Maes

The Golden Axe dragon has nice, long, smooth, sexy legs. ....what? They really are. Now that I think about it, those dragons were unusual in that they had pretty human-like leg joints, and not the usual "chicken walker" anatomy usually attributed to fantasy dragons, and seen on dipedal dinosaurs.

Well, they are a way to get reference images, indeed, and even hand drawing is more convenient if done over an existing sprite used as a template. But even the best model should be viewed as exactly that: a template, no more and no less, especially if the final medium is as limited as Doom was. My "gripe", so to speak, comes from those projects that thought that using models (of any kind) was a sufficient, one-step method, only to be overwhelmed by the per-sprite postprocessing work. At that point, you might have just as well used a generic, posable artist's dummy as a template and draw around it.

Exactly what I've been trying to convey, @Bauul. There's a difference between "it's easy to make/modify/repose/re-color in its original form" (3D model, clay figurine, latex doll/action figure etc.) and "looks good in the final medium without too much effort". I suppose you could kinda-sorta get away without much post-processing if your final medium has a respectable sprite resolution ( @Tea Monster's models would be enormous by Doom standards) and a high enough color depth so that you don't have to worry about excessive detail loss/pixel noise. Which definitively wasn't the case for any of the classic 1990s era FPS. With Cyberdemon, at pixel scale, for comparison: It's the tallest sprite, yet it looks absolutely tiny next to that Mummy and Chthulhu guy. Still think they would look good if I just blindly halved their dimensions and applied the Doom palette to them? What if they were not even meant to be that tall if resized to scale? E.g. the Mummy guy seems more appropriate for Imp-size, while Chtulhu strikes me more as Baron-sized. Edit: it's interesting how in that before and after thread, the approach they followed was to scale down the resolution first to their intended in-game one (or pretty close to it) and then they performed any edits. That's actually pretty clever, as you know immediately what details will be lost and what you have to work with. That didn't prevent them from going overboard with model details that wouldn't make it cleanly into the finished sprites, though. The Archvile IIRC looked nothing like its final form, esp. the face.

@Tea MonsterNice models, but would they scale down nicely to Doom resolution without some postprocessing work? Carmack & co. definitely had to deal with that aspect, even if it may appear a non-issue today. Limited res., limited palette etc. all required some compromises and good old fashioned elbow grease and eye squint to get a good fit into the final medium, no matter how clean your starting model was. The amount of said post-processing work vs an original creation in the 2D domain determines the method to choose. Like all things in life, it's yet another compromise between desires and available resources.

Now a literal Shit Fighter would have been awesome. Look at how many styles there are to choose from!

@Tea MonsterMy point was more that even with models, spriting isn't easy work. First of all, you need to make the models somehow, then you need to take their pictures and clean them up in order to have usable sprites. For Carmack & co, they also had to go through the additional step of developing and scanning real film photos, but it's probably not as relevant to the discussion. My point is that even with good quality models available, getting the angles right, getting the resolution downgrade right and, most importantly, getting them to work well as low-res sprites is still an art that takes much time, and if you skimp on it/cut corners there, BOY, does it show. Oh and BTW, not all monsters started off as models. Most notably, the zombies and imp, Cacodemon/PE, Lost Soul. Edit: an example of what I mean. Imagine e.g. that you had an imp model with super-sharp sprites, super-detail, claws, eyes, teeth, scales or even fur if you subscribe to that theory (eww). Make it super-ultra-HD-and whatnot, if you want. Now, when you reduce that to a few tenths of pixels in each dimension, how many of the details will still pass across you think? Will the spikes/eyes/teeth still be recognizable as such or will they have crumbled/been averaged into a mess of noise-like, dancing pixels? Unless your downsizing filter is super-smart, you'll have to make some significant edits by hand, in order to get a presentable picture. So, models: definitively a starting point, but not a necessary one, and definitively not a sufficient one.

Anything by Andrew Jones. That guy always seems to bite more than what he can chew.

Yup, that's the good old Mocha Doom blockmap hack alright. Hey, the purpose was exactly for it to make it everywhere, so mission kind-of accomplished I guess? If anything, I wonder why this isn't standard in every Doom port by now (at least those using a source code reasonably close to the original, and not aiming at 100% bug replication). It's a relatively unintrusive and "oldschool friendly" fix. As for shedding some light.... here's an old post I made on the subject. Hoo boy, has time passed!

More like rapeface. Look at those imps!

You know, I have a perverse liking for this sort of map start. Where you carefully punch + vector one barrel at a time, just enough so that you can barely squeeze through. All the more fun if there are monsters around who don't seem to share your meticulous enthusiasm for careful barrel-pushing, or if you need to punch a barrel twice...it may take it, it may not.

Well, in some Atomic Shrimp scambaiting video it was determined that Ohio was the "United State", singular.

Well duh, I thought everybody knew by now that in Doom the "Demons" are actually non-Earth based Extraterrestial Mutant Devil lifeforms OF DOOM from OUTER SPACE.

Well, at these sorts of resolutions, it maybe pays to have custom assets optimized for the display's limitations. E.g. it would make much more sense to have Zombiemen redrawn as stickmen (even if they had to undergo the same scaling process), than a bunch of blocky characters.

There's a an official (?) UV-MAX run of CYBIE.WAD: