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Blastfrog

Trying to calclate Doomguy's real speed [a whole lot of wrongness ITT]

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Sodaholic said:

And again, they are drawn below. Their origin points are in the negatives vertically, are they not? And yes, you would see them if they were below the ground, since the Doom engine does not clip sprites against flats.

No and irrelevant.

Sodaholic said:

They are not drawn right on the floor, if they were, they'd look like they were floating a few inches above the ground. They are offset below the ground to correct this, so that the bottom center of the actor is at the origin point, and not slightly above.

Self-contradicting.

Sodaholic said:

These sprites have depth, the front of what space they take up is closer to the camera than the origin point. Things that are closer to you look larger. Therefore, the sprites are slightly larger visually than they are physically, to account for the fact that the front of the sprites space is not at the origin.

See, if you had said that in the beginning there wouldn't have been a problem. "Drawn in front" isn't the same thing as "drawn below the floor".

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DASI-I said:

Now that is fast! Is that measurement based on him running straight or diagonally? (you move even faster diagonally). I wish more modern shooters were that fantastic.



that's true. you see, classic shooters offered advanced players means of moving faster than the default running speed (straferunning, wallrunning, strafejumping, rocketjumping, ramp jumping, dodging etc), which can make a difference between a good player and a great one.

compare that with modern games. not only does the player move a lot slower here, he doesn't have such movement techniques which require great skill to use during a battle. anyone can press a button to run forward, thanks.

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Gez said:

See, if you had said that in the beginning there wouldn't have been a problem.

Sometimes I wish that human communication was maintained through telepathy instead of language, because it appears we were both agreeing the whole time, but one of us (most likely me :P) wasn't doing a very good job communicating exactly what we meant in words. :P

Gez said:

"Drawn in front" isn't the same thing as "drawn below the floor".

Well, there's nowhere but down for the excess to be drawn, so the sprite is technically in the floor, despite not looking like that.

Whatever is below the red line is indisputably in the floor, as the red line represents where the floor level is relative to the sprite:


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Doomguy's eyes ARE about 4 feet off the ground, because they're in his nipples.

Seriously. Doom's view height does not match the scale of the player object >_>

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Torr Samaho said:

that's true. you see, classic shooters offered advanced players means of moving faster than the default running speed (straferunning, wallrunning, strafejumping, rocketjumping, ramp jumping, dodging etc), which can make a difference between a good player and a great one.

compare that with modern games. not only does the player move a lot slower here, he doesn't have such movement techniques which require great skill to use during a battle. anyone can press a button to run forward, thanks.


This is a good point, I didn't notice that. Thanks for mentioning it, I'll remember that if I ever make a game.

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Sodaholic's depth, origin and perspective argument would make a lot more sense if he wasn't talking about humanoid figures. We're not very deep compared to how wide we are and the sprites reflect that.

@Gez: Those 8 unit == 1 foot measurements you cited earlier do make a lot of sense, particularly with the player height in relation to the chair as the very seat I'm sitting on can range between about 10-20 inches off of the ground.

I'd also agree that the scaling was probably only consistent for the sprites though (the cyberdemon being about 14 feet tall is suitably impressive). They certainly seem out of proportion for the maps.


Personally I'd agree with Maes that the actual mapping is done with a rectangular scale rather than a square one, with 16 along the x/y plane and 10 perpendicular to it. Normal doors being just over 7 feet tall makes sense to the human perspective, even if that'd make your big beefy 7' marine suddenly only 5'6".

The fact of the matter is that it's a game though. Not a lot of thought really would have gone into making things mathematically accurate when we're more interested in making it look about right. Particularly when your eyes are in your chest (either about 5 and a half or 4 feet off the ground). You'd need some new textures to make the 8 unit/1 foot measurements look about right though... and without the ability to slightly duck under doorways Doomguy's big boots and helmet suddenly become very unweildy, as he's about as tall as your average doorway in them.

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Phobus said:

Personally I'd agree with Maes that the actual mapping is done with a rectangular scale rather than a square one, with 16 along the x/y plane and 10 perpendicular to it. Normal doors being just over 7 feet tall makes sense to the human perspective, even if that'd make your big beefy 7' marine suddenly only 5'6".

