I thought it'd be interesting to take the Freedoom assets and see how they work with Romero's 2015 levels

[neozeed]

And FYI it works surprisingly well.  I downsampled everything I could, and it's even playable on the registered DooM v1.1 executable.  I shoved it on sourceforge as zeeDoom.

 

Sorry if this is all off topic, herrasy or just plain evil.

 

I made a lame run through e1m1, although I should have upped the difficulty as there just wasn't enough action in this video.  I'll maybe make a new one later on.

 

 

 

Again apologies to all.  And Happy New Years!

[neozeed]

I just found out about the deutex update to handle PNG's.  So I dumped all the old stuff I could and re-downsampled everything just as I had done before.  The only thing that hit me was the text generation, it needs python modules I don't have and pip doesn't work.  So I filled in the text blank with some older versions.  I wonder if it's just easier to have imagemagik just use a TTF, and just 'print' all the pictures to a PNG?

 

I'm still using the midi3mus for ultimate vanilla compatibility.  I know the 1.666 onwards can play midi, but I wanted to go all the way vanilla.  I also had to chop up the status bar, and overlay the 1.1 bar so it'd match the same dimensions.  I think it looks good.

 

And here we go again, on the registered v1.1 executable, this time using general midi

 

 

I think it still looks great!  I need to look at the sprites to see if there really is some fringe pixels, or just an error in my methodology.

 

Anyway, I know people always complain about freedoom, and by using the assets over Romero's 2015 level dump it really shows that freedom has really captured the DooM environment!

[Blastfrog]

I don't get it.

 

The palette looks like the 16-color palette that Windows 9x used. It sounds like you recorded the speakers through a low quality microphone. The thread title mentions Romero's recent-ish levels, yet you show regular Doom 1 levels. You don't even get the level number right on the second video.
 

why

[neozeed]

16 minutes ago, Blastfrog said:

I don't get it.

 

The palette looks like the 16-color palette that Windows 9x used. It sounds like you recorded the speakers through a low quality microphone. The thread title mentions Romero's recent-ish levels, yet you show regular Doom 1 levels. You don't even get the level number right on the second video.
 

why

It's the DooM 1.1 engine, it only used 11khz 8bit audio.  And yes the images have been downsampled.   When I tried to use the freedoom graphics I got rainbow artifacting, so that is why I ran them through a dither / remap through this 'vga palette' .  

 

These are doom 1 levels from the 2015 Romero dump.  Oh yeah it is E2M2.  That is what I get for doing this @3AM.  

 

Why?

 

Because I wanted to see if I could get something 'recognizable' but different using the 1.1 engine.  And learn the freedoom build system, and tweek stuff here and there for my own twisted enjoyment.  After Romero had released all the dwd files, I thought it'd be interesting to try to setup a build system to build them all and run them.

[MrFlibble]

11 hours ago, neozeed said:

And yes the images have been downsampled.   When I tried to use the freedoom graphics I got rainbow artifacting, so that is why I ran them through a dither / remap through this 'vga palette' .

Freedoom graphics are by definition 100% compatible with the original Doom palette, not sure why they did not work for you. Converting them to a different VGA palette like this only resulted in very noticeable quality degradation.

[neozeed]

Interesting, I always got crazy rainbowing when I was using the default palette stuff so I went through learning how to re-adabt the graphics.  It was still a fun experience.  I'll have to try it again, as needless to say it takes a while to go through all those images.

 

Although I was thinking about having imagemagik stitch all the images together as on 24 or 32bit deep PNG image, and letting it decide what 255 colors best work for everything.  It'd be an interesting experiment.

 

I'm still I'm pressed I got anything to actually work on 1.1 thought.  And with Romero's original level dump it just shows how immediatly recognizable it is.  

 

When people cry about freedoom, I think seeing it over familiar levels just shows how great the assets really are.

[MrFlibble]

3 minutes ago, neozeed said:

I'll have to try it again, as needless to say it takes a while to go through all those images.

You should be able to effortlessly create an IWAD with Freedoom graphics and the dumped levels either from Freedoom's source, or, even simpler, get all the Doom levels into a WAD and merge it with the Freedoom IWAD. That should work with the vanilla Doom executable with every asset preserved intact, no need to convert anything.

[neozeed]

1 hour ago, MrFlibble said:

You should be able to effortlessly create an IWAD with Freedoom graphics and the dumped levels either from Freedoom's source, or, even simpler, get all the Doom levels into a WAD and merge it with the Freedoom IWAD. That should work with the vanilla Doom executable with every asset preserved intact, no need to convert anything.

I'd just liked the idea of building raw levels as I've never done it before. Just like even re-processing all the graphics, audio and music.  If anything, it let's me source assets from a much higher resolution and depth and vanilaerizing them.  

 

I'd never actually built an iwad before, and it's been an interesting experiment.  Sure things can be effortless, but I almost like that this is crazy top heavy.

 

And it was cool Romero released the level source but I'd never done anything with them.  

 

Also I should be able to take other level sets and make them standalone iwads, which would be a lot more cooler than just patch wads.  I was more so drawn to Romero's dump as it's reconizable data, and it needed an additional step to make into levels.

 

I'm still impressed as an outsider I was able to crawl through the build process and get something.  And a chance to mess with imagemagik.  I know that you guys have been burned with it but it's still an incredible tool.  Just sucks that it's not bit by bit reproducible, which I can see as a pain, but for one off fun it's just that.

 

It takes my laptop, an i7 about 20 minutes to re-process all the assets, which is still amazing to me.  It'd take a lifetime in the 90s.

 

Although for my messing around with 1.1 I have to downsample the music and audio for sure as 1.1 doesn't know what a midi is.  Or audio at 22Khz...  But at least, programmatically I can make a few changes and not downsample anything and try vanilla 1.9 ....  

 

I mostly like 1.1 because it runs under OS/2, and it has that left/right network view thing.

[neozeed]

I tried something else crazy, using Imagemagick I stitched together all the art into one big file, then let it dither it down to 256 colors, used that as a map, and re-transformed the entire art set.  And it looks way better now.

 

 

It's an incredible amount of work to go through, but I guess the only ones who would care either want to keep higher resolution/depth assets or want to avoid copying the magical palette from iD, and don't want to spend all that much time on it.  I just thought it was an interesting exercise.

 

[Blastfrog]

id Software gave express permission to use the same palette. You're fine, dude, just use the palette that Freedoom comes with. All of this needless dithering just looks terrible, frankly.

 

Your goal of trying to run it on such an old version of the game is very neat. The Freedoom levels are meant to be run on at least vanilla 1.9 specs, so it's unlikely that they'd run on 1.1. I'm not sure if sprite or memory limits changed, it's possible that Freedoom's sprites may hit some kind of limit in 1.1 that it wouldn't in 1.9, but that's just conjecture. Perhaps @fraggle or @Quasar might know?

Edited January 4, 2018 by Blastfrog

[fraggle]

It certainly seems like an interesting project and it seems like you've gone to a lot of effort. I'd just like to question a few decisions here though:

• Running with the DOS v1.1 binary seems like an odd choice. Bugs aside there isn't really much substantial difference between v1.1 and v1.9. It's still basically the same game. It seems like you're making things harder for yourself (eg. lack of MIDI file support) but it's not clear what you're gaining from it.
• The palette thing is very odd. I agree with @Blastfrog here - both games use the same palette, so no palette conversion should be necessary. I don't know why you got those rainbow patterns but I think you're probably missing something simpler and more fundamental. If you change the palette (not sure why you would) things are always going to get messed up.
• Interesting as your work is, I'd discourage you from putting it on SourceForge since the last time I checked, they had strict rules that all content must be open source. Neither the Doom v1.1 exe or the Romero dumped dwd files are open source. The SF page lists this a GPL3 which it clearly isn't.

 

To some extent by the way, what you're doing is not a new thing. Early on in Freedoom's development I used to run the game side by side with and without the Freedoom textures to see the difference (you can set up a multiplayer game and use the spy function to get the same view from both players). Here's a very old screenshot as an example.

[MrFlibble]

1 hour ago, fraggle said:

• Interesting as your work is, I'd discourage you from putting it on SourceForge since the last time I checked, they had strict rules that all content must be open source. Neither the Doom v1.1 exe or the Romero dumped dwd files are open source. The SF page lists this a GPL3 which it clearly isn't.

Yes, this is something that concerned me as well, plus the project name with the word "Doom" in it. It'd be better to remove the stuff from SourceForge altogether IMO.

 

Also, the second gameplay video you posted doesn't seem to clearly state that the Freedoom graphics were converted to a different palette (the first one at least states that they have been "downsampled" although this might not be clear enough too as this word usually refers to sound effects), the description simply states that these are "the latest assets from Freedoom" which I think may confuse viewers as of the actual quality of Freedoom graphics because of the wrong palette. I'd very certainly recommend to either change the wording to make it unambiguously clear for both videos what you did with the palette, or remove them altogether.

 

1 hour ago, fraggle said:

To some extent by the way, what you're doing is not a new thing. Early on in Freedoom's development I used to run the game side by side with and without the Freedoom textures to see the difference (you can set up a multiplayer game and use the spy function to get the same view from both players). Here's a very old screenshot as an example.

Additionally, earlier builds (up to v0.8) have separate WADs containing partial assets such as graphics and sounds only, making it easy to play Doom levels "reskinned" to Freedoom with the Doom IWAD (although admittedly it would be easier to just extract Doom levels into a PWAD and play it with Freedoom IWAD).

[neozeed]

On 1/4/2018 at 4:51 PM, fraggle said:

 

To some extent by the way, what you're doing is not a new thing. Early on in Freedoom's development I used to run the game side by side with and without the Freedoom textures to see the difference (you can set up a multiplayer game and use the spy function to get the same view from both players). Here's a very old screenshot as an example.

I killed the page as I was unclear about the level source John had released.  I just never realized how well the freedoom artwork fits the iD levels until I had mapped them.  I redid the graphics one last time with no dithering against the imagemagik palette and it looks a lot more on target with just loading the iD levels as an iwad.  

 

I'll update the videos later as VPN access to YouTube has been hell in China this weekend.  

 

I just thought it was interesting that even using the"wrong" it horrible quality settings still gives something that is immediately recognizable, and that by showing that assets from Freedoom map so nicely on vanilla (even version 1.1) that people's complaints about Freedoom are largely in their heads, as it's obviously different looking, but when on familiar levels things are imediatly recognizable, and very playable.

 

I'll clarify that I was altering sound, music, palette, and the graphics so that it's clear.

 

What I also want to try is to take a bunch of pictures of flooring and wall tiles, and use high resolution, high color depth, and have imagemagik do all the hard work to show other people that they too can try to do stuff in the doom engines.

 

I doubt any of it is of any use to Freedoom, but I just thought it was super cool.  

[MrFlibble]

On 07.01.2018 at 8:06 AM, neozeed said:

I just never realized how well the freedoom artwork fits the iD levels until I had mapped them.

There are some awesome textures in Freedoom that capture the original "feel" while being visually very different from their Doom counterparts if you compare them side-by-side (e.g. the large metallic doors and the elevator side texture). Personally I find this a marvellous accomplishment in its own right.