8 ms·

Is it okay if I occupy the following ideological niche: 1. I love original doom. 2. I am very excited about what ray-tracing can do for games. 3. I have a ton

Is it okay if I occupy the following ideological niche: 1. I love original doom. 2. I am very excited about what ray-tracing can do for games. 3. I have a ton of respect for doom modders and the doubtless huge amount of effort that went into this project. 4. I hate how this looks and wouldn't play it except as a curiosity To me, the original doom was a piece of art, tuned by artists (I'll say it!) to look a certain way on the computer screen. Like a great movie, every frame was a painting - a bright blue soul sphere added a nice highlight on top of a muted brownish-green canvas. A pinky demon standing in front of some mid-level gray barrels with greenish ooze... a spare clip - black, with a little orange. I find that modern games tend to be really visually tiresome and unappealing. Often, this seems to come from overly contrasted, poorly lit scenes. Instead of a painting you get a bad photograph with too much or too little exposure. This seems to be largely the effect you get with ray-traced doom. Instead of the painting that is E1M1, you get this black room occasionally washed out by an awful fluorescent glow. I think ray-tracing has the potential to create some amazing stuff, but retroactively applying it to doom rather predictably just makes... poorly balanced doom.

paulryanrogers 5y ago
As a one time Doom modder in the mid-90s I agree the lighting feels out of place. Even most modern renderers in software don't look the same as CRTs over VGA. They're all too bright and often washed out. Tuning contrast and brightness only help so much.
jay_kyburz 5y ago
Yes, I wanted to say something similar. I would love to see what this looked like with all the textures removed and replaced with simple flat colors or nice crisp vector images.
andrewf 5y ago
I've often felt this way about spruced-up Doom ports. Bilinear texture filtering and hi-res exposes the simplicity of the geometry and textures, it's like when TV went HD, and TV-quality sets/costumes/makeup suddenly looked "worse". It's probably still a net win if you want to blast through third-party levels. See: https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/DOOM%20II%3A%20Hell%20on%20Earth https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/DOOM%20II%3A%20Hell%20o... I personally draw the line at colored lighting :) Naively, I'm interested in whether raytraced Doom would be a good way to experiment with reproducing Doom's original atmospherics in a less pixelated way. Unfiltered texturing, 320x200, and the lossiness of palettized graphics (https://doomwiki.org/wiki/COLORMAP https://doomwiki.org/wiki/COLORMAP looks gross!) makes the world dark and blurry, it'd be cool to have the same atmosphere without the pixelation and moire effects.
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  I don't think you can have high resolution without an AI+human up-scaling of the art assets. And ideally without the bill-boarding from projecting sprites on polygons. Better to have always facing sprites IMO. Now if only the up-scaling artists could collaborate with Smooth Doom. That would be a great way to play.
bombcar 5y ago
Doom has that "pixel perfect" feeling that many early highly-polished games had. With that few pixels, it's actually possible to consider each one individually and how it works with the whole. The amount of actual 3D polygon detail you need to imitate that is quite high - compare WarCraft 2 to WarCraft III and Starcraft 2.
thomastjeffery 5y ago
I wonder how good it would look at 320x240 and 16-bit color.
- anthk 5y ago
  8, you mean. 16 bit allows a big pallete, near true color, but bad gradients.
  - thomastjeffery 5y ago
    > but bad gradients That may be good enough. I would like to find out.
astrange 5y ago
