PSX Doom is actually really good

10 minutes ago, Rudolph said:

Sure, but clearly the developers had yet to figure out how to properly implement the Arch-Vile and the Icon of Sin, so by focusing on developing a complete port of Doom 1 first, maybe they could have given themselves more time to figure out how to do it?

It wasn't that they couldn't figure it out. There wasn't the texture ram for either the Archvile's large number of animation frames or a whopping nine 256x128 patches for the IoS.

7 minutes ago, Jayextee said:

It wasn't that they couldn't figure it out. There wasn't the texture ram for either the Archvile's large number of animation frames or a whopping nine 256x128 patches for the IoS.

So how did the Master Edition manage to include both of them again? From what I understand, the hack can run on actual Playstation hardware.

Without looking at their implementation, couldn't tell you.

2 hours ago, Rudolph said:

So how did the Master Edition manage to include both of them again? From what I understand, the hack can run on actual Playstation hardware.

I couldn't tell you why the Arch-Vile wasn't included but the Icon of Sin was probably not included because it just doesn't make much sense to have it, PS1 Doom is it's own thing. Same reason why there's no Dis or Wolfenstein 3D levels.

Wait, Dis is not in Playstation Doom? Surely, the port could handle a map with a single Spider Mastermind.

19 hours ago, Individualised said:

People say this a lot but... is this actually true? Doom 64 started development soon after Doom 2 was released, in late 1994. Was PSX Doom already in development at that point? It released in late 1995. I get the impression that it was the other way round. Doomwiki seems to explain how this happened; they didn't have a devkit yet so started development on a PlayStation version as a stopgap.

Development did begin in late 1994, but for PS1 Doom, I'm sure development began even earlier - the PS1 released in Japan in December of 1994, so it was fully possible to get PS1 devkits around the time, or even before then.

We'd probably have to ask one of the devs to be sure (sadly, none of them are floating around here anymore), but I know for a fact PS1 Doom was based on the JagDoom codebase. That and it's very silly to develop two totally different branches of the game side-by-side - code is going to be put into one and used in the other, if it's sensible to do so.

PS1 Doom came out first (by over a year - November 1995 for PS1 Doom, March 1997 for Doom 64), so there's really no way the game would be done almost a year and a half later if PS1 Doom were based on the Doom 64 codebase. It just doesn't make logical sense.

19 hours ago, Individualised said:

People say this a lot but... is this actually true? Doom 64 started development soon after Doom 2 was released, in late 1994. Was PSX Doom already in development at that point? It released in late 1995. I get the impression that it was the other way round. Doomwiki seems to explain how this happened; they didn't have a devkit yet so started development on a PlayStation version as a stopgap.

 

That's exactly what I meant by "partial hardware"; it's using the hardware to render things but it's doing it in the way the software renderer would. Though I wasn't sure if it was due to time limits or if it was because of Carmack.

I'd really recommend not using that terminology, as it is extremely confusing.

In a technical sense, hardware rendering is when some sort of specialized graphics chip accelerates the rendering, and software rendering is when the CPU itself is doing all of the graphical processing work. "Partial hardware" conversely implies some of it is hardware, and some of it is software, and that is definitely not the case for PSX Doom. (It is the case in a few other ports, though - IIRC the 3DO version does have acceleration for walls, but the flats still had to be done in software, and that's one of the reasons the 3DO version is so terrible performance-wise.)

It is rendering things like how the PC renderer did it, but that is done fully in hardware. The MIPS CPU of the PS1 has nothing to do with drawing the scene, so calling it "partial hardware" is not only erroneous, it's flat-out wrong.

11 hours ago, Rudolph said:

Sure, but clearly the developers had yet to figure out how to properly implement the Arch-Vile and the Icon of Sin, so by focusing on developing a complete port of Doom 1 first, maybe they could have given themselves more time to figure out how to do it?

 

I mean, 36 maps is still plenty, not to mention the extra post-Thy Flesh Consumed maps.

