, there is a corpse, you stomp on the head and it spatters, you leave bloody bootprints as you proceed forward) and lighting bouncing from various surfaces in real time, but at this point in time, is just not possible with the technology we have at our disposal. Realistic looking scenes you see made in computer graphics can take hours to render, we really can't ask to a game engine to do on the fly what a render program does in 30 minutes. 

 

The janitor working as soon as a specific area is left even if a bit weird when backtracking, can be a good idea but I don't think it's enough, as I said I suspect the waves of monsters where created since the engine could not handle all that monsters being placed at the same time. If you got the same principle in doom eternal, then you wouldn't be able to free computational power for the other wave if there are persistent corpses. I didn't see any wave spawned (apart the invasion) in the gameplay video, so it actually could be a solution. Invasion enemy corpses can disappear imho, since they don't strictly come from your game environment but from somewhere else.

 

It would be interesting to delve more deeply in the engine logic to see how certain things are managed (are all the actors places at the same time in doom eternal? Do they spawn when they requested? Is the map loaded all at the same time?) but I don't think we have this information available at this point in time.

I wouldn't really care if they used less polygons to get actual dead bodies and gore this time, to be honest. They can always save the more HQ models for later in time when hardware advances enough to handle them; probably not gonna happen, though...

Or maybe they can have them be in like physics for a brief little moment or something like that and then when they land on the ground and stop moving, they can be snapped to a predetermined death pose depending on how you killed them (like 4/5 for physics, each depending on how close they are to the original physics pose (or just random, whatever performs best), 1 for each glory kill) that can be dismembered and mutilated but can't actually be moved? Would that be a good way to do it? Again, probably not gonna happen; but I can at least hope, damnit!

several 3d programs have a tool to automatically decimate a polygon to reduce the tris count with a quite good approximation (it's basically unchanged to the naked eye). I do suspect however, the game will already use models who are decimate to the limits of non detail loss.

I'm not sure how he engine will handle an abrupt model substitution and how this should in theory happens. If it's noticeable or not. 

We are in the field of pure hypothesis here, we are not even sure that the corpse elimination is something related to polycounts or any other reason. To be honest, I don't even think so, since I have no idea how computationally heavy could be to manage a object that doesn't have physics and is basically a piece of terrain with no interactions. 

Maybe this time there will be an option to choose if you want disappearing corpses or not...?

Maybe?

On 8/12/2018 at 9:32 AM, Nanomen said:

the gore and ultra-violence is one of the main selling points of both Doom 16 and Eternal and it could be done so much better!

For me it was the satisfying and fun gameplay combined with kick-ass music.

I don't really care for the gore enough that I will cry over corpses dissapearing.

I looked at Wolfestein the new colossus that use the same engine to see what solutions they used.

I don't own the game so was just watching some gameplay footage.

I understood they have some death models (a limited numbers of them) and they got a fixed animation who plays for 2/3 seconds after death and then it position the corpse in the fixed position. I have no idea about corpse janitor system since it was not enough backtracking to estabilish if the corpses are persistent or not.

My first impression however was a bit negative. The death sequences looked kinda "artificial" (for example the dogs have one corpse model and always move their leg before dying, corpses dying near walls instead of sliding down and lay on the wall are oddly displaced to lay completely on the floor instead) and the gameplay in general had much less enemies on screen and was bordeline boring. If we need to renounce to corpses to have more enemies on screen and the frenetic gameplay of doom, I think it's a price well worth to pay.

What if the dead demons slowly decomposed into a pile of bones and sludge shortly after death?   I think that is better than what we have now.

As I've been observing the QuakeCon game footage more and more, I've actually come to notice that while actual bodies seem to fade away quicker, general gibs/body parts actually seem to stick around for more than just a few seconds. This leads me to a potential solution that could somewhat fix the problem of disappearing corpses.

I know this is basically kind of an older idea (especially since id Software has done this in the past), but what if instead of the bodies disappearing, what if id took the Quake 2 approach and have all the gibs disappear after a short amount of time while leaving the bodies behind? That way, the engine shouldn't have to account for as many game world objects and the physics they require (a handful of corpses vs. the hundreds of tiny gibs they might leave behind), plus there's the added benefit of getting to enjoy the handiwork of the new "destructible demons" mechanic and the opportunity of turning those corpses into more static environmental objects.