I used to work on the open source Marathon port and I have to say, I regret us making it high-res bilinear OpenGL just because we could. In the end the effect was to make everything look unbalanced and blurry because the geometry and textures weren't meant to be scaled up so much. Obviously very different, but Return of the Obra Dinn struck me as a modern game that actually manages to look "low res" in a resolution scalable way.
- ovao 5y ago
  Is there a nearest neighbor option? That gets you (mostly) halfway there at least.
  - astrange 5y ago
    There is, and IIRC you can set it differently for near and far walls. There’s also highres texture packs now. (I think you still want bilinear+anisotropy as a minification filter/on faraway textures, because nearest neighbor will just look like a mess in motion or at extreme angles.)
- Zardoz84 5y ago
  GZDoom/Zandronum allows to set to use mipmapping with nearest and anisotropic filtering... Simply looks good and sharp and avoid all problems of blurriness that bilinear/trilinear introduces.
- anthk 5y ago
  On Alephone and such I always set the filter to a -pixelish- nearest mipmap rendering. I loved that port since the SuSE 8.2 days.
dleslie 5y ago
This isn't an uncommon niche; it's not without reason that using meshes never really caught on in the Doom community, despite support for various formats having been in common source ports for decades now. Personally, I hate the look of bilinear filtered, over-bloomed, real-time shadowed Doom that some folks enjoy with GZDoom and similar. Part of the charm of the design is because the lighting is _unreal_. The hard transitions between light levels, with the ability sharply transition light levels, led to some absolutely wild horror experiences. FWIW, my favourite source port is Crispy Doom.
- anthk 5y ago
  >FWIW, my favourite source port is Crispy Doom. Ditto. I used to use Chocolate Doom, but I want to play Boom compatible PWADs which don't requiere ZDoom (old Celeron+Mobile 4 series user there, GL 2.1 it's a bitch). Also, the changes from Choco to Crispy are almost nil except liming removing support. Man, I love Doom, Slashem, IF gaming and some libre games which maybe not as graphical intensive as the current AAA games since... 2005? But they are crazy replayable.
  - gentleman11 5y ago
    I find the movement in gzdoom feels slightly nicer than in chocolate for some reason. More slidy maybe
    - andrewf 5y ago
      Chocolate preserves Doom's framerate cap (35fps). GZDoom makes it configurable (I think uncapped is the default)
hotpotamus 5y ago
It reminded me a bit of the Star Wars Special Edition fiasco - puttng 90's CGI into a 70's movie looked bad at the time and terrible now. The footage I saw of this gave me a similar mismatched feeling though I agree it's technically impressive.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  Thank God despecialised edition exists!
  - stevage 5y ago
    Very hard to get hold of though.
- eproxus 5y ago
  Speaking of, I think this glossy look would be perfect for a game like Dark Forces [1], rather than Doom. I feel most surfaces in Doom doesn’t really look like they would be so glossy. But imagine a raytraced imperial starship hangar in Dark Forces instead. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Dark_Forces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Dark_Forces
throw7 5y ago
You will always be correct and not some "ideological niche". Original means the source. Anything from the origin will always be derivative. If it wasn't it would be original.
pcwalton 5y ago
RTX Doom isn't an exercise in art direction any more than the Cornell Box is an exercise in art direction. If you want an experience shaped by an art director, pick up your favorite title on Steam. This is a hack that was probably a lot of fun to write and a lot of fun to look at. Hacking support for bleeding-edge GPU technology into a engine from 1993 that doesn't support 3D meshes at all is an impressive feat. I'm glad people are having fun writing such things and don't see the need to critique the aesthetics.
- anthk 5y ago
  I would love to try this with the Freedoom assets. I play most PWADs with Freedoom too, they look perfectly fine.
- skocznymroczny 5y ago
