Beautiful Doom

Another micro-report: I found a way to alternate gibbing in such a way that a gibbed monster doesn't explode in all directions but instead its limbs and whatnot fly away from the point where damage came from. I.e. if it was gibbed by a rocket that hit it from the left, the gibs will mostly fly to the right, etc. It seems logical but at the same time may be a little less fun (I got really used to those random explosions).

Also Arch-Vile is now able to respawn gibbed enemies even if advanced gibbing is used. When gibbed they leave behind a pool of blood (among other things, he-he) that marks the location where the monster was. The Arch-Vile can ressurrect it. The ressurection animation looks different in this way (the monster is red and fades in slowly, as if spawned from hell), but it's just a visual difference.

And another idea I've been playing with today: another type of death.
Currently I have standard (in 1-2 variations for some monsters), fire, plasma (smoky) and extreme (gibs). In the video I also show a 'half-gibbing' that I call Decapitation death at the moment. It checks how far the monster's health went down after damage (health value can be negative) and if it was damaged strongly but not strong enough to be gibbed, in enters decapitation animation which is slightly more gory than regular death. In case of Zombieman it loses its head and right arm. I think mostly it'll be about losing the head.

Here's a rough piece of video that shows those three things. (Only the monsters wad is used here, so the weapons are vanilla in the video.)



UPD:

After a while I decided to remove the 'hellish respawning' style of gibbing. Instead a gibbed monster leaves behind a small pool of meat and blood and is ressurrected from it as usual.

I also removed Pinky gibbing animation because I think it looked a bit out of place. I added more death animations however, so that it now has 4 (including one where it loses an arm and one where it loses a head).

Sneakpeak: alternative Cacodemon death anims.
You may notice that they are the same alternative deaths as before, but I redrew the animations from scratch.



Alternative Pain Elemental death.

In the game they're also supplied with special effects (particle gibs and blood).

Almost done with the monsters. Lots of minor tweaks.

The first animation looks like the Cacodemon is spewing out a chewed Imp.

scifista42 said:

The first animation looks like the Cacodemon is spewing out a chewed Imp.

Ha-ha, kinda, yeah :) But in the game you'll clearly see that it's its intestines. I actually used basic sprites to create intestines sprites.

Also particle meat pieces spewed by Caco are now not blue but rather fleshy-brownish but with blue blood.

Jekyll Grim Payne said:

'Half-gibbing' that I call Decapitation death at the moment.

I have a better term for that: dismemberment.

J.B.R said:

I have a better term for that: dismemberment.

Right you are, thought that last night. Anyway, the term doesn't appear in the game so it doesn't really matter.

Another piece.



Like I said, almost done with the monsters... Now to the last and most fun part: tweaking weapons.

Those gibs look good, i look foward to it.

I also decided to try and make a few higher-resolution sprites. Definitely not going to do a lot of these, but maybe for the main pickups.

I like the idea to make HD sprites, but I'm not much of an artist myself and I'd like them to look as familiar as possible. So that's what I did for now.



These were enlarged 4 times and then I removed the blockiness manually. (The image itself is addionally zoomed so that the details can be seen.)

Very very cool! Something comparable to Brutal Doom at last!
But hey, did you used a Dehacked patch or modified the source code of the game directly? Because I never knew it was POSSIBLE to make gibs just fly away from the damage point, between other impossibilities like Brutal Doom's bonus or stuff like that.

Gustavo6046 said:

Very very cool! Something comparable to Brutal Doom at last!
But hey, did you used a Dehacked patch or modified the source code of the game directly? Because I never knew it was POSSIBLE to make gibs just fly away from the damage point, between other impossibilities like Brutal Doom's bonus or stuff like that.

I used DECORATE and other features of GZDoom. Wouldn't say it's "modifying source code" because (G)ZDoom is technically not a Doom but a different engine, and DECORATE is just a scripting language. And practically anything is possible with it :)

Also first versions of Beautiful Doom appeared quite some time before Brutal Doom. I think I started several years ago and there's been a long time since the release of version 5.3, that's why I created this new thread. I'm not really comparing because the idea of the mod is different.

