Digital Foundry's Technical Analysis of Doom 1-3 Release

[deepthaw]

Digital Foundry did their expected frame counting and resolution measuring for their review of the recent release of Doom 1-3 for PS4/XBone/Switch

 

 

TLDR;

 

• Doom 1 & 2 were apparently ported to C# then used Unity as a wrapper.
• Game runs at 35fps, which means you have frame judder since it won't divide into 60hz smoothly.
• It's not rendering at a resolution that scales to 1080p exactly, so scaling artifacts appear in the graphics.
• Sound's messed up.

 

• Doom 3's pretty great on all platforms. PS4/XBone are perfect with no issues.
• Switch version sees occasional frame drops, but sticks to 60fps most of the time.

 

Won't bother going into the BNet crap since they're supposedly changing how that works...

Edited July 31, 2019 by deepthaw

[Bauul]

I'm relatively impressed DF managed to touch on the vast majority of the engine issues.  They covered pretty much everything I had heard was wrong with them.

[Linguica]

I eagle-eyed some other very rudimentary bugs you get when making a port from scratch. The lighting issues are because the flat lighting uses SCREENWIDTH in a calculation, so unless you notice and fix that, the lighting gets screwed up. I also noticed that the port has significant wall wiggle, which I suppose should have been obvious.

[EANB]

Most of the issues in this port have simply accumulated over the years from the other "modern" ports. The BFG edition has the same broken lighting, framerate, slowed down music (something which itself inherited from the XBLA version), content removal (red crosses, nazis) and slightly broken Nightmare functionality (monsters and projectiles are not fast). Not to say that they are exonerated from not fixing these issues just because someone before them fucked it up.

 

Here's a shot of the lighting from the PC BFG edition. It's not quite as bad as the PS4 version, which makes sense if screenwidth is a factor as it's locked to a lower resolution. Playing the Switch in handheld mode also reduces the issue.

 

 

 

[FreakZoneGames]

Exactly, it’s issues are mostly accumulative from prior ports. It’s still probably the most accurate console port we have though. I’m weird but I actually like the 16:10 aspect ratio, it feels better to me seeing pixel perfect sprites, like I got used to from Doom95, Doom Legacy and later the GBA version, and having the TV almost filled up is great. But I can see why some people are annoyed at that too.

 

35fps is how the original Doom runs but, yeah, monitors are 70Hz so it divides evenly with good frame timing, while TVs and consoles tend to do 60.

 

An update just came out removing the mandatory sign in, however mine automatically signs in to the account I created after downloading, and I see no sign out option.

[Danfun64]

How is this more accurate than the BFG engine? One example of being less accurate is the replacement of the pickup font for some reason.

[FreakZoneGames]

On 8/15/2019 at 8:14 PM, Danfun64 said:

How is this more accurate than the BFG engine? One example of being less accurate is the replacement of the pickup font for some reason.

I was thinking more things like the menus. I like how they kept the PC fonts and the pixel art look for them unlike the previous ports.

[LadyVader1138]

Is it me or is the shotgun sound in it louder than usual?

[VGA]

Played this yesterday on a PS4 on local coop ... The goddamn viewports of the players are too small! He has a yuge screen and it felt like we were playing in poststamp-sized windows ... so much space wasted on all 4 directions  /facepalm

 

Also, something was up, the framerate was not smooth, probably? Because the turning speed (with the analogs) felt inconsistent to me.

[Eurisko]

Digital Foundry have released another vid today. 
Check it out.

 

 

[ketmar]

bethesda actually invested some efforts into fixing their releases?! did i fell into some alternative reality while i was asleep?

 

anyway, great work, Nerve!

[Boaby Kenobi]

It takes a special level of stupidity from Bethesda to release games from almost 30 years ago in a broken state. Bethesda of old would probably have tried to make contact with the authors of some of the sourceports and asked them if they had any advice on how to bring the games to modern consoles.

I used to love Bethesda games and I genuinely looked forward to its new releases. Like I remember years ago when Skyrim was about to be launched, I booked a week off so I could delve into a new Elder Scrolls game but now I'm actually worried about TES VI.

[ketmar]

i believe that Nerve programmers are competent enough to make it right by themselves. bethesda just rushed the release (as b. always does), so Nerve hadn't enough time to polish the code. now they got some time, and hey, they did it almost perfectly!

[Boaby Kenobi]

It doesn't matter who's doing what now to "fix" the games, it's still stupidity and greed on Bethesda's part. These games were already released for Xbox 360 and PS3 and those ports were pretty good, although for me the sounds constantly changing pitch is annoying, so I would have thought there would be no issues for further releases.

 

Doom runs on pretty much anything so I don't see why there are issues with the games when they're released again, especially since it's official releases from Bethesda.

[Quasar]

The majority of problems that the Doom 1 & 2 ports had at launch were already present in the Xbox, Xbox 360, and BFG Edition versions. Why people are engaging in selective memory and calling those ports "good" or even "better" is baffling to me. They also had incorrect aspect ratio, music that was too slow, exaggerated random sound pitch, incorrect floor and ceiling lighting, NO access to cheat codes, multiplayer on consoles ONLY, no proper Nightmare skill level, etc. All of this has been documented on the wiki for literal decades now. The error wasn't so much doing a "lazy" port job this time as it was believing/assuming they had a fairly good codebase in place to work off already. It's not as if they were even aware of some of these problems until they were pointed out, and they were created a long time ago by people who work at *none* of id, Bethesda, or Nerve in a lot of cases (a lot of them are to blame, if "blame" must be placed, on Vicarious Visions, a long time ago). Like, why would you even think to check if your music is too slow? You'd just assume it must be right because who in the world would record it at nearly half speed to begin with?! And think about how the people who missed that feel now after the fact. Not good already I'm sure, w/o being yelled at about it after it's been fixed even by randos on the Internet.

