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idSoftware981

Anything to make DOOM a little bit newer?!

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Just wondering. I mean anything that makes the sprites look much more newer and actually resizes and basically... you know what I'm saying. You see this Marathon 2 Durandal video?!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TodUVUydYFQ


Is there anything like that for DOOM?! I mean as in Shader Support, Hi-Res Sprites (not 3D models which are TERRIBLE) and Hi-Res Weapon Sprites?! Anything?! Sorry if I sound like a N00B. I'm just asking. Thanks.

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There have been several "hi res sprite" projects. Some (let's call them Type A) were mostly half-assed attempts done with a photoshop-like resizing filter. Some (let's call them Type B) were more ambitious and managed to maybe redraw/retouch by hand a few of the thousands of frames needed, only for the authors to realize that at the pace of 1 frame per day, they will maybe finish in 10 years, before giving up.

These were doubly pointless IMO: both methods are too labor intensive and the end result will be only compatible with very specific ports, especially if true colour support comes into play.

Plus, hardware accelerated ports can apply "photoshop filtering" in real time, thus making Type A approaches pointless, and high quality 3D models so far have looked much better than even the best hand-drawn/retouched sprites I've seen.

N.B.: there are some very high quality 3D models around which however are not currently used/usable in any of the current ports, unless the Doom Ascension project has made any progress.

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I don't think that our Ascension models are "TERIBBLE" but you might have meant that 3d models are terrible in general. If you don't mind 3d models you might find some interest in DoomAscension.com. FYI the marathon 2 sprites are 3d models that are converted (couldn't come up with a better word just then) into hi-res sprites.

That link that Maes provided is severely outdated and is full of broken links that i'm too lazy to go back and fix. I'm also one of those who isn't very interested in showing progress very often so there isn't a lot to show.

The biggest problem with Ascension is that the mod/mods are not ready for release and nothing will be publicly released until they are all finished.

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There are plenty of various enhancement stuff around here. Some source ports feature OpenGL rendering, full mouse looking, jumping/crouching, dynamic lighting, basic shadow rendering, blood splat decals, bullet holes, particle effects, splashing water (like in Heretic and Hexen), 3D models, interpolated monster movement, hi resolution textures, music remixes, high resolution sounds, smoother sprite animations for weapons, etc.

Using most of these things will eventually make Doom look like this.



Whether or not it looks good is up to your discretion. Depending on what source port you like to play with, you can have most of these things on source ports like JDoom, GZDoom, and Skulltag.

All these enhancements are made by various people and are not all bundled up in one package, so you'll probably be linked to various doom threads and forums and web pages for downloads, and deal with different installation procedures to get them all functional together. It's not too complicated if you're willing to read though. The convenient part of it though is that if you don't like certain features, it's easy to have some and not others. It'll help us get you on the right track if you mention which source port you are currently using and we can direct you where to go from there.

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Personally I find jDoom, with the "high res" environment textures but with the original sprites hits a visual sweet spot between classic Doom and revamped classic Doom. But this is a highly subjective topic.

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I think the reason why there hasn't been any shader/bloom support for today's source ports is because the majority of users here run off of ancient laptops with intel-integrated graphics chip with minimal features.

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I haven't seen a 3D model pack that hasn't made Doom look, at best, Chasm: The Rift.

Doom is like Super Mario World; the artwork is charming if you have an open enough mind to fit a flies balls through.

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Technician said:

Doom is like Super Mario World; the artwork is charming if you have an open enough mind to fit a flies balls through.

I always want to reply with a sentiment like this whenever someone wants to make Doom look more contemporary. I just don't understand the need to totally bastardise the classic look of the game.

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Kaiser said:

I think the reason why there hasn't been any shader/bloom support for today's source ports is because the majority of users here run off of ancient laptops with intel-integrated graphics chip with minimal features.

Well blow me down. I find that quite surprising. I understand that classic Doomers would use older computers, but are they really expected to be mostly laptops? What, do Doomers travel so much? I hate to think that most of Doom's active community works on underpowered portables (like the one I'm typing this on, but I also have a good enough Windows desktop).

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printz said:

Well blow me down. I find that quite surprising. I understand that classic Doomers would use older computers, but are they really expected to be mostly laptops? What, do Doomers travel so much? I hate to think that most of Doom's active community works on underpowered portables (like the one I'm typing this on, but I also have a good enough Windows desktop).