The fact of the matter is that it's a game though. Not a lot of thought really would have gone into making things mathematically accurate when we're more interested in making it look about right. Particularly when your eyes are in your chest (either about 5 and a half or 4 feet off the ground). You'd need some new textures to make the 8 unit/1 foot measurements look about right though... and without the ability to slightly duck under doorways Doomguy's big boots and helmet suddenly become very unweildy, as he's about as tall as your average doorway in them.



i don't know how plausible that 7 foot doomguy is... sure, he's our hero and he can splatter imps with his bare fists. but according to that doom metrics table, he's exactly the same height as any former human, which would make him average height, if the base wasn't full of basketball pros for some reason.

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As for everybody considering 5'6" too low, don't forget that this is highly dependant on demographics and ethnicity. I'm barely 30, and yet I remember the average for my country and generation (judging from high school heights here, where most development stopped anyway) being close to 1.73-1.75 m average (which would be close to 5.6"). Of course there were taller people, but anyone over 1.80 really standed out as "tall".

And undeniably, even here younger generations are typically getting taller and fatter.

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Maybe in the future everybody is really tall? We're all going that way afterall.

This probably once again boils down to everybody over-thinking things though, as we're quickly butting up against how little since it makes.

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Maes said:
No.

http://www.trilobite.org/doom/doom_metrics.html

Seriously, try making your own levels or better yet, sprites based on real objects. You'll find that 8 units per foot will result in very miniaturized objects and skewed proportions. So an 8-unit step is 1 foot tall? That's an OBSTACLE, not a step.

See my post here for the resulting figures from an analysis of DOOM measures.

8 pixels of width in DOOM equal 9 inches.
1 foot of width is 10.6666 pixels wide.
8 pixels in height in DOOM equal 10.8 inches.
1 foot of height is 8.8888 pixels high.

Scott's conclusions make little sense. We all know a pixel is only 20% taller than it is wide, not 60%. The difference in pixel height and width proportions has to do with the difference between the pixel ratio on the screen (320x200, or an 8x5 proportion) and the physical screen size (8x6 in whatever measure in physical inches.) Maybe Scott was using some weird square monitor that stretched all pixels even further :p

His vertical measure was closer to something reasonable, at least, and that may have made him and Jacob think that they were making some sense.

32 units or 2 feet seems reasonable for a man-crossable gap, and 16 seems about right for beams (1 foot thick). Double these distances....yup, too big.

My calculations give 3 feet to the minimum gap, which is reasonable for a large male that's usually armored, carries large weapons and can move quickly though such gaps.

The only thing that in my opinion looks off in DOOM, in terms of proportions, is the item sprites, but they are logically larger so that the player can see them easily and so that they don't look bad in the low res environment. Perhaps the same can be said of steps. To make stairs stand out and give more detail to the step textures, they are "physically" larger than what one would expect visually.

As for everybody considering 5'6" too low, don't forget that this is highly dependant on demographics and ethnicity.

Yeah, but the status bar face gives the impression of a typical Anglo-Saxon stereotype military guy from the US, and they tend to be like 6 feet tall.

Quasar said:
Doomguy's eyes ARE about 4 feet off the ground, because they're in his nipples.

Seriously. Doom's view height does not match the scale of the player object >_>

The marine is a land animal, and we tend to look down a lot when moving around to avoid tripping over protrusions and dips on the floor. However, the game only allows the view to look straight forward because it lacks free look. The only way to give the player a more reasonable point of focus in this case, without risking some visual deformity, is to lower the viewpoint somewhat, giving an impression closer to our usual habit of inclining our view a bit. Thus, one could argue it might actually be sensible to increase the view height when enabling free look. Also, obstacle heights could be decreased when enabling jumping, as we have to assume that the player's ability to move over stuff includes hopping over obstacles to a degree. The need to allow the player not to be stopped by certain obstacles that would be too low to detain a moving human also explain why designers could create stairs composed of what we could call over-sized steps.

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