Doom II and Final Doom were the more relevant games by the time PSX Doom came out; doing a port of just the original game would have seemed silly and old. I mean, the original (Non-Ultimate) version was released on 32X, SNES, Jaguar... a port to the PS1 of just those levels, especially when how much stuff CD-ROMs could hold was frequently a highlight point at the time, would've just seemed backwards.

Also, the reason they couldn't easily implement the Arch-Vile and IoS was simple: Lack of RAM. The PS1 has 2 MB of RAM; after you reserve the chunk necessary to run the game engine, you're left with about 1.6 MB. Your entire level, textures, and so on, must all fit within that space. Sprites have a hardcoded amount of VRAM dedicated to them (about 384 KB, if memory serves), but the problem is the Arch-Vile also has like twice the frames of animation of any other monster, and reducing it would look quite choppy. GEC achieved it, IIRC, by judicious frame cutting as well as reducing the resolution of the sprite (but don't quote me on that).

Icon of Sin is a problem for a similar reason: If you try to load all monster types, or even most of them, in a map, the game will quickly run out of VRAM for sprites and bomb. The solution GEC came up with is that the mapper defines what monsters can spawn, and that's what the IoS spawns on a map that it's on - and only those (though IIRC it can nightmare flag them as well for variety; those take no extra sprites as it's really just a different blending mode).

5 hours ago, Rudolph said:

Wait, Dis is not in Playstation Doom? Surely, the port could handle a map with a single Spider Mastermind.

Dis was indeed not in PSX Doom. And you're forgetting it was more than that - there were also Barons of Hell and Cacos in there. Which is also doable - but it runs into a problem when you're doing a gimmick of "Doom II monsters in Doom I maps."

I did the conversion for Master Edition (please die a lot, it will make me happy), so I can speak in detail about my version of the map, but simply put, I tried to add Pain Elementals to that list and the map ran out of RAM. I had to chop the Cacos to make it work. The Spider Mastermind takes up an INSANE amount of the sprite VRAM space - so dropping one in limits you to one or two other types of monsters, and that's about it.

There's a reason it's used very sparingly - and in official maps where it is used (Redemption Denied comes to mind), that's the reason there is very little monster variety besides the Mastermind.

3 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

Icon of Sin is a problem for a similar reason: If you try to load all monster types, or even most of them, in a map, the game will quickly run out of VRAM for sprites and bomb. The solution GEC came up with is that the mapper defines what monsters can spawn, and that's what the IoS spawns on a map that it's on - and only those (though IIRC it can nightmare flag them as well for variety; those take no extra sprites as it's really just a different blending mode).

They must have also reduced the size of the IOS wall textures quite a bit, as if I'm not mistaken with nine 256x128 patches in PC Doom, it alone would take about 150% of the available VRAM space usually allocated to wall textures. And there's the animated lava brain hole, plus the whole rest of the level to account for, too.

Picture from opening post of Master Edition thread, in the nested spoilers about VRAM stuff.

5 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

Dis was indeed not in PSX Doom. And you're forgetting it was more than that - there were also Barons of Hell and Cacos in there. Which is also doable - but it runs into a problem when you're doing a gimmick of "Doom II monsters in Doom I maps."

But according to the Doom wiki, Redemption Denied features not only a bunch of Barons of Hell but also two Spider Masterminds.

Does it not make it a lot more resource-intensive than Dis?

5 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

Doom II and Final Doom were the more relevant games by the time PSX Doom came out; doing a port of just the original game would have seemed silly and old. I mean, the original (Non-Ultimate) version was released on 32X, SNES, Jaguar... a port to the PS1 of just those levels, especially when how much stuff CD-ROMs could hold was frequently a highlight point at the time, would've just seemed backwards.

That is fair, but like I said, they could have always compensated with a more faithful port and more original maps. I mean, to this day, PC players still have to purchase Doom II separately, so I do see how even a conservative port of the Ultimate Doom would have suffered by comparison.

5 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

GEC achieved it, IIRC, by judicious frame cutting as well as reducing the resolution of the sprite (but don't quote me on that). 

 

Icon of Sin is a problem for a similar reason: If you try to load all monster types, or even most of them, in a map, the game will quickly run out of VRAM for sprites and bomb. The solution GEC came up with is that the mapper defines what monsters can spawn, and that's what the IoS spawns on a map that it's on - and only those (though IIRC it can nightmare flag them as well for variety; those take no extra sprites as it's really just a different blending mode).

Oh, so Williams could have pulled it off back then, but they ultimately chose not to?

Or does that approach require some special knowledge that the developers may not have had at the time?

10 minutes ago, Rudolph said:

But according to the Doom wiki, Redemption Denied features not only a bunch of Barons of Hell but also two Spider Masterminds. 

 

Does it not make it a lot more resource-intensive than Dis?

No. As far as VRAM use is concerned, it doesn't matter whether you have one big spider or ten thousands; as long as they all use the same sprites, there's only one instance of the sprite set in VRAM.

So spider + baron < spider + baron + caco.

8 minutes ago, Gez said:

No. As far as VRAM use is concerned, it doesn't matter whether you have one big spider or ten thousands; as long as they all use the same sprites, there's only one instance of the sprite set in VRAM.

 

So spider + baron < spider + baron + caco.

Oh! So they still could have made Dis run on Playstation by just removing the Cacodemons?

Yeah, probably.

3 minutes ago, Rudolph said:

Oh! So they still could have made Dis run on Playstation by just removing the Cacodemons?

Yeah. But they decided to keep the spider for the big finale, so they ended the "Doom episode" with Threshold of Pain (six pain elementals and a bunch of Hell knights) and put Redemption Denied as the end of the "Doom II" episode instead of the Icon of Sin.

Well, regardless, it is nice to see modders finishing what Williams has started, so to speak!

13 hours ago, Gez said:

They must have also reduced the size of the IOS wall textures quite a bit, as if I'm not mistaken with nine 256x128 patches in PC Doom, it alone would take about 150% of the available VRAM space usually allocated to wall textures. And there's the animated lava brain hole, plus the whole rest of the level to account for, too.

Yeah. I know they're reduced-rez. They basically chopped up the wall into eight 128x128 segments; you can see this easily via PsyDoom when you load up Icon of Sin and then use the VRAM viewer cheat (idram, or F7 if you've enabled the developer cheat shortcuts).

The wall, for the record, takes up 2/3rds of the entire space set aside for textures as a result - it can generally hold up to 12 128x128 textures. GEC used a trick as of Beta 4 that let it be up to 13, though.

This is the reason why a LOT of PSX Doom textures are 64, 32, or even 16 wide.

12 hours ago, Rudolph said:

But according to the Doom wiki, Redemption Denied features not only a bunch of Barons of Hell but also two Spider Masterminds.

 

Does it not make it a lot more resource-intensive than Dis?

As far as sprites are concerned, it only matters if it's loaded into the level or not. Tracking each individual monster does require a miniscule amount of RAM to account for its position, HP, etc. but otherwise, there's no difference between loading one Mastermind or a hundred, because they all use the same sprites.

The TYPES of monsters matter, but the AMOUNTS, not really. (To a point, of course - there is still a hard limit on how many Things can be inside of a map.)

12 hours ago, Rudolph said:

That is fair, but like I said, they could have always compensated with a more faithful port and more original maps. I mean, to this day, PC players still have to purchase Doom II separately, so I do see how even a conservative port of the Ultimate Doom would have suffered by comparison.

But the JagDoom codebase is what was shopped around, and that version had cut-down maps. In fact, the only contemporary port that did NOT have the cut-down maps was, ironically, the SNES port, because its developer reverse-engineered the game from the PC version, as opposed to starting with a codebase designed for weaker systems in mind.

Also, keep in mind that even if the geometry can be more faithful, texturing almost certainly wouldn't have been. Even if you included every single texture the PC versions had, there's simply not enough VRAM to include every map in perfect fidelity. If the PS1 had 4 MB of RAM or so, it might be a different story.