That being said, I think part of the reason why disappearing corpses exist in the first place with DE is that of the arenas not really being suited to have persistent corpses lying around. As an example, both outdoor areas on the Hell on Earth section of the footage have walkways and platforms that are often too small for larger corpses to have such as the Mancubus or Arachnotron, and it would look rather silly for the exact same 2-3 Arachnotron corpses taking up the same space on a narrow walkway, especially given how they seem to have static death animations like that of the Mancubus.

On Monday, August 13, 2018 at 6:05 PM, Nanomen said:

 

 

Agreed: I say only "a little disappointing" because I'm not surprised.

Disappearing corpses, especially in a Doom game, bug the fuck out of me. They had last time to figure out how to modernize the Doom formula, now all I want them to do is refine it: not add more new shit like Heaven, lore, new weapons/demons, or whatever they're doing, I got more than enough of that last time. They should just focus on the core Doom elements they had last time and make them feel better (optimizing the game so corpses don't disappear to improve killing, better shooting sfx, faster movement speed, more varied and interesting level design, etc.) and not adding stupid shit *like* the runes and upgrade points and lore and stuff we got last time.

Corpses disappeared in Doom 3. The Archvile not having its resurrecting ability is just awkward. It made it a unique, challenging creature.

Yeah, we all hear you but here's the thing: You either have a good framerate, or you have non-disappearing bodies. They disappear because of optimization, not because they think it's cool.

These performance impact claims are now rendered moot. Keeping bodies gibs etc has very little impact on performance and I can prove it. Behold : https://www.nexusmods.com/doom/mods/16

5 hours ago, KNIGHTMARE077 said:

These performance impact claims are now rendered moot. Keeping bodies gibs etc has very little impact on performance and I can prove it. Behold : https://www.nexusmods.com/doom/mods/16

Consoles must be considered in this equation. A strong PC can theoretically run anything. Consoles cannot. 

30 minutes ago, Super Mighty G said:

 

Consoles must be considered in this equation. A strong PC can theoretically run anything. Consoles cannot. 

Actually, I think @KNIGHTMARE077 may be onto something. 
 

What if just the PC version of DE were to have the option to keep all corpses (or at least have a slider to determine how many corpses can exist in the game world before despawning/a predetermined time for corpses to stay before despawning)?

I bring this up because Wolf: TNO had a very particular way of how it handled corpses in the game world.

On PC/PS4/XB1, corpses seemed to stick around indefinitely (or at least had a counter of how many corpses could exist in the game world because I remember a video that mentioned TNC having a similar corpse counter).
On PS3/360, the count of corpses allowed was much lower (like only one corpse at a time could exist in the game world). Suppose you kill one enemy and his corpse will linger indefinitely, but kill another enemy and the corpse of the previous enemy would vanish while the corpse of the new one will stay (rinse and repeat for every enemy save for the larger enemies like Supersoldaten which seemed to just disappear a few seconds after dying).

9 hours ago, Super Mighty G said:

 

Consoles must be considered in this equation. A strong PC can theoretically run anything. Consoles cannot. 

Obviously this should be a feature for the PC version.

There is also video on the Doom 2016 forum that has the player fighting dozens of barons at the same time.  Seems to have very little performance impact.

These are both great points , wolfenstein indeed kept Corpses. I remember being salty that it did while Doom did not.  Perhaps there is hope Eternal would have a similar option? It's also true the console versions could not and had a hard set limit. As for Doom 2016, I want to find the engine value that controls the amount of total a.i allowed in game. Living or dead. It's in there somewhere. I'm going to see if extracting the game files yields any tangible results. Let's not kid ourselves,  while Eternal is using ID Tech 7, its looks to be a upgraded version of 6 and therefore many of these engine values and names will likely be similar if not identical. What we figure out here may help in not letting Eternal sit out in the world for 3 years without a way to at the very least keep most of the gore etc from burning away.