Jekyll Grim Payne said:

I also decided to try and make a few higher-resolution sprites. Definitely not going to do a lot of these, but maybe for the main pickups.

I like the idea to make HD sprites, but I'm not much of an artist myself and I'd like them to look as familiar as possible. So that's what I did for now.

http://oi66.tinypic.com/24ypl3k.jpg

These were enlarged 4 times and then I removed the blockiness manually. (The image itself is addionally zoomed so that the details can be seen.)

These look nice, although it think it would be better to just have the main pickups, as the hi-res sprites increase the size of a wad or a pk3 file.

wouldn't it look weird if some sprites where higher res than others?

raymoohawk said:

Wouldn't it look weird if some sprites where higher res than others?

Well, it would look weird, however, maybe it could be a seperate addon?

raymoohawk said:

wouldn't it look weird if some sprites where higher res than others?

You know, it's actually interesting. It depends on the sprite. I should say, you don't really see the difference unless you stop and look close. That's because they have hard eges and basically the same amount of detail. The hard edge make them look very much like original sprite.

Check out this comparison:



(Notice that health bonuses in the right screenshots and the stimpack in the left screenshots are hi-res too, but you can't really see it from this distance and in this resolution.)


But in any case, I'm definitely not going to do many of them. It wasn't even the original plan, because generally yes, hi-res sprites look out of place. I think I'll probably only make them for weapons, that'll make them look crisp and easier to spot. Maybe health and armor too but I haven't decided yet. And of course I made a lot of new sprites most of which are in original resolution (e.g. new monster death animations).

I could be wrong, but isn't there a hi-res pickups addon already floating around somewhere? Your work looks good, regardless!

Gifty said:

I could be wrong, but isn't there a hi-res pickups addon already floating around somewhere? Your work looks good, regardless!

I only came across Skulltag hires items which to my mind don't look that great and, more importantly, most of them aren't original items/sprites. Which surprises me, because I believe there should be this sort of addon. I mostly made these just for fun.


My other idea is to use HD (high definition not just hi-res) sprites. They look slightly different from original sprites but not that much. But that is for weapons only. I can make them based on some images and models of Doom weapons floating around the Internet. Some of them are quite good.

Here's what I have in mind:




(top to bottom: original, hi-res, HD)

Jekyll Grim Payne said:

My other idea is to use HD (high definition not just hi-res) sprites. They look slightly different from original sprites but not that much. But that is for weapons only. I can make them based on some images and models of Doom weapons floating around the Internet. Some of them are quite good.

Here's what I have in mind:

http://oi63.tinypic.com/21bvvjk.jpg


(top to bottom: original, hi-res, HD)

I kinda like that HD SSG, it think it's a good idea to make HD sprites for weapon pickups, although my issue is the size of the mod, because the higher the quality, the heavier it becomes to download.

That third SSG is definitely the way to go. It looks great!

That's it's exactly the sort of thing that most "HD" sprite projects seem to miss -- you need that extra detail else it'll look like a blurry mess. So yep, you're Doing It Right. :D


[The coloration could maaaybe be tweaked a bit to incorporate an olive green shine since that was a feature on the original sprite, but I'm nitpicking at this point. :P]

Actually, I tested it out... and I don't know now.

I like the HD sprites. But while the hi-res sprites look just fine — they look just like original sprites but trimmed a little with finer edges (and in case of ammo boxes — clearer words) — these HD sprites look quite noticeably out of place. Considering that they are 4 times bigger than the original sprites, they look too detailed and it makes other sprites around look bad.

Maybe I should try to use the hi-res sprites but just work on them manually to add more details rather than trying to reduce the amount of details and add crispy look to the HD images I found.

But maybe not, because still I like what I'm getting with the HD sprites.

The images I'm using now are from this great guy FrancoTieppo. He actually allowed me to use them. Check out his awesome gallery of Doom weapon designs here: http://francotieppo.deviantart.com/gallery/39036494/Doom-High-Def-Weapon-Designs

He also said he's planning to redesign them soon. So far he has completed the shotguns which I think look just amazing. And their crisp look and even lighting makes them great base images for sprites. I don't know how soon he's going to finish others, but if it does happen soon enough I'd love to use these. They still look a little out of place but so far they seem pretty good with some color and shape correction.