 

Some people act as if though the source ports we have now sprung fully formed from the minds of their lead programmers a year after the source code for Doom was released. Couldn't be less correct or less true. They've had ~20 years of constant hobbyist development focused on them intensely. Of course they're going to be superior - you cannot even buy that kind of attention on any kind of project for what the game industry pays. And Bethesda isn't allowed to refer to the code for them, because they're not under licenses that would be compatible with release on consoles or platforms like iOS, so there goes that option.

 

Could they have contracted community coders for the project? Yeah, and that would have been smart, but I am guessing their higher ups in charge didn't know about or weren't apt to consider that kind of option. They prefer in-house work first, and then external partnerships where they make sense (such as what we did for Doom 64 at NDS). It's the natural way of commercial devs and publishers. Seems with AlexMax being brought in to help with interpolation, they're warming up to the concept at least.

 

What we have now, regardless of its launch state, is definitely the best release of Doom since the originals, exceeding prior console efforts and the old Doom 95 by miles, and this is thanks to a load of additional effort by people like sponge who definitely really care about the game. If Bethesda was going to be that greedy, they'd not have greenlit any additional patch work on the game and just settled for what I am sure was the bulk of sales it already got at launch. And, we'd be stuck with a much less stellar product.

Edited January 21, 2020 by Quasar

[VGA]

Ahem.

 

 

I enjoyed the video. By the way, the Doom 3 gameplay shows one of my greatest dislikes about it, shooting an enemy with a shotgun in the face does not stun them and they finish their attack, unless it actually kills them. Infuriating.

 

By the way, fuck that Bethesda login requirement. And how did the purchase of Doom 3 for the Nvidia Shield get lost? It was ... removed from the store? Huh??!!

[Danfun64]

On 1/21/2020 at 6:24 AM, Quasar said:

The majority of problems that the Doom 1 & 2 ports had at launch were already present in the Xbox, Xbox 360, and BFG Edition versions. Why people are engaging in selective memory and calling those ports "good" or even "better" is baffling to me.

I never played the new ports or any of the console versions, but I heard one person say that the controls were best in the Xbox 360 version and inferior in both the PS3 and Unity ports. Perhaps something about the analog controls being true analog in the Xbox 360 version and not so much with the other two.

[Edward850]

44 minutes ago, Danfun64 said:

Perhaps something about the analog controls being true analog in the Xbox 360 version and not so much with the other two.

No. 

[Allard]

On 1/21/2020 at 3:24 PM, Quasar said:

The majority of problems that the Doom 1 & 2 ports had at launch were already present in the Xbox, Xbox 360, and BFG Edition versions. Why people are engaging in selective memory and calling those ports "good" or even "better" is baffling to me. They also had incorrect aspect ratio, music that was too slow, exaggerated random sound pitch, incorrect floor and ceiling lighting, NO access to cheat codes, multiplayer on consoles ONLY, no proper Nightmare skill level, etc.

As an owner of the PS3 DOOM Classic Complete - it only had half of that. The music wasn't slow and the aspect ratio was correct, plus it had more content. It was better than the Unity ports were on launch. Not so much these days.

[Devalaous]

The PSN port did suffer from really bad menu lag though, which got worse and worse the longer you played.

 

[VGA]

Why do some of the official ports have the random sound pitch bug? Did they inherit it from vanilla and just didn't fix it?

[Edward850]

30 minutes ago, VGA said:

Why do some of the official ports have the random sound pitch bug? Did they inherit it from vanilla and just didn't fix it?

I was not aware of any bugs related to the random sound pitching other than it being accidentally absent from later versions of Doom starting from v1.4. Is there another issue the wiki doesn't have documented?

[VGA]

Quasar above stated that the older Xbox etc ports had exaggerated random sound pitch, how did that happen?

 

Also, why does the doomwiki call it a feature when it originally was a bug in the DOS version? I am confused.

[Edward850]

18 minutes ago, VGA said:

Also, why does the doomwiki call it a feature when it originally was a bug in the DOS version? I am confused.

Simplest answer as always is the correct one: Random sound pitch was a (somewhat*) intended feature, not a bug.

 

*So it was experimental and Romero didn't like it, but it was intended.

[seed]

16 hours ago, Edward850 said:

Simplest answer as always is the correct one: Random sound pitch was a (somewhat*) intended feature, not a bug.

 

*So it was experimental and Romero didn't like it, but it was intended.

 

This.

 

Randomized sound pitches were a feature specific to the old versions of Doom, present up until version 1.4 when DMX failed to account for some changes in the Doom codebase, and the root cause was never identified at the time.

 

But it was never a "full" feature though, as explained by Romero, when it was originally added it was experimental, and the sound effects were not designed with it in mind either. It's existence was absolutely not a bug though, that's just plain inaccurate.

[Gez]

2 hours ago, seed said:

until version 1.4 when DMX failed to account for some changes in the Doom codebase

Other way around, IIRC: DMX had some changes in its API but on Doom's side they didn't update the code correctly.

 

A few years ago people found several leaked copies of DMX at various versions, and comparing them solved this old mystery.