  It's not hacking support into an engine from 1993. It's adding RTX support to a source port, which is a more modern engine with 3D rendering in mind from the beginning. However I agree it's nothing more than a fun exercise.
- plorg 5y ago
  I get the feeling that GP was responding more to the article than to the project. The article spends a lot of words suggesting the project makes all other DOOM ports obsolete. Definitely the title suggests that. And given that value judgment I think it's plenty reasonable to offer a critique of "this project is technically impressive but leaves me wanting aesthetically." I suspect if a different article (say, the project GitHub) had been submitted the comments here would be much different.
  - jcbrand 5y ago
    The title is clickbait (what else is new?) and is meant tongue-in-cheek. I doubt anyone seriously thinks that this makes all other DOOM ports obsolete.
millimeterman 5y ago
As someone who didn't grow up with the original Doom, I frankly think it looks like an incomprehensible jumble. That's not a knock against the artists - I think the technological limitations simply made a readable 3D game impossible. I'm not saying this is any better, but I think your impression is being colored more by your gameplay experience and nostalgia than by how the game actually looks.
- bananamerica 5y ago
  It's quite possible that the way you played Doom was not ideal. Chocolate Doom is a project focused on making vanilla Doom look and feel right on modern hardware. https://www.chocolate-doom.org/wiki/index.php/About https://www.chocolate-doom.org/wiki/index.php/About
  - anthk 5y ago
    Crispy Doom is better. It's almost as purist as Choco but it allows you to play Boom compatible IWADs well. Also, Hexen and Strife. So FreeDoom + all of the Boom compatible PWADs will work. Today most Vanilla [AKA non-Zdoom] targetings PWAD's will require a Boom/limit removing compatible engine, that's the gold standard.
    - bananamerica 5y ago
      The projects seem to have different goals > Crispy Doom is a friendly fork of Chocolate Doom that provides a higher display resolution, removes the static limits of the Doom engine and offers further optional visual, tactical and physical enhancements while remaining entirely config file, savegame, netplay and demo compatible with the original
      - anthk 5y ago
        Yeah, but Boom-compatible it's still on the boundaries. Most purists will be fine with Crispy. It doesn't require a PC more powerful than a 2001 one if not less. Pentium MMX-2, if any. Or ARMv5. Because of SDL. (G)ZDoom is another level.
emptyfile 5y ago
>4. I hate how this looks and wouldn't play it except as a curiosity What on earth makes you think Doom with raytracing is anything other then a curiosity? It would be shocking if it turned out to be anything else. Are posters on this site really so dour to not recognize a bit of... hacking?
- xxs 5y ago
  >What on earth makes you think Doom with raytracing is anything other then a curiosity The attempt to add raytracing to everything w/o any regard of usability, e.g. this in the raytraced version is really hard to see anything if you are shot at.
WithinReason 5y ago
I think a partial reason for that is the huge amounts of "bloom" the guy enabled next to ray tracing
benreesman 5y ago
This is a bit of a meta-comment, but why do these downer comments fastidiously festooned in the language of plausibly-deniable faux-amicability end up at the top? The right answer to “harmless cool thing that others enjoy but I have zero interest in” is nothing. This is dope, a lot of people seem to think so. It’s not your cup of tea, fine. You’re allowed to say nothing.
- wly_cdgr 5y ago
  The right answer is whatever the heck they want to say. As someone who agrees strongly with them I appreciate having my point of view represented.
  - benreesman 5y ago