I play on an Intel Atom D525. My other computer is a P3 which still runs 98SE.

PrBoom in GL mode draws faster than in software mode however.

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Technician said:

I haven't seen a 3D model pack that hasn't made Doom look, at best, Chasm: The Rift.


I don't know if what you just said is a complement or an insult in some manner (And lack of better wording on my part).

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Technician said:

I haven't seen a 3D model pack that hasn't made Doom look, at best, Chasm: The Rift.

I'll take that as a compliment... although this statement makes me think you aren't aware of the Doom Ascension project. Of course it could just be that I have blinders on the way that parent's with ugly children do. Maybe my models do look like that. For the record, I love the look of that game.

Technician said:

Doom is like Super Mario World; the artwork is charming if you have an open enough mind to fit a flies balls through.

... I can't disagree with that statement no matter how hard I try.

DoomUK said:

I just don't understand the need to totally bastardise the classic look of the game.

It is more simple than it seems. We do it because we love doing it. I'm under no delusions that I "bastardize" doom in order to improve the Doom community in any way. I do it for myself.

I can relate to what you said though. I think the same thing quite frequently when I download someones map and think something along the lines of "Why would someone want to bastardize doom in this way.". It is probably wrong to think that way because they didn't really make that map to insult me. The best part is that I can delete it and pretend it never happened. I'm sure many people will do the same thing with Doom Ascension once it is finally available for download.

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Nice to see DA has made some progress, but in all honesty that pinky demon model is terrible, mainly in that it doesn't resemble the original sprite's style at all. When I think of a pinky demon I think of a big, stupid pissed off gorilla. If it looks like it has an IQ above that of a boiled lobster, you've failed.

And last I checked, computer chips weren't the size of a package of ramen noodles.

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Marnetmar said:

And last I checked, computer chips weren't the size of a package of ramen noodles.

They are in Doom. Heh.

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40oz said:

Using most of these things will eventually make Doom look like this.

Problem with mods like this, in my opinion, is that they change Doom from being an awesome old game to a really mediocre modern game.

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That seems odd to me. I don't mean that in a confrontational tone, I just don't understand and would like to. Does that mean the original art is such an important part of the entire experience to you you find much less appeal in the game with higher res resources of a lower "subjective" quality, or is your enjoyment of Doom solely determined by the art, and the game itself bad by modern standards? Or something else entirely?

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I'm pretty sure the high-res pack and model pack are enough to make DOOM look modern - I think models are more moderny than hi-res sprites.

Still, the hrp and models could be a lot better. It would be interesting to make DOOM look as modern as DOOM 3, but I suppose one could just use the Classic DOOM 3 mod for DOOM 3. Still, I wonder what it would be like to have a "DOOM 3" mod for the original DOOM - a mod that makes the old DOOM look like DOOM 3 in terms of sound, textures, and models.

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fraggle said:

Problem with mods like this, in my opinion, is that they change Doom from being an awesome old game to a really mediocre modern game.

I respect that opinion and I mean this with no hostility at all but I don't understand what you said there. I love Doom because it's gameplay and design is awesome. I don't think its awesome because its old. I find games like COD and MW to be a bore because, despite their flashy modern graphics, I find them to be bland and uninspired.

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I play with the standard graphics at a higher resolution and I wouldn't want anything else. In ports with colored lighting it's always way overdone and looks ridiculous. The 3d models I've seen do make Doom look more modern -- they take it from 1993 to 1997, when 3d was just starting to show up in video games and the models looked way worse than sprites.

Most importantly, though, even if these updates were done well, they make Doom a different game. The limited color palette and sprite resolution make monsters more obvious. Playing through some ports, I can't even tell which monster I'm fighting sometimes. Effff that.

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I think it's a matter of the resources fitting together. If you update all the sprites/textures, you're still going to be left with maps that have 1993 levels of detail. Someone in a thread once said that slapping high-res textures on old FPS games makes them look incredibly empty, which I agree with. They end up looking like late 90's FPS, where they couldn't afford to render models and environments that were more than boxes at the same time.

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Let alone that you couldn't play something like nuts.wad with fully 3D high detail models (hell, not even with 3D low detail models), thus trapping Doom in precisely the same technical limitations that led to the development of much more slow-paced FPS after it.

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Doom 3 Ascension is in development and it looks incredibly awesome, you should also check Rinechard's texture replacements. Even though none of these are finished yet, you should keep an eye on them.

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Maes said:

Let alone that you couldn't play something like nuts.wad with fully 3D high detail models (hell, not even with 3D low detail models), thus trapping Doom in precisely the same technical limitations that led to the development of much more slow-paced FPS after it.

lol nope. no nuts.wad for my models. Does it earn my models points if I can populate the screen with 100 monsters with a very small drop in frame rate? 50 monsters on screen doesn't put a dent in frame rate at all and it isn't often that you come across a non-slaughter map with 50 monsters on screen at once. Of course this is with using the newest version of Doomsday Engine which scares away most of the people in these forums.

DooM_RO said:

Doom 3 Ascension is in development and it looks incredibly awesome, you should also check Rinechard's texture replacements. Even though none of these are finished yet, you should keep an eye on them.

I'm assuming you meant Doom Ascension.

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I'm going to echo the people in this thread that say "don't do it". Doom, as it was and should be, was-and-is a game with a very strong and definite aesthetic; a look which defines it as Doom. It is part of the appeal, the atmosphere and why some of us return to it over and over.

The way I see it is, making Doom more 'modern' is the equivalent of taking the monochrome line-art of a silver-age comic and giving it a Photoshop colour-job, replacing the gorgeous flats with over-glossy paints and textures. The lines simply aren't designed for that kind of look, and it appears rather drab in comparison to the dynamics (a word I use in both senses at once here) of the old limited palette.

And so it is with Doom. The sprites complement the flats and the stretched-and-skewed-patch walls, the maps and level-of-detail all go hand in hand. And I'm by no means a purist; high-resolutions are fine with me, as are higher colour-depths (save me from that horrible red brick fading into brown, wouldya?). But a lot of the modern features - even mouselook, given how the game is rendered - detract from that original aesthetic. Change that, and it's merely a Doom clone.

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NiuHaka said:

I respect that opinion and I mean this with no hostility at all but I don't understand what you said there.

For a game to work well it needs an integrated design from the start: a team of programmers, artists, level designers, etc. all working together towards a single end product. The capabilities of the computers at the time will shape what is possible to achieve: think about eg. Half Life 2 vs. Doom, for example. Both very good games, but they work in very different ways. The context of the time in which they were made shaped the technology that was used and the overall game design as a result.

Imagine if Doom was released today, but in the form it is in that video, with higher resolution textures, models and 3D effects, etc. It should be obvious that nobody would hail it as a ground breaking game. I suspect that few if any people would even consider it a very good game. Why do you think that is?

Doom was considered a good game within the historical context of when it was made. For modern games we expect things that we don't expect of older games. Simple things like ambient sound effects, for example. Or "realistic" environments (think about how challenging it is within Doom's level format to construct something fairly simple, like a car). Other examples would be deeper plot/story integration, which are more common nowadays.

When you upgrade the Doom engine to have graphics similar to modern games, you place the game in the same "sphere of expectations" of modern games, if you will. When I see a video like the one above, my natural instinct is to compare it with other games that have similar graphical abilities. The problem is that in comparisons like that, Doom loses, and it will always lose.

As a side note, ever noticed how modern games that try to be "Doom-like", like Serious Sam, Wrack, Painkiller, etc. can only ever do so by using the excuse that they're "retro"? If they didn't have that, people would just think of them as third rate games.

There are a bunch of criticisms I expect in response to this. "I hate stories in games anyway", etc. If that's your response, you've missed the point I'm making. My point is that to make a modern game, there are lots and lots of individual details, things that Doom is missing even if you replace the renderer and add new textures and models. You'll never solve that problem without changing so many things that you'll be playing a completely new game anyway.

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david_a said:

Someone in a thread once said that slapping high-res textures on old FPS games makes them look incredibly empty, which I agree with.


That's pretty much it for me too. To avoid that effect with higher res you end up having to put in more fiddly architecture details, so it's a lot more work for the mapper, and even so it doesn't always come out looking all that convincing. For example, I noticed in recent Freedoom builds that MAP03 now has some intricate "depressions" in the ground at the player start positions. They're exactly identical cut & paste jobs that just stand out for no reason, and don't add anything to the original smooth floor in previous builds. Though none of this was even necessary, even a much simpler set of 8 or 16-unit deep depressions (or raised platforms) would have done an adequate job here, but I suspect the mapper was using a screen resolution that led him to add lots of extra detail to compensate for the perceived emptyness.