Note that this isn't a problem unique to Doom - a lot of games suffered. Street Fighter Alpha 3, for example, had tons of its animation frames cut from all sorts of character animations. The Sega Saturn version, on the other hand, had near-perfect Arcade animations with only very minor cuts - but the difference there is that the game required an add-on cartridge to be plugged into the Saturn's rarely-used cartridge slot, and that cartridge added 4 MB of RAM to the system. The game would refuse to run without the extra RAM.

Basically the only maps where you can get away with near-perfect texturing is maps where a lot of variety wasn't used in the first place. My conversion of Dis is a pretty solid example; I actually had leftover texture room and so was able to make use of some extra textures (most of which was in the new central "pedastal" and the exit room). Other conversions of mine, like Bloodsea Keep, weren't so fortunate. :)

12 hours ago, Rudolph said:

Oh, so Williams could have pulled it off back then, but they ultimately chose not to?

 

Or does that approach require some special knowledge that the developers may not have had at the time?

I mean, theoretically they could have. But the thing with commercial game dev is that getting the game out on time is the #1 priority - and this would be especially true for Doom, since by the time that came out on PS1, Quake was already making the news and would be hitting PC very shortly (June 1996), and everyone knew the PS1 was capable of pushing 3D so basically, a delay on Doom could have been catastrophic.

With infinite time and resources, you can iron out all sorts of stuff, like the texture stretch issue GEC fixed and so on. But of course, you don't have that luxury as a commercial game dev - you've got a budget, you've got a deadline, and they'd damn well better be met - even if that means cutting features, accuracy, or functionality.

18 minutes ago, Dark Pulse said:

I mean, theoretically they could have. But the thing with commercial game dev is that getting the game out on time is the #1 priority - and this would be especially true for Doom, since by the time that came out on PS1, Quake was already making the news and would be hitting PC very shortly (June 1996), and everyone knew the PS1 was capable of pushing 3D so basically, a delay on Doom could have been catastrophic.

 

With infinite time and resources, you can iron out all sorts of stuff, like the texture stretch issue GEC fixed and so on. But of course, you don't have that luxury as a commercial game dev - you've got a budget, you've got a deadline, and they'd damn well better be met - even if that means cutting features, accuracy, or functionality.

I hear you. :(

As I said in the comment above, it is cool to see people like you finding the time and energy to finish what Williams started!

1 hour ago, Dark Pulse said:

But the JagDoom codebase is what was shopped around, and that version had cut-down maps. In fact, the only contemporary port that did NOT have the cut-down maps was, ironically, the SNES port, because its developer reverse-engineered the game from the PC version, as opposed to starting with a codebase designed for weaker systems in mind.

Saturn Doom was going to have PC maps as it was originally a port of the PC codebase before the situation with Carmack happened.

47 minutes ago, Individualised said:

Saturn Doom was going to have PC maps as it was originally a port of the PC codebase before the situation with Carmack happened.

Well aware of that, but we're not talking about "what was supposed to happen." The end result was not that, and that's all that matters.

Just now, Dark Pulse said:

Well aware of that, but we're not talking about "what was supposed to happen." The end result was not that, and that's all that matters.

I wasn't refuting your post, I was simply providing additional info.

On 5/31/2023 at 7:43 PM, Individualised said:

Saturn Doom was going to have PC maps as it was originally a port of the PC codebase before the situation with Carmack happened.

The situation with Carmack?

4 hours ago, PhoxFyre007 said:

The situation with Carmack?

I think he refers to that situation, where Carmack gave the direction for the Sega Saturn version, that the software renderer must be used.

On 6/6/2023 at 3:05 AM, PhoxFyre007 said:

The situation with Carmack?

In a nutshell: The lead programmer on the Saturn version (Jim Bagley) had a fully hardware-accelerated, 60 FPS renderer running. However, a common problem of consoles at the time was that there was no sort of perspective correction on textures in hardware, so usually affine perspective was used - which, famously, causes the texture to shift and warp depending on the angle, but it's extremely fast.

