lazygecko

I'd say a lot of it just comes down to artists converging around a common pool of styles that were proven to work well within the technical constraints of the time. This is also when 3D graphics had finally been heavily codified around a rigid set of standards, while in the early 90s a lot of devs were experimenting with in retrospect more unorthodox methods to render 3D or 3D-esque graphics.

You can roughly categorize the history into 3 different eras. The first era was most of the 20th century, where electronic music was completely within the realm of visionary DIY engineers and professors creating their own gear, being made exclusively in labs/workshops and universities. And the style of music being made would also very much reflect that. The second era, starting some time in the 1970s was after the first commercial synthesizers had gained a foothold and started becoming commonplace in recording studios, gaining the attention of traditionally schooled musicians. And the era we are firmly in now is after the proliferation of computers and the internet completely democratized the creation and distribution of the music via cheap software and online platforms.

Not sure if it really feels like a good fit for Doom. Detail textures started being implemented in 3D games after it was pretty much standard practice to liberally stretch textures across large surfaces rather than tiling them more, and detail layers became this sort of workaround to give more, erm, texture, to what would otherwise look like quasi-gourad shading. This was not the case with early texture mapped games like Doom that just repeated tiles more across surfaces, which kept the textures sharper and more defined overall. The other issue here is that there are so many features baked into the textures like lamps, metal panels, etc, the detail layer indiscriminately overlaid atop all those differing elements just doesn't gel well. It actually starts breaking the illusion of the intended material and just looks more like crumpled wallpaper or something. Plus, the look really reminds me of older amateur HD texture packs for games like Oblivion where they'd just upscale the original with bilinear/cubic and just blend in a layer of noise/grime to give a vague impression of more sharpness.

I just happened upon the video by chance in my feed. It's an hour long but I actually sat through all of it as I was not prepared for how interesting unraveling this whole thing would be. I barely had any personal history with this game back in the day. I played the demo, and primarily remembered it as the first game showing me that my 133mhz with a Voodoo 1 just wasn't going to cut it any more. For a 1998 game running on the Quake 2 engine, this seems insanely ambitious in technical scope. The game opens with what might be the first instance of a scripted helicopter turret sequence in a FPS? This was something that would only become a staple about a decade later with the surge of cinematic military shooters. Later maps in the game also feature very expansive outdoor environments like the oil rig which also has the vast underwater ocean section. And this was something that the Q2 engine allegedly struggled with when compared to UE1. In the expansion missions they also add very robust rope climbing/swinging physics which to this day is a real rarity in the genre (Dark Messiah is the only other example I can think of). The weapon models also look surprisingly good in quality for a game of this era. They look well defined with sharp texture features, whereas I'm used to most shooters from 98-2001 to look obviously lowpoly with blurry texture work mercilessly stretched across the surfaces (Quake 2 itself being one such example). Also I had no freakin clue they had actually paid to farm out an obscure anime adaptation.

I played Unreal on a 233/266mhz (can't remember which) just fine and that was even in the more demanding software renderer. That engine was really a work of art in how many visual effects it could reproduce which everyone else required hardware acceleration to pull off.

Snowglobes and gambling? Mr House's favorite combination.

It's much more than just about the colors. UT3 suffered from pretty typical "AAA-itis" in how they made the visuals/environments needlessly cluttered with props and other noisy visual elements which is very ill suited for a competitive game, whereas the previous ones had more concise easily readable visuals, perhaps inadvertently so given the technological constraints. It's been a general problem with the industry since the shift to the PS360 generation in the mid-to-late 00's where I started to notice how devs would just awkwardly work around these problems rather than addressing them head on, like adding contextual outlines or tooltips/text overlays to characters or interactable items in order to distinguish them from the environment. Also my favorite thing is how UT3 was delayed just because they wanted to tack on FMV story cutscenes which absolutely no one cares about to a single player story campaign which was just a bunch of glorified botmatches, and this is what caused the game to release within the same timeframe as the gluttony of other high profile shooters in late 2007. Epic really screwed the game's chances with that needless decision.

Surprised he didn't want to get to the high ground.

Seems appropriate to put here

A recurring thing I've noticed in these projects is how the weapon models don't look nearly as good as the Quake 1 weapons. Their polycount seems lower and more simplistic, and also uses very pixelated low res textures smeared over the entire thing whereas in Q1 I think the models had noticeably better quality textures (they're meant to be right up in your face after all), and also better geometric detail on the meshes to help differentiate different elements rather than leaving that work entirely to textures over a simplistic shape.

When I tried Darkplaces it inexplicably altered the weapon bob animations from the original pigeon thrust to the Doom style swaying. Couldn't even find any option for turning it back to normal. It really aggravated me.

Eurobeat is really just power metal. EUROMAIDEN.zip

Just another facet of that good old American exceptionalism at work. Any other country that has more sensible policies resulting in better overall success for its citizens has to be discredited and ridiculed in order to justify the status quo of the US and never make any attempts to improve.

Sure. Go right ahead.

I did work on something like this in 2016. More for Doom 1 than Doom 2 though. Tried emulating all the Bobby Prince quirks like the blues 12 bar progression, layering in triads to harmonize, replaying the same guitar riff but with different/unusual instrument patches, etc. doom wad e1m3.zip