The other nice thing about the original 320x200 display is that its relative grainyness helps to offset some strange or ugly effects, like repetitive texture patterns on large walls.

The original system works extremely well, because all the pieces were designed to fit together. The only improvements I sometimes wish they had implemented are the ability to look up & down (like in Heretic), because later maps make more use of height differences, and sometimes it becomes a problem (you can't see what's in a pit without jumping in, can't reliably shoot high-up chaingunners, etc.) But that's all map design related, and the actual resources (textures, etc.) are spot on.

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As a side note, ever noticed how modern games that try to be "Doom-like", like Serious Sam, Wrack, Painkiller, etc. can only ever do so by using the excuse that they're "retro"? If they didn't have that, people would just think of them as third rate games.


I'm not sure any of these games have been marketed that way. It's journalists and players who tend to label them as such.

Your position is understandable, but I don't think it's realistic for you to assume everyone shares the same view. Some of us don't care for historical context one bit.

Standards don't necessarily evolve in a positive direction either. While it can't be argued graphic technology is better now than then, everything else is heavily debatable. Storytelling? Examples of "tell, not show", with followers channelling Exposition Man are a dime a dozen. Level design? Insert one of those numerous sketches over the Internet comparing a CoD corridor-like level to any Doom one.

I can genuinely say I personally find Serious Sam 3 to be a better game than every CoD, MoH or Battlefield of the world. This has nothing to do with a supposed fondness for retro games over newer ones. I liked FEAR 1, Crysis 1, both Left 4 Dead, both Portal, Dead Island, and none of these games could possibly be qualified as retro with a straight face. Technology evolves, but a truly good game can stay entertaining regardless of when it was released; much like we haven't stopped playing chess when computers were invented or stopped watching old movies when Hollywood decided everything must be about super-heroes and loud explosions.

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The biggest problem to me is that "better" graphics make Doom less playable. I don't mean there is a performance hit, I mean it changes the look to the extent that it's hardly Doom anymore.

Does anyone seriously think that this:


Looks better than this?

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That's also a problem with high-res sprites. It is very hard to create something that is both faithful to the original low-res sprites yet still looks good by modern standards. If you have a wonderful model, chances are it will just not look like the original at all; and if it does look quite close to the original in terms of details, chances are it'll just look goofy.

Worse still is the animation. With sprites, they just go through a number of frames. That approach, transposed to models, translates to a stop-motion system like in the original Quake. It'd be better to have skeletal animations, like modern games do, to offer some fluidity and adaptability to the animations; but that would mean changing all the monster logic at a fundamental level because the state system used in Doom corresponds to both AI stuff and animation.

Finally, there is the last problem of high-res replacements: they clash with custom resources. Play some ZDoom mod (say, the ZDCMP1) on GZDoom with a model pack. You'll see some monsters replaced by models, while others aren't. Likewise if you play most custom levels out there with a high-res texture pack, some textures will be high-res and others won't.

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ComicMischief said:

I'm going to echo the people in this thread that say "don't do it".

Just don't download it. Mods will never stop and it is becoming easier and easier to mod for Doom so I don't see it stopping until people don't remember what Doom is anymore. You will probably have better success in convincing people not to download it.

ComicMischief said:

Doom, as it was and should be, was-and-is a game with a very strong and definite aesthetic; a look which defines it as Doom. It is part of the appeal, the atmosphere and why some of us return to it over and over.
Doom clone.

I have a hard time disagreeing with that. That is the reason why I have such a hard time accepting any other Doom other than Doom & Doom 2 as truly being Doom. But i'm wrong in thinking that way. Just because Doom 64 or Doom 3 doesn't look like Doom 2 doesn't make them any less Doom-ish. There are people in these very forums who enjoy playing those games more and they are still Doomers to the core.
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@Fraggle:
I agree with some of that but I disagree that games should play a certain way just because they have a certain look. That's like telling people they shouldn't play chess with detailed game pieces and game boards. That just doesn't compute.

@Phml:
I agree completely. Good gameplay is good gameplay. If people want pretty imagery (subjective) with their gameplay I really don't see why others should be insulted and/or threatened by that.

qoncept said:

The biggest problem to me is that "better" graphics make Doom less playable. I don't mean there is a performance hit, I mean it changes the look to the extent that it's hardly Doom anymore.

Does anyone seriously think that this:

Looks better than this?

I don't but someone might. You shouldn't feel threatened by that.

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