Carmack was very keen on making sure the game's presentation was as good as possible, so he naturally hated this texture swim and vetoed it, demanding Bagley render the game much like the PC version did it. This immediately solved the swim, but in turn, absolutely destroyed framerate, because it was all rendered on the CPUs instead of the Saturn's very fast VDPs - and of course, the SH-2s inside the Saturn weren't even remotely comparable to a 486 DX, much less the Pentiums that were starting to appear in PCs at the time.

Years later, Carmack did a mea culpa and admitted he probably should've let Jim see if he could come up with an alternative solution first.

For what it's worth, the PS1 also has no perspective-correct texturing; on the PS1 version, this was worked around by rendering the scene as pixel-wide polygonal strips. This is also why really large areas tank that particular version's framerate, as well. Later games tended to get around this problem by increasing the subdivision of polygonal surfaces as you got closer, which minimized the amount of swim that a texture could do.

I take it that it has since been essentially achieved by PsyDoom?

1 hour ago, Rudolph said:

I take it that it has since been essentially achieved by PsyDoom?

I think PsyDoom is doing things fundamentally differently due to Vulkan for its hardware renderer, but the classic renderer should be fairly close to PS1 since, IIRC, it emulates the PS1 GPU to some extent or another. But in either case, modern processors are so fast that it would be able to use raw horsepower to run it faster than the PS1 itself could have in hardware.

1 minute ago, Dark Pulse said:

I think PsyDoom is doing things fundamentally differently due to Vulkan for its hardware renderer, but the classic renderer should be fairly close to PS1 since, IIRC, it emulates the PS1 GPU to some extent or another. But in either case, modern processors are so fast that it would be able to use raw horsepower to run it faster than the PS1 itself could have in hardware.

Well, I meant it is making a console port of Doom run smoothly with a good framerate. I know it is not quite the same, but you know...

Just now, Rudolph said:

Well, I meant it is making a console port of Doom run smoothly with a good framerate. I know it is not quite the same, but you know...

Well yeah, by that logic, of course it's probably the way to play, unless you enjoy things close to how the original PSX experience was, framerate and all :P

47 minutes ago, Dark Pulse said:

Well yeah, by that logic, of course it's probably the way to play, unless you enjoy things close to how the original PSX experience was, framerate and all :P

And these days, you can play the Unity ports on consoles. :P

Also, I was reminded that the OG Xbox port of Doom came packaged with Doom I and II - which is where No Rest For The Living originated as well as the now quasi-canonical integration of E1M10: Sewers and MAP33: Betray, if I am not mistaken.

I assume those two were a step up from the Playstation and Saturn ports?

2 minutes ago, Rudolph said:

Also, I was reminded that the OG Xbox port of Doom came packaged with Doom I and II - which is where No Rest For The Living originated

No it came from the Xbox 360 release of Doom2.

18 minutes ago, Edward850 said:

No it came from the Xbox 360 release of Doom2.

Oh, right. Thank you. I got them confused.

But Doom I and II did get ported to the OG Xbox, I see: https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Xbox

@Dark Pulse Oh, I just wanted to let you know that I finally got to play your remake of Dis. It was quite good!

I would even call it an improvement over the PC one, as the Spider Mastermind gets to have a climactic reveal rather than just waiting in a corner. :D

46 minutes ago, Rudolph said:

@Dark Pulse Oh, I just wanted to let you know that I finally got to play your remake of Dis. It was quite good!

 

I would even call it an improvement over the PC one, as the Spider Mastermind gets to have a climactic reveal rather than just waiting in a corner. :D

Glad to hear you liked it! And yeah, I did kind of hate that element of the original.

If it killed you as well (part of the goal was to make it more challenging by letting it control more of the map and narrowing down the totally safe spots), then I've done good. :)

Of course, if you played continuous, you could still just brain it with a few BFG shots, but there's nothing I can do about that. :P

Mini Duel Tournament on Playstation DOOM (using link-cable)