    You feel appreciative that someone had the gumption and integrity to stand up to the lemming-like groundswell of mindless drones corrupting the legacy of Id by a DOOM mod? You realize that while Romero was the one pushing for WAD in particular, Carmack backed him all the way. To the point of open-sourcing the engines. To the point of threatening to quit on multiple occasions if anyone tried to patent-encumber any of the Id intellectual property? Adrian Carmack (no relation) was also totally onboard. The right answer is to know things about things before saying things about them. For Christ’s sake they made a book about this shit legible to people who don’t understand the 1/sqrt trick.
    - MattRix 5y ago
      I feel like you misinterpreted the initial comment and you’re now using that as a reason to go on your own unrelated rant. Nobody said that Doom mods are bad or that they’re corrupting Id’s legacy or even that this specific Doom mod was a mistake. They just don’t like the way it looks, that’s it. It’s not that big of a deal.
      - benreesman 5y ago
        I didn’t misinterpret anything. OP saw an opportunity to take a shot at something and get some replies, fair play that’s what HNers do when we’re bored, myself included. I saw someone talking nonsense about a topic I’m versed in and snapped them off at the stem over it, also what HNers do when they’re bored.
wly_cdgr 5y ago
Agree, hate it
erwincoumans 5y ago
A super cool mod, but agreed. They could have added more ambient light and make the raytracing effect more subtle and probably much prettier, with just a few lines of code. Some areas and shadows became way too dark.
jstummbillig 5y ago
Also: Big fan of Doom > Like a great movie, every frame was a painting - a bright blue soul sphere added a nice highlight on top of a muted brownish-green canvas. Well, that's unreasonably nostalgic. I do agree that a lot of modern games confuse high quality art with effects, but past video games were heavily, and (to their creators) excruciatingly limited by technical feasibility, NOT by deliberate artistic choices. The classics you remember are not what the creator imagined or wanted. It was the least painful compromise. The creators had two sticks and were hell-bent to build a space station with those. Completely unreasonable. Immensely frustrating. A masterpiece, but definitely not what the creators would have created given more options – least of all id software, which were nothing if not cutting edge.
- t0suj4 5y ago
  It looks like you've single-handedly dismissed all the pixel art created today by saying that. The art direction was simply chosen based on the available technology.
  - jstummbillig 5y ago
    > It looks like you've single-handedly dismissed all the pixel art created today by saying that. Hm. I feel one has to read my comment very carelessly or interpret lot of words very unfavourably to arrive at that conclusion.
    - t0suj4 5y ago
      I must admit, I have misinterpreted it.
  - alar44 5y ago
    To be honest I hate modern pixel art games because the sprites can rotate and move around but not respect a pixelated canvas. I see it as laziness or at the least, a lack of actual art direction.
    - alpaca128 5y ago
stared 5y ago
I agree. I mean, I love this project as a proof of concept. It runs, it works. It is interesting to see an imp's fireball casting my shadow on a wall. At the same time, visually it falls in an uncanny valley. As you notied, Doom is polished to its edge. Or in other words, it is in a local optimum. Any small changes (in graphics or gameplay) are unlikely to improve it. That said, it is clearly prossible to make high-quality remakes. I recommend a lot Black Mesa: Xen, also using Ray Traciing. It goes way beyond higher res textures, more detailed models, or just ray tracing. It bring a stunning experience! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAIJich73NY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAIJich73NY
gentleman11 5y ago
Ray tracing in quake 2 also looks worse. The games have very good lighting baked in and aren’t designed for ray tracing realistic lighting - it throws the colour pallet and focal points out
Shorel 5y ago
You can take the original DooM, and the super advanced ray-traced DooM, and for each pixel make an average of both, and it will look better than either of them. At least that's what I get from this demo.
oweiler 5y ago
Have you played Brutal Doom?

