20 Years of PlayStation Doom.

[Da Werecat]

Considering the quality of art assets in PSX port, I highly doubt that anyone in the team working on it was skilled enough to make serious changes to monster sprites.

Jaxxoon R said:

Or just remove half of the rotations and flip the sprite like most of the Doom 1 monsters do anyways.

That would probably help.

Although maybe they tried that and it was still heavy? Were other symmetrical monsters optimized this way?

[Jaxxoon R]

I don't recall there ever any overtly bad custom assets in the PSX ports. I can only remember them being improvements, like replacing that godawful moldy yarn fence in Final Doom with a decent chainlink one. A lot of people give FIREBLU shit but at least it's a well-made chromatic aberration, DOBWIRE is the true satan in this world.

[BaronOfStuff]

inb4 someone posts the unfinished/unused textures. THEY DON'T COUNT.

[Da Werecat]

What unfinished/unused textures?

The only thing that comes to mind is the ceiling lamp that doesn't fit, but it's a sprite.

[Jaxxoon R]

All I know is the bloody hook and Final Doom SSG looked pretty nice. Especially the latter, since it lacked the brown color banding of the original and made it work a bit better under colder colored lights.

[Koko Ricky]

The classic SSG just looks muddy and kind of ugly when it's not being fired. It looks like it needs to be polished. There's more sheen on the PSX version and it looks great, I agree.

[Da Werecat]

You don't need a good artist to make that sprite. It's very small, and also rather blurry.

But I was mostly talking about how they processed the old assets. Some of the textures were sharpened for no apparent reason, others weren't, silver stuff was subjected to horrible dithering, interpic looks messy because of the questionable attempts to give it more depth, and don't get me started on blatant nearest neighbor scaling artifacts. It all reeks of amateur hour.

[Tritnew]

GoatLord said:

The classic SSG just looks muddy and kind of ugly when it's not being fired. It looks like it needs to be polished. There's more sheen on the PSX version and it looks great, I agree.

I know, I can't stand looking at the PSX DOOM SSG, but the Final DOOM one Is the best I agree.

[Deleted_Account]

The PSX Final Doom super shotgun is great to look at it.

[Jaxxoon R]

Da Werecat said:

You don't need a good artist to make that sprite. It's very small, and also rather blurry.

And yet somehow a good artist made the SSG initially and it was somehow infinitely uglier.

[Koko Ricky]

I have to say that I still have this weird nightmarish association with PSX Final Doom. I was just 11 or 12 when I first played it and it had a profound effect on me due to the sound design and colored lighting. The devs really got the hang of colored lighting by that point and it really added a lot to the environments. In PSX Doom, it's hit or miss. Sometimes it's very loud and out of place.

[Da Werecat]

Jaxxoon R said:

And yet somehow a good artist made the SSG initially and it was somehow infinitely uglier.

The original one wasn't. The shrunk one in PSX Doom - maybe.

And you still don't need a good artist to make a small mediocre asset.

[Deleted_Account]

How many gaming platforms was Doom ported onto anyways?

[VGA]

Piper Maru said:

How many gaming platforms was Doom ported onto anyways?

http://classicdoom.com/doomcomp.htm

And for Final Doom:
http://classicdoom.com/fdoomcmp.htm

[Koko Ricky]

Piper Maru said:

How many gaming platforms was Doom ported onto anyways?

Sometimes I think it's amazing that it's literally the only 90s FPS that has had this much exposure. Even Wolf3D was only ported to a couple systems.

[HorrorMovieRei]

Piper Maru said:

How many gaming platforms was Doom ported onto anyways?

http://itrunsdoom.tumblr.com/

[Deleted_Account]

I've been a fan of Doom since 1993, I never realized it was ON that many platforms. You know id software made something special when it was ported to nearly everything, and still persists to this very day. Quite a legacy! Looks like I have a lot reading to do about these different ports.

[VGA]

Yes and with the unofficial ports ... it has to be the most multiplatform video game of all time :-)

[BaronOfStuff]

Da Werecat said:

What unfinished/unused textures?

There are a couple of marble textures with unfinished "corpsework" on them. Looks awful as-is, compared to the related (and finished) articles.

[VGA]

You mean the hanging bodies that are cut in half? They are just a variation of the other marble texture with the hanging body.

[Koko Ricky]

Eris Falling said:

I actually prefer PSX Final Doom to PSX Doom/Doom II. Master Levels and TNT outshone Plutonia easily though, which is funny because that's like completely backwards from what most people would say when talking about the PC counterparts.
I feel like the PSX style was better suited to ML + TNT, much more so than Plutonia.

I feel PSX Final Doom outshone not only PSX D1/2, but also PC Final Doom. The map selection is excellent and highly memorable, plus the team had, by that point, vastly improved the re-texturing and colored lighting. It's a very unique port in that you won't find that map set on any other console.

[BaronOfStuff]

VGA said:

You mean the hanging bodies that are cut in half? They are just a variation of the other marble texture with the hanging body.

[Quasar]

BaronOfStuff said:

http://i.imgur.com/6TmjQde.png
http://i.imgur.com/AIlrO2z.png

Palette isn't correct on that second one.

[Darklordrobert]

Weren't those hanging bodies in the Jaguar version? I wonder why they didn't use those in the PSX version.

[BaronOfStuff]

Quasar said:

Palette isn't correct on that second one.

On a second look, it's actually not correct on either of 'em; SLADE can't/won't read the palette lump from the PSX IWAD apparently so it just ripped them out using the default PC palette. Regardless, the difference in quality still stands out.

[Gez]

BaronOfStuff said:

On a second look, it's actually not correct on either of 'em; SLADE can't/won't read the palette lump from the PSX IWAD apparently so it just ripped them out using the default PC palette. Regardless, the difference in quality still stands out.

The palette format is different, though I may have written a conversion routine you'd have to call with a console command.

Edit: Looks like I did. Select the palette lump and type palconvpsx in the console. There are also palconv64 and lightspsxtopalette. Also fun for such niche cases: vertex32x and vertexpsx, I'll let you guess what they do and how you should use them.

[Da Werecat]

I saw those. Who was handling the textures in Jaguar Doom? I got the impression that someone wanted to make things neater and more polished in that release, hence the new smooth marble textures, among other examples. Apparently, the guy wasn't very experienced in drawing humans, so the corpses (if they were made by the same person or people) look a little lame.

I don't think they're unfinished.

[Gez]

I don't think GORE09 and GORE10 look really worse than GORE07 and GORE08. What's sure is that if you put them together, both sets will look awful because the styles clash completely, and neither set really fit graphically with the rest of the Doom sprites, though GORE09 and 10 are closer to the style of GORE01 and 02.

[Quasar]

Oddly Romero with his perfect memory wasn't able to tell me for sure who did the work retooling stuff for the Jaguar version :P I had suggested that American McGee might have made the weird extramap.wad that's in the 3DO resource dump and he wasn't able to confirm or deny that, only remarking that he didn't remember ever seeing that map before.

[BaronOfStuff]

Gez said:

Also fun for such niche cases: vertex32x and vertexpsx, I'll let you guess what they do and how you should use them.

This must be something to do with the console map formats (durrrr). Reading them directly in SLADE (to see layouts, etc), or some other fantastimagical function such as converting one format to another?

Guess I'll have to stop being a lazy shit and find out.