Sprites Doom 2 Minor Sprite Fixing Project - v2.0 Release (updated 11/28/22)

The fist has some pretty ugly artifacting around the edges, as well as some grey where it shouldn't be. Here are my attempts at improving it:

^ I actually did clean up the PR fists at one time, but I never got to share them. Thanks for doing the dirty work for me, Soda-er, I mean, Blast.

I'm curious to see your version. Mind posting it?

No.

Maybe when I'm not too busy, I'll redo that set from scratch. Although to be quite honest, you did a better job than I did years ago...

Er, why not?

Oh, okay.

This is a really impressive project. I never realized how elegant the animation could look.

I carefully compared the press release beta version of the lost soul with the 1.1 and 1.666 versions, and I'm certain that the 1.666 version is the more recent one and was not an accidental reversion.

Here's a gif I made to compare it. I reproportioned the beta lost soul so that the eyes and teeth match up with the final positions for easier comparison, but is otherwise unedited.

Good catch!

Blastfrog said:

I carefully compared the press release beta version of the lost soul with the 1.1 and 1.666 versions, and I'm certain that the 1.666 version is the more recent one and was not an accidental reversion.

Here's a gif I made to compare it. I reproportioned the beta lost soul so that the eyes and teeth match up with the final positions for easier comparison, but is otherwise unedited.

http://i.imgur.com/8Kigw4K.gif

Nice! You know, at least one of the alphas have slightly different skulls too - might be worth checking out.

Blastfrog said:

On another note, I believe there might be an error in the number 5 for the status bar. It appears they neglected to give it a full outline, inconsistent with all other status bar numbers.

I made an adjusted version:

http://i.imgur.com/gKgD4Vp.png

Compare:

http://i.imgur.com/Ofp5ZGm.png

Also, when digging through Romero's stuff I found that POL5A0 actually had a couple extra pixels that were cut off when imported into the game. This is the full version:

http://i.imgur.com/vFdK1IY.png

Thanks! I'll implement these for 1.8 which will come with the manual padding fixes. No immediate rush on that yet, however.

Blastfrog said:

The fist has some pretty ugly artifacting around the edges, as well as some grey where it shouldn't be. Here are my attempts at improving it:

I'm aware of this type of artifacting as its fairly common in the digitized sprites, but I'm iffy on whether art alterations such as these really fit within the scope of the project. These aren't quantifiable errors as with the case of the transparent pixels or leftover garbage pixels and whatnot. This artifacting is mainly just the side effect of indiscreet art cleanup during the digitization process. As small as the changes you've made are, they're actually on the extreme end as far as the sorts of manual art edits previously made. I appreciate the sprites, but I don't think I'll be including these as they're encroaching into a larger territory. As said, I've seen similar artifacting elsewhere, and cleaning those up is not something I want to expand into now.

Blastfrog said:

I carefully compared the press release beta version of the lost soul with the 1.1 and 1.666 versions, and I'm certain that the 1.666 version is the more recent one and was not an accidental reversion.

Here's a gif I made to compare it. I reproportioned the beta lost soul so that the eyes and teeth match up with the final positions for easier comparison, but is otherwise unedited.

http://i.imgur.com/8Kigw4K.gif

What is meant to be shown here? We already know that the new Lost Soul sprites were based on a model with a few parts salvaged from the original sprite set, namely the face. Unfortunately, that doesn't tell us much in terms of its development timeline, and that just leads back to the same circular argument.

Nonetheless, with respect of what to do about the Lost Soul sprites in this project, I've already addressed this issue in a manner irrespective which sprite is "right" or "wrong": the 1.666 Lost Soul sprites pose a marked consistency error in relation to its accompanying rotations and other sequence frames as well as internally within its own two-frame animation. Ignoring all outside investigation on the matter, I would still (and have) opt to use the 1.1 registered version sprites as they most closely adhere to the original stated principles of the project which are to address unambiguous errors in a method most consistent with id's own approach. In this case, I used id's own fix to fix id's error.

Medis said:

After seeing this post, we (Thanks noncom!) made a commit to ZDaemon that fixes this. Nice findings guys. If lucky and gets accepted it will appear in next release/beta (1.10b08)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ms2Cg0UJVO8&feature=youtu.be

Is your patch available to the public anywhere?

