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Why Does E1's sky not look like a Mars Moon?

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This was something I didn't get, It reminded me of something you would see in a Mountainous forest or something. Never once has it reminded of a mars moon.

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Same here, it's a great sky but not martian enough, not really matching the intermission background.

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I always figured the entire base was under a dome with an atmosphere and terraformed land. The real answer is that they tried a realistic black sky and it sucked compared to the final sky.

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One thing I noticed:

E1 sky is gray with gray mountains, E1 intermission ground is brown
E2 sky is red with brown mountains, E2 intermission ground is gray

Uhhh

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Why are you still trying to make sense of Doom?

This game is from a time when gameplay was more important than realism and in my opinion that's a good thing.

A 'proper' Phobos sky would have sucked visually for these levels.

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Graf Zahl said:

A 'proper' Phobos sky would have sucked visually for these levels.

Wouldn't a proper Phobos sky have a big Mars above? Actually, it happened in KDiZD. I wonder if there, the Mars disc was at the correct apparent size.

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Depends on where you are on Phobos. If you are on the opposite side there wouldn't be any Mars to see.

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They used a photography of the Yangshuo County in China.

They didn't find any photography of the skyline in Phobos, probably because there aren't any photographer who traveled to Mars' moons and back before putting their photos on a Media Clips CD-ROM freely allowing redistribution of selected parts of the content, so they didn't use that.

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Gez said:

They didn't find any photography of the skyline in Phobos, probably because there aren't any photographer who traveled to Mars' moons and back before putting their photos on a Media Clips CD-ROM freely allowing redistribution of selected parts of the content, so they didn't use that.

Not even probes?

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Graf Zahl said:

Why are you still trying to make sense of Doom?


Because then we will understand the meaning of life and all the rest.

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All answers are in the Code of Doom. Read it, and be enlightened!

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If it was accurate for Phobos, the sky would be black, as there is no atmosphere.

I think I actually remember reading something about this - in an interview with John Romero or one of the other members of the Id team. I think they explained that they tried a black sky and it just looked unpleasant, so they switched to something more aesthetically pleasing. I don't remember where I read it now, though. Perhaps someone else will have a better memory.

EDIT: The Press Release beta had a black sky. I think there may have been a comment about it in the Doom post-mortem.

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I think it's because after the doomguy got moved to Mars for insubordination. He took pills to alleviate the pain of not being at home.

The side-effect of these pills was unfortunately hallucinations. Story has shown that shortly after a persistent hallucination where he thought he was on Earth, he killed everyone on the base, thinking they were "demons" and "zombiemen".

It could have been great for tabloids back on Earth, but unfortunately for them too, he came back to his home city, killing everyone on the starport and sending survivors in space without destination and food.

It didn't end well for him either when his killing spree came to an end in the sewers, his arm stuck in an hole while being underwater.

tl;dr: pills. That's why the sky looks like he was on Earth.

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Although it was obviously an aesthetic choice, you could handwave it as the UAC terraforming Phobos. There is after all a terraformer in Doom64.

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The problem with the terraforming hypothesis is that those mountains would be larger than Phobos itself, if they were in perspective.

Edit: well, maybe not. They are actually small enough to "fit" as the borders of Phobos' largest crater...barely. So it truly is a sort of Doomguy's microcosm, where the "mountains" are nothing but small Karst peaks :-)

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Well, the moon is so small the entire base would float of into space anyway, so who cares? Phobos seems to have Earth gravity in-game, or what passes for Earth gravity in Doom when it really shouldn't :L

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In the context apparent in Doom, those barren and unusually shaped mountains look alien enough to me. I was a bit disappointed to find out it's just Phobos, I expected a grander planet.

The Deimos mountains are of course even less fitting of the smaller rock that's Deimos. They also have an unexplainable evilness to them, probably because they're easily associated with scary maps like E2M8.

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fraggle said:

If it was accurate for Phobos, the sky would be black, as there is no atmosphere.

Also, Doomguy wouldn't be walking around outside.

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qoncept said:

Also, Doomguy wouldn't be walking around outside.


Yes he would. Watch the end of Total Recall dude.

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printz said:

The Deimos mountains are of course even less fitting of the smaller rock that's Deimos. They also have an unexplainable evilness to them, probably because they're easily associated with scary maps like E2M8.


Well, you are floating above Hell's surface. And how in the world can we explain a moon that vanished out of orbit?

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The terraforming process must have added considerable mass to Phobos, in order to allow it to retain an atmosphere for a practical length of time and giving it mountains. This would also increase its escape velocity such that vehicles driving on a particularly hilly surface wouldn't accidentally launch themselves into space (I'm not sure if humans could do it by jumping even now -- although that would explain why the Doomguy never jumps :-) ).

The setting for E1 must be on the far side of Phobos, as seen from Mars (like our Moon, Phobos always presents the same side to its planet's surface) -- otherwise there'd be a giant red planet taking up half the sky. That would seem to exclude Stickney as the location, as it's on the Mars-facing side (or at least implied to be by Wikipedia, which states the L1 point is just above the crater). Or maybe the additional mass also changed the rotational dynamics and we just happen to be on the non-Martian (but Sun-facing) side while playing the game.

Or maybe it's the demonic influence...

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Johan entered the base, for he knew there were demons. His great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandfather knew there would be demons.

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Vordakk said:

Yes he would. Watch the end of Total Recall dude.

That was Mars, not Phobos. And the graphics is all wrong. Psh!

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qoncept said:

Also, Doomguy wouldn't be walking around outside.

In fact, he wouldn't be walking at all, because Phobos is so small that its gravity is pretty negligible.

fraggle said:

EDIT: The Press Release beta had a black sky. I think there may have been a comment about it in the Doom post-mortem.

I was right: they answered this very question. Skip to 46:20 in the video.

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The sky is an image displayed on a big dome around the base to make the people living there to feel less homesick.

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