Streached monsters

[Shapeless]

I remember reading a long time ago that doom is displayed in a form that's strached on peoples monitors. so the characters in particular look short and wide. I was wondering how could I play the game the way the developers vishioned it? and how could I view pics of monsters without the midget syndrome?

[Mindless Rambler]

change the resolution? just a guess.

[Udderdude]

Try out Chocolate Doom, or set your resolution to 320x200 or 640x400.

[Enjay]

The characters in Doom are short and wide. Just compare the relative dimensions of the sprites. Or maybe try importing regularly proportioned sprites from another game into Doom and see how tall and skinny they look.

Perhaps you are thinking of another effect that was available in early versions of Doom, the -left and -right parameters. This allowed you to set up an IPX network game and, using those parameters, have a monitor to the left and one to the right of your normal play monitor to give you "wrap around" vision.

[myk]

It's a matter of screen resolution ratios; Windows often uses "1.333..." while Doom uses "1.6" (VGA Mode 13h.) So when you run a 320x200 window in a "1.333..." environment, the shorter pixel height makes DOOM, or its resources in an editing utility, look a bit squat.

Most modern released source based engines have Windows-like resolutions which render things a bit differently than Mode 13h, but the authors have made sure that the sprites scale properly while running the game (at least in full screen mode.)

[Shapeless]

alright I'll reinstall this game on my new Mombo. but how can I tell exactly how correct they are? they aren't very realistic to begin with. deffinitly on full screen, does the status bar make it different? I always play full screen anyway.

thanks for all the help :)

[myk]

They should be correct in most cases; only the first few non-id engines to use hi res (namely DOSDoom and WinDoom) rendered things incorrectly on some (desktop) resolutions; official engines or any newer engines shouldn't have issues. If you're want to make things completely perfect, use 320x200 or 640x400 resolutions.

On the other hand, if you're going to take screen shots to use in a desktop environment, use 640x480, or any other similarly proportioned resolution.

When I took screen shots for the /newstuff Chronicles with the standard Doom (320x200 res) I resized the shots to 640x480 so that they would look right in a web browser.