paulryanrogers 5y ago

As a one time Doom modder in the mid-90s I agree the lighting feels out of place. Even most modern renderers in software don't look the same as CRTs over VGA. They're all too bright and often washed out. Tuning contrast and brightness only help so much.

jay_kyburz 5y ago

Yes, I wanted to say something similar. I would love to see what this looked like with all the textures removed and replaced with simple flat colors or nice crisp vector images.

andrewf 5y ago

I've often felt this way about spruced-up Doom ports. Bilinear texture filtering and hi-res exposes the simplicity of the geometry and textures, it's like when TV went HD, and TV-quality sets/costumes/makeup suddenly looked "worse". It's probably still a net win if you want to blast through third-party levels. See: https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/DOOM%20II%3A%20Hell%20on%20Earth https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/DOOM%20II%3A%20Hell%20o... I personally draw the line at colored lighting :) Naively, I'm interested in whether raytraced Doom would be a good way to experiment with reproducing Doom's original atmospherics in a less pixelated way. Unfiltered texturing, 320x200, and the lossiness of palettized graphics (https://doomwiki.org/wiki/COLORMAP https://doomwiki.org/wiki/COLORMAP looks gross!) makes the world dark and blurry, it'd be cool to have the same atmosphere without the pixelation and moire effects.

paulryanrogers 5y ago
I don't think you can have high resolution without an AI+human up-scaling of the art assets. And ideally without the bill-boarding from projecting sprites on polygons. Better to have always facing sprites IMO. Now if only the up-scaling artists could collaborate with Smooth Doom. That would be a great way to play.

bombcar 5y ago

Doom has that "pixel perfect" feeling that many early highly-polished games had. With that few pixels, it's actually possible to consider each one individually and how it works with the whole. The amount of actual 3D polygon detail you need to imitate that is quite high - compare WarCraft 2 to WarCraft III and Starcraft 2.

thomastjeffery 5y ago

I wonder how good it would look at 320x240 and 16-bit color.

anthk 5y ago
8, you mean. 16 bit allows a big pallete, near true color, but bad gradients.
- thomastjeffery 5y ago
  > but bad gradients That may be good enough. I would like to find out.

astrange 5y ago

I used to work on the open source Marathon port and I have to say, I regret us making it high-res bilinear OpenGL just because we could. In the end the effect was to make everything look unbalanced and blurry because the geometry and textures weren't meant to be scaled up so much. Obviously very different, but Return of the Obra Dinn struck me as a modern game that actually manages to look "low res" in a resolution scalable way.

ovao 5y ago
Is there a nearest neighbor option? That gets you (mostly) halfway there at least.
- astrange 5y ago
  There is, and IIRC you can set it differently for near and far walls. There’s also highres texture packs now. (I think you still want bilinear+anisotropy as a minification filter/on faraway textures, because nearest neighbor will just look like a mess in motion or at extreme angles.)
Zardoz84 5y ago
GZDoom/Zandronum allows to set to use mipmapping with nearest and anisotropic filtering... Simply looks good and sharp and avoid all problems of blurriness that bilinear/trilinear introduces.
anthk 5y ago
On Alephone and such I always set the filter to a -pixelish- nearest mipmap rendering. I loved that port since the SuSE 8.2 days.

dleslie 5y ago

This isn't an uncommon niche; it's not without reason that using meshes never really caught on in the Doom community, despite support for various formats having been in common source ports for decades now. Personally, I hate the look of bilinear filtered, over-bloomed, real-time shadowed Doom that some folks enjoy with GZDoom and similar. Part of the charm of the design is because the lighting is _unreal_. The hard transitions between light levels, with the ability sharply transition light levels, led to some absolutely wild horror experiences. FWIW, my favourite source port is Crispy Doom.

anthk 5y ago
>FWIW, my favourite source port is Crispy Doom. Ditto. I used to use Chocolate Doom, but I want to play Boom compatible PWADs which don't requiere ZDoom (old Celeron+Mobile 4 series user there, GL 2.1 it's a bitch). Also, the changes from Choco to Crispy are almost nil except liming removing support. Man, I love Doom, Slashem, IF gaming and some libre games which maybe not as graphical intensive as the current AAA games since... 2005? But they are crazy replayable.
- gentleman11 5y ago
  I find the movement in gzdoom feels slightly nicer than in chocolate for some reason. More slidy maybe
  - andrewf 5y ago
    Chocolate preserves Doom's framerate cap (35fps). GZDoom makes it configurable (I think uncapped is the default)

hotpotamus 5y ago

It reminded me a bit of the Star Wars Special Edition fiasco - puttng 90's CGI into a 70's movie looked bad at the time and terrible now. The footage I saw of this gave me a similar mismatched feeling though I agree it's technically impressive.

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
Thank God despecialised edition exists!
- stevage 5y ago
  Very hard to get hold of though.
eproxus 5y ago
Speaking of, I think this glossy look would be perfect for a game like Dark Forces [1], rather than Doom. I feel most surfaces in Doom doesn’t really look like they would be so glossy. But imagine a raytraced imperial starship hangar in Dark Forces instead. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Dark_Forces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Dark_Forces

throw7 5y ago

You will always be correct and not some "ideological niche". Original means the source. Anything from the origin will always be derivative. If it wasn't it would be original.

pcwalton 5y ago

RTX Doom isn't an exercise in art direction any more than the Cornell Box is an exercise in art direction. If you want an experience shaped by an art director, pick up your favorite title on Steam. This is a hack that was probably a lot of fun to write and a lot of fun to look at. Hacking support for bleeding-edge GPU technology into a engine from 1993 that doesn't support 3D meshes at all is an impressive feat. I'm glad people are having fun writing such things and don't see the need to critique the aesthetics.

anthk 5y ago
I would love to try this with the Freedoom assets. I play most PWADs with Freedoom too, they look perfectly fine.
skocznymroczny 5y ago
It's not hacking support into an engine from 1993. It's adding RTX support to a source port, which is a more modern engine with 3D rendering in mind from the beginning. However I agree it's nothing more than a fun exercise.
plorg 5y ago
I get the feeling that GP was responding more to the article than to the project. The article spends a lot of words suggesting the project makes all other DOOM ports obsolete. Definitely the title suggests that. And given that value judgment I think it's plenty reasonable to offer a critique of "this project is technically impressive but leaves me wanting aesthetically." I suspect if a different article (say, the project GitHub) had been submitted the comments here would be much different.
- jcbrand 5y ago
  The title is clickbait (what else is new?) and is meant tongue-in-cheek. I doubt anyone seriously thinks that this makes all other DOOM ports obsolete.

millimeterman 5y ago

As someone who didn't grow up with the original Doom, I frankly think it looks like an incomprehensible jumble. That's not a knock against the artists - I think the technological limitations simply made a readable 3D game impossible. I'm not saying this is any better, but I think your impression is being colored more by your gameplay experience and nostalgia than by how the game actually looks.

bananamerica 5y ago
It's quite possible that the way you played Doom was not ideal. Chocolate Doom is a project focused on making vanilla Doom look and feel right on modern hardware. https://www.chocolate-doom.org/wiki/index.php/About https://www.chocolate-doom.org/wiki/index.php/About
- anthk 5y ago
  Crispy Doom is better. It's almost as purist as Choco but it allows you to play Boom compatible IWADs well. Also, Hexen and Strife. So FreeDoom + all of the Boom compatible PWADs will work. Today most Vanilla [AKA non-Zdoom] targetings PWAD's will require a Boom/limit removing compatible engine, that's the gold standard.
  - bananamerica 5y ago
    The projects seem to have different goals > Crispy Doom is a friendly fork of Chocolate Doom that provides a higher display resolution, removes the static limits of the Doom engine and offers further optional visual, tactical and physical enhancements while remaining entirely config file, savegame, netplay and demo compatible with the original
    - anthk 5y ago
      Yeah, but Boom-compatible it's still on the boundaries. Most purists will be fine with Crispy. It doesn't require a PC more powerful than a 2001 one if not less. Pentium MMX-2, if any. Or ARMv5. Because of SDL. (G)ZDoom is another level.

emptyfile 5y ago

>4. I hate how this looks and wouldn't play it except as a curiosity What on earth makes you think Doom with raytracing is anything other then a curiosity? It would be shocking if it turned out to be anything else. Are posters on this site really so dour to not recognize a bit of... hacking?

xxs 5y ago
>What on earth makes you think Doom with raytracing is anything other then a curiosity The attempt to add raytracing to everything w/o any regard of usability, e.g. this in the raytraced version is really hard to see anything if you are shot at.

WithinReason 5y ago

I think a partial reason for that is the huge amounts of "bloom" the guy enabled next to ray tracing

benreesman 5y ago

This is a bit of a meta-comment, but why do these downer comments fastidiously festooned in the language of plausibly-deniable faux-amicability end up at the top? The right answer to “harmless cool thing that others enjoy but I have zero interest in” is nothing. This is dope, a lot of people seem to think so. It’s not your cup of tea, fine. You’re allowed to say nothing.

wly_cdgr 5y ago
The right answer is whatever the heck they want to say. As someone who agrees strongly with them I appreciate having my point of view represented.
- benreesman 5y ago
  You feel appreciative that someone had the gumption and integrity to stand up to the lemming-like groundswell of mindless drones corrupting the legacy of Id by a DOOM mod? You realize that while Romero was the one pushing for WAD in particular, Carmack backed him all the way. To the point of open-sourcing the engines. To the point of threatening to quit on multiple occasions if anyone tried to patent-encumber any of the Id intellectual property? Adrian Carmack (no relation) was also totally onboard. The right answer is to know things about things before saying things about them. For Christ’s sake they made a book about this shit legible to people who don’t understand the 1/sqrt trick.
  - MattRix 5y ago
    I feel like you misinterpreted the initial comment and you’re now using that as a reason to go on your own unrelated rant. Nobody said that Doom mods are bad or that they’re corrupting Id’s legacy or even that this specific Doom mod was a mistake. They just don’t like the way it looks, that’s it. It’s not that big of a deal.
    - benreesman 5y ago
      I didn’t misinterpret anything. OP saw an opportunity to take a shot at something and get some replies, fair play that’s what HNers do when we’re bored, myself included. I saw someone talking nonsense about a topic I’m versed in and snapped them off at the stem over it, also what HNers do when they’re bored.

wly_cdgr 5y ago

Agree, hate it

erwincoumans 5y ago

A super cool mod, but agreed. They could have added more ambient light and make the raytracing effect more subtle and probably much prettier, with just a few lines of code. Some areas and shadows became way too dark.

jstummbillig 5y ago

Also: Big fan of Doom > Like a great movie, every frame was a painting - a bright blue soul sphere added a nice highlight on top of a muted brownish-green canvas. Well, that's unreasonably nostalgic. I do agree that a lot of modern games confuse high quality art with effects, but past video games were heavily, and (to their creators) excruciatingly limited by technical feasibility, NOT by deliberate artistic choices. The classics you remember are not what the creator imagined or wanted. It was the least painful compromise. The creators had two sticks and were hell-bent to build a space station with those. Completely unreasonable. Immensely frustrating. A masterpiece, but definitely not what the creators would have created given more options – least of all id software, which were nothing if not cutting edge.

t0suj4 5y ago
It looks like you've single-handedly dismissed all the pixel art created today by saying that. The art direction was simply chosen based on the available technology.
- jstummbillig 5y ago
  > It looks like you've single-handedly dismissed all the pixel art created today by saying that. Hm. I feel one has to read my comment very carelessly or interpret lot of words very unfavourably to arrive at that conclusion.
  - t0suj4 5y ago
    I must admit, I have misinterpreted it.
- alar44 5y ago
  To be honest I hate modern pixel art games because the sprites can rotate and move around but not respect a pixelated canvas. I see it as laziness or at the least, a lack of actual art direction.
  - alpaca128 5y ago

stared 5y ago

I agree. I mean, I love this project as a proof of concept. It runs, it works. It is interesting to see an imp's fireball casting my shadow on a wall. At the same time, visually it falls in an uncanny valley. As you notied, Doom is polished to its edge. Or in other words, it is in a local optimum. Any small changes (in graphics or gameplay) are unlikely to improve it. That said, it is clearly prossible to make high-quality remakes. I recommend a lot Black Mesa: Xen, also using Ray Traciing. It goes way beyond higher res textures, more detailed models, or just ray tracing. It bring a stunning experience! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAIJich73NY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAIJich73NY

gentleman11 5y ago

Ray tracing in quake 2 also looks worse. The games have very good lighting baked in and aren’t designed for ray tracing realistic lighting - it throws the colour pallet and focal points out

Shorel 5y ago

You can take the original DooM, and the super advanced ray-traced DooM, and for each pixel make an average of both, and it will look better than either of them. At least that's what I get from this demo.

oweiler 5y ago

Have you played Brutal Doom?