Should the pistol be aspect-corrected?

[MrFlibble]

Scuba Steve's pistol, in my opinion, is an excellent example of Freedoom art. It manages to capture the feel of the original game while being completely different from its Doom counterpart.

However, while making comparisons I've noticed something:


To the left is a Freedoom image without aspect correction. The central image is from Doom with aspect correction, to the right, Freedoom with aspect correction. All screenshots were made in MBF running with DOSBox, and aspect correction was accomplished using the built-in DOSBox function.

It seems to me that the image on the left (without aspect correction) is more similar to the proportions of the Doom pistol as it looks in-game (with aspect correction), whereas the image in the right is overly stretched.

What do you think? Should the sprite be "squashed" to appear as it does on the left image when the game is run with proper aspect ratio?

[esselfortium]

I think it looks fine as-is. It's not the same gun, and there's no need for it to match perfectly. The perspective on Doom's original pistol has always looked confusing to me, anyway.

[raymoohawk]

yep, the original doom pistol is an unsual example of a bad doom sprite, the scuba one is better (albeit a bit too clean)

[Marnetmar]

I was expecting a sodaholic thread.

[Blastfrog]

I think it looks better scaled down. It also matches up with perspective better, the unsquashed version looks like it's tilting significantly upward. I find that it feels better in-game, not to mention that the unmodified version looks huge compared to weapons that are actually supposed to be bigger like the shotgun.

Chungy, can you please reconsider that particular commit of my earlier pull request? It has nothing to do with "making it feel more like Doom" as you said on IRC.

Marnetmar said:

I was expecting a sodaholic thread.

heh

[Da Werecat]

raymoohawk said:

yep, the original doom pistol is an unsual example of a bad doom sprite, the scuba one is better (albeit a bit too clean)

I don't think it's bad, but if it was, it would be hardly unusual. Shotguns aren't better.

As for the FD pistol - well, I never liked it. Squashing it seems to make it better. In addition to that, the glove needs redrawing, because it's just a crude copy of the Doom glove (the key word being "crude").

[MrFlibble]

BTW, I remember Minigunner made a modified version of the pistol, found here (in the weapons spoiler-hidden section). Perhaps this one should be used if you decide to scale it down?

[frithiof]

This might seem inappropriate, but given how most of the other weapons appear to be somewhat high tech now, doesn't it seem a little weird keep a basic little pistol from the 20th century?

Why not give Freedoomguy something a little bit more creative... maybe something similar in nature, a pistol, but make the outer metal mostly clear so that you can see the inner workings of the pistol as you walk around, and you can see the pistol loading a new round when you pull the trigger.

Maybe have the slide darken a little bit when the bullet "explodes", the way photochromic glasses do, to avoid excessively annoying the player.

[Blastfrog]

How's this?

[HorrorMovieRei]

I love it. I just think the shading on the hand could be ajusted a little. The lighting made it look a little flat after the conversion to the Freedoom palette

[MrFlibble]

Sodaholic said:

How's this?

http://i.imgur.com/P9N3bUp.png

That sort fo reminds me of Rise of the Triad:

The shading indeed needs some adjustment.

BTW, what does that pistol look like (from another angle)?

[frithiof]

Sodaholic said:

How's this?

http://i.imgur.com/P9N3bUp.png

I like it. :)