I don't quite like the current extended SHT2E0, it doesn't look natural. I made an alternate one I propose that the project uses:

Thanks! That's certainly an improvement over the current sprite. I'll be including this as well.

Revenant100, I noticed an error in the BSPIL0 sprite; there are holes in the Arachnotron's cannon as if it were a chaingun.

Here's the fix I made not long ago. Hardly noticeable, but still...



No need to credit me, of course... I prefer keeping a low profile. :P

There's an inconsistency in some of the status bar faces. The left and right looking faces for full health change in skin tone from the forward looking one, and STFST21 (which is based on the KILL face) has two extra pixels that the rest of the KILL faces do not.

Here are my fixes:








Lastly, I wanted to note that the SSG reloading frames are not currently realigned 4 pixels to the left as they should be for consistency with the realigned idle frame.

HavoX said:

Revenant100, I noticed an error in the BSPIL0 sprite; there are holes in the Arachnotron's cannon as if it were a chaingun.

Here's the fix I made not long ago. Hardly noticeable, but still...

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v58/Honushi/Doom/BSPIL0.png

No need to credit me, of course... I prefer keeping a low profile. :P

Nice catch! I'll add this too. I'm keen on providing credit to everyone who has submitted assets, but if you'd prefer otherwise, I'll respect those wishes.

Blastfrog said:

The left and right looking faces for full health change in skin tone from the forward looking one

I don't see this as an error. Doom Guy scrunches up his face when he peeks left and right, and the change in skin tone looks to be how they intended to convey this visual. Also, these very same status bar face sprites specifically received some minor consistency touch ups between the press release beta and the first shareware release, and the face was not changed in the process, so id (apparently Kevin Cloud) did not view this as a consistency issue either.

and STFST21 (which is based on the KILL face) has two extra pixels that the rest of the KILL faces do not.

This I do not see as being an error as well. The KILL faces and the STFST21 face are two different expressions, the former with his teeth clenched and the latter a resting position, and that well accounts for the difference in the jawline's shape.

Lastly, I wanted to note that the SSG reloading frames are not currently realigned 4 pixels to the left as they should be for consistency with the realigned idle frame.

Thanks, this was a vestige of some very old testing that was causing the vanilla engine to crash. I've adjusted the offsets to be match the base shift.

Revenant100 said:

I'm keen on providing credit to everyone who has submitted assets, but if you'd prefer otherwise, I'll respect those wishes.

Uh, the "low profile" remark was a joke (hence the :P). Anyway, crediting me is optional, since it didn't take me long to fix it. If you want to credit me, that's great, but if you don't want to, that's fine too ;)

@Revenant100: I just wanted to say that this project is the best thing since Per Kristen's Smooth Weapons and hi-fi sounds! It is most obviously a labor of love, and most appreciated! Doom, being my favorite game, I would accept nothing less than perfection. This is the quintessential "digital remaster", if there ever was one.

Combined with a future possible "minor texture fix" project, I think a "diff" should be done against the iwads and these projects, and that the community should endorse this version as the definitive v1.10! I will be doing so to my iwads!

It is rare when a Doom project improves upon the vanilla experience so seamlessly, without any side effects. I feel like this is exactly what id tried to produce, without the bugs.

Thanks for your, and everyone else's effort towards a job well done! It doesn't get any better than this, folks!

(sorry dbl post)

I think some (more) full rotations are available for the imp, in either the alphas or the beta wad. They are not mirrors, but actual unique frames. I'll try to find them and let you know which, if necessary. But, I'm sure they exist - I've been using them for a while now. v1.8, maybe? :)

Do you think you could add support for both of Final Doom's episodes? I get error messages when using the wads for Doom 2.
Also, has anyone considered making a project similar to this one but to fix map/level bugs in vanilla Doom (ie. wall textures partially covering switches)?

Thank you for the kind praise, kb1!

kb1 said:

I think some (more) full rotations are available for the imp, in either the alphas or the beta wad. They are not mirrors, but actual unique frames.

Despite the full *1-8 lump names, the rotations in the alphas are just mirrored graphics. Their later use of the *2*8 and so on lump names for automatic mirrored rotations is functionally identical to what they did in the alphas except more memory efficient.