Xaser said:

That third SSG is definitely the way to go. It looks great!

That's it's exactly the sort of thing that most "HD" sprite projects seem to miss -- you need that extra detail else it'll look like a blurry mess. So yep, you're Doing It Right. :D


[The coloration could maaaybe be tweaked a bit to incorporate an olive green shine since that was a feature on the original sprite, but I'm nitpicking at this point. :P]

Yeah, that's why at first I only wrote about hi-res sprites, not HD ones, until I found those drawings.

BTW sometimes some color spots seem quite weird to me on some guns, I've bever noticed that before. For example, what is this green area actually? Why is it green? Shotguns don't normally have a green spot on them. Is it supposed to be something significant, like perhaps a place for a logo, or maybe it's just unfortunate metal coloring in Doom palette?

But in any case I decided to do them for now and see how it goes. Here are some comparison images. Cool, eh? :)



The chainsaw isn't that great. Blade looks like a piece of asphalt, plus edges require some more trimming. But I'll see what I can do.



And to complete the post — a few ammo sprites. I think they look pretty fine and still very original.


I wrote "property of uac" at the bottom just to occupy the space that seems to be occupied by small words in the original sprites. I now think that perhaps writing the caliber and type of ammo in those places would be more appropriate.

Currently these are the weapon sprites I have. I should say I'm pretty satisfied with how they look, even though they do stand out a little in the game.

Nice touch.

The chainsaw blades do look like they could use some touching up though...

HavoX said:

Nice touch.

The chainsaw blades do look like they could use some touching up though...

They don't look great on the forum background but in the game it's pretty fine. On the origina chainsaw sprite the edges of the blade are just white and grey pixels. Here it's pretty much the same but much more varied and with spaces so that you can more or less see the teeth. I don't think I want to blur them too much. But of course I'll be looking at them for some time and may decide to work on it more.

I'm practically done. The weapons were rebalanced, the animation length is tic by tic original and lots of other stuff.

Does anyone has a good idea for a TITLEPIC (or a titlemap perhaps)?

I think a gameplay mod shouldn't have its own TITLEPIC/TITLEMAP, because people will be using it to play PWADS with their own TITLEPICS/TITLEMAPS, and I wouldn't like it if Beautiful Doom's TITLEPIC/TITLEMAP had overriden all of them.

It would be wonderful with Smooth Doom.

scifista42 said:

I think a gameplay mod shouldn't have its own TITLEPIC/TITLEMAP, because people will be using it to play PWADS with their own TITLEPICS/TITLEMAPS, and I wouldn't like it if Beautiful Doom's TITLEPIC/TITLEMAP had overriden all of them.

I initially wrote that I disagree, but now I think you may be right. Mostly because I can't seem to find/make anything good :)
BTW FYI you can see the pwad's titlepic instead of the mod's, you just need to load the mod before the pwad. E.g. gzdoom -file modname.wad pwadname.wad.

Avoozl said:

It would be wonderful with Smooth Doom.

Beautiful Doom has included smooth weapon animation since its first version. The new items and stuff like explosions and additional animations are rather smooth too. Naturally I'm not going to use alternative weapon or monster sprites from Smooth Doom, because the main point of Beautiful Doom is to look original (those few changes I made in terms of how things look will be reverted in the new version). There are also smooth water textures in BF. I'll see if there's anything I could use in Smooth Doom but I would like to go too far with changes.

Definitely a great alternative to Brutal Doom I see. That and comparable to Smooth Doom and Random Deaths & Decoration.

OK, it's out!
Check out the first post and report any issues you find.

UPD:

Updated to fix incorrect rocket hud sprite.

This is really good!
Although I REALLY have to ask that you please include HD sprites separately?
You're doing a great job with them, but I'm just not a big fan of HD sprites in DOOM in general. They contrast a little too much, and I honestly like the pixelated style of the originals.