3371-Alpha said:

Do you think you could add support for both of Final Doom's episodes? I get error messages when using the wads for Doom 2.

The Doom 2 sprite fix WAD is already compatible with the Final Doom IWADs. What error message do you receive?

For Plutonia, "Unknown patch BOSFA0 in texture A-BROWN4".
And for TNT, "Unknown patch TFOGI0 in texture SLAD10" and "Unknown patch TFOGI0 in texture SLAD11".
They don't seem to keep the games from running, but they are alarming.

Judging by that error message, you're using either ZDoom or GZDoom. I can confirm and replicate the problem in both source ports (as well as Zandronum), but the issue here is on the port's end and is unrelated to IWAD compatibility. The problem does not occur in any non-ZDoom based port I've tested. I found that this issue is not present in ZDaemon or Odamex, which means the error was introduced into the ZDoom codebase somewhere after 1.23, unfortunately not greatly narrowing the time span down.

I've reported this bug on the ZDoom forums, but otherwise, there's nothing I can do on my end as this is a fault in the source ports in question.

For reference, here's the sprite fix WAD loaded in Chocolate Doom running Plutonia:


And here's the WAD loaded in ZDoom 2.8.1 (same result in the latest dev builds):

Blastfrog said:

I don't quite like the current extended SHT2E0, it doesn't look natural. I made an alternate one I propose that the project uses:

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

Cool!
Made comparsion here


Also the HUD faces seems okay when considered they animate.

But HavoX I don't think the arachnotron sprite's is wrong since its based on real model. :/

Guys also thing that bothers me... The "sprite numbers" used on HUD de-facto copies the HUD background which shouldn't be right? It bothers me when I "lower" the HUD so I see them used in HP / AMMO counter with the few pixels from HUD bar... is it subject to fix?


Oh well now I realized they cast shadow in HUD, so removing it is silly sorta. confusing! Alien Vendetta does not suffer from this...

Edit: After removal they look way too flat heh, nobody would survive such change

Revenant100 said:

[...] I've reported this bug on the ZDoom forums, but otherwise, there's nothing I can do on my end as this is a fault in the source ports in question. [...]

The issue seems to be fixed since Oct 24. Any ZDoom/GZDoom build released after that should work fine (right now however, latest builds are dated Oct 20).

Boo! Happy (almost) Halloween! This frightening holiday weekend, I'm bringing you a spooky beta release of v1.8! The big additions here are the sprite padding fixes to correct mirroring and jittering issues in certain versions and ports (vanilla, GLBoom+, ZDaemon, etc). This likely marks the first time in over 20+ years, if not ever, it will be possible to see Doom's demon sprites with proper mirrored offsets in the original executables!

The purpose for a beta release is that, while the padding fixes are largely non-intrusive and even invisible in several ports, it is nonetheless a fairly large update for the project. I wish to make sure there are no unintended side effects, so I'm looking to additional public testing for assistance. I can't imagine any major conflicts, but I believe a very particular small number of PWADs such as brightmaps for GZDoom may lose compatibility due the the altered sprite dimensions.

Download for v1.8 (Beta 1):
(Outdated, see original post)

v1.8 Beta 1 summary changelog:

Just to note...
The padding issue is fixed in dev. versions of ZDaemon already. (1.10b08)

I am out this weekend on phone, so I cannot check but i am burning with curiousity.
How did you managed to fix sprite padding without the "engine sprite offset-flip bug-fix"? If I remember correctly the only way was to re-center sprites, but it makes some sacrafice? Mirroring used?

That padding issue is the most peeving thing for me about Doom each time I encounter a mastermind.

Medis said:

How did you managed to fix sprite padding without the "engine sprite offset-flip bug-fix"? If I remember correctly the only way was to re-center sprites, but it makes some sacrafice? Mirroring used?

By padding, I mean that I actually added empty space to the sprites to pad their dimensions, thus ensuring they are perfectly centered without changing their current offsets. Here's an example with the Spider Mastermind:



The original sprite is 215x109. The padded sprite is 251x109. When the engine mirrors the padded sprite, it flips it perfectly over the Y axis, thus avoiding the improperly recentered issue.

Never noticed that the big spider demon had such a jumpy sequence - now I have to go back and play some Doom/II.
Great work - keep it up!