I'll have to give this a try. Maybe it's a nostalgia thing, but Doom feels "wrong" at higher resolutions and hardware-accelerated texture smoothing. In the past I usually set GZDoom to a 720p resolution with software rendering while disabling up/down mouselook. This to me is the best of maintaining a "classic" Doom feel while still supporting widescreen.
My pet theory is: Doom's aesthetic is dark and scary. Being low-res helps with that, as does artifacting on distant surfaces (aliasing), and the way the 8-bit COLORMAP [1] turns things gray and splotchy. The darkness is exaggerated, compared to a high-res image with trilinear texture filtering and 24-bit color.
Simply disabling texture filtering would go a long way toward keeping the game looking the way the developers intended, without disabling hardware acceleration, widescreen, or other quality of life improvements.
I don’t think that the developers “intended” the game to look the way it does, they were merely responding to the constraints of the platform available at the time. Sure, we all can appreciate the “classic” look and feel, but to imply that it is to any degree essential to enjoying the game would be a bit disingenuous. I have no doubt that kids today would enjoy this game a lot more if, for example, the sprites were in higher resolution and used a smoother animation.
> I don’t think that the developers “intended” the game to look the way it does, they were merely responding to the constraints of the platform available at the time.
It's a distinction without a difference, as the end result is graphical assets (textures, sprites, etc.) that were designed to be displayed without any filtering.
Funny, I grew up playing the original DOOM and Quake, and when the Nintendo 64 came out with texture filtering I wanted to get that look into those games more than anything in the world (at least in Quake it did eventually get official support via GLQuake). My last playthroughs were at my screen's native rez with texture filtering, a remixed music pack, remastered audio, and with Brutal Doom installed, and the experience was like everything I dreamed Doom was back in the day. A retro-accurate version of the game just feels bland.
(On another note, Quake II RTX revitalizes an already great game, definitely check it out if you can run it)
I feel like you're my exact opposite. Quake 2 is a boring game and the RTX version is like spraying a fine mist of water all over Quake 2 and shining at it with a flashlight. Doom is best enjoyed largely untouched mechanically because its design is still unique and unrivaled. Brutal Doom completely throws everything off and turns it into an obnoxious gorefest.
We should meet and fight in a schoolyard some time.
Q2 is pretty boring compared to modern shooters, but it is one of the last games from it's particular vintage style of corridor-shooter FPS, and it does it better than it's priors mechanically. Full 3D, autorun, mouselook, none of this click-to-aim, walk-by-default crap
Soon thereafter Call of Duty hit the scene and everything goes downhill from there (save Half-Life)
edit- I remember seeing the fake screenshots on the back of the box of D-ZONE and getting pissed my game didn't look like that. It only took 20 years or so!
Oh I know that's how it originally was. I think the N64 required it but I'm not sure. Either way I didn't play it at the time so I don't have any nostalgia for the look. But IMO it looks leagues better without.
also there are shaders in many emulators that apply this effect on modern monitors. but this is usually only for old console games, never seen one for pc games (but this crispy doom - or other doom modernizartion - could maybe incorporate them?)
That is true. I don't mind the pixel-perfect upgrade, but I wonder if any texture filter can do justice to vector games like Asteroids, where the bullets really lighted up the screen, it felt like they were dangerous and explosive.
I guess it all boils down to personal preferences. I grew up with consoles that used huge pixels, so in my mind they were perfect squares.
I recently played through Doom and Doom II via GZDoom and had a great experience playing at 1080p and with disabled texture filtering. I didn't play these games when they first came out so mouselook feels natural to me and I'd recommend it for people in similar positions. These games really do hold up
I agree with the resolution and texture smoothing, but I really like the mouselook, though. On the higher difficulty levels, with autoaim disabled, the experience is really intense. Of course I like the Brutal Doom mod as well.
However, the software rendering in GZDoom does that 256-color-only fade out thing which really contributed to the scary, gritty look of the original. Game looks "better" with that enabled even if it's not truly 3-d rendered.
That's the awesome thing about GZDoom though. Everyone can make it their own game and customize it how they want. It's fascinating people are still making new levels for it.
Part of the issue is old games were designed for the shitty 13-15" CRTs of the day. They had a natural amount of antialiasing from phosphor bleed and dot pitch of the shadow mask. Game art often took advantage of these limitations.
You see the same issues with old console games on emulators. While some people like the "pixelated" look you see with default settings, it's not how the games actually looked on a CRT.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the "Doomsday Engine," which is cross-platform and has the slickest modernization of Doom (I and II), Hexen, and Heretic that I've come across.
How much fidelity to the original to maintain is certainly a matter of taste, but imo they've done an excellent job of maintaining the essence while translating the basic feel and appearance to something slick and modern(ish): upscaled and better filtered textures, dynamic lighting, mouse look + strafing + jumping, UI for multiplayer match-making + game-playing, etc.
Doomsday doesn't get much mention these days because the community has largely embraced GZDoom for Doom with "modern" enhancements, and many modern maps and mods are designed for for he GZDoom engine.
I just tried out GZDoom to see how it compares. I think the rendering is nice, and far more performant than Doomsday on my M1 mac.
I do miss the dynamic lights and particle effects and nicer UI from Doomsday though (e.g. GZDoom won't start until you move your WAD files to a specific directory or edit a .ini file; Doomsday launches with an optional quick tutorial through the UI, then allows you to use a filechooser and point to a directory, after which the games corresponding to WADs show up in a nice visual selector).
It's nice to know there is a backup if support falls off for Doomsday in the future though (my sister and I have been using it to play co-op multiplayer for > 15yrs :)
Woof! is a source port from the same creator and worth checking out too: https://github.com/fabiangreffrath/woof It's crispy doom visual plus much more modern extensions to doom mod support (way less limits and much more custom behavior supported). This is a good video describing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aq44msZ3eO8
The point of Crispy is to be closer to vanilla than ports like GZDoom, Zandronum, PRBoom, etc, but still remove some static limits (that custom maps need to work) and increase the render resolution (which GZDoom etc do, but vanilla and ports like Chocolate Doom don't).
Basically it's Chocolate Doom (which is essentially 1994 Doom, but it builds and runs on modern systems), but a little more easy to use and a little more compatible.
I think I played through most of Chocolate Doom a year or two ago... I started playing video games maybe 5-10 years after the game's time and missed out on when it was new. There is something fast paced, simple and exciting to Doom's classic gameplay I didn't get from the FPS's I played as a kid. It's neat to see how much work goes on around the classic Doom games still to this day. Want to pick up Doom64 and play that next probably.
I'd love to try this, but but I tend to get motion sick playing doom. It seems to be one of the few FPS games that I can't handle for more than a couple minutes at a time.
Older "2.5D" game engines (like vanilla Doom and the BUILD engine) use a number of tricks to simulate a three-dimensional scene that can be disorienting, especially when your player-character is looking up or down, crouching, leaning, or otherwise not looking directly straight.
Modern engines like GZDoom or eDuke32 have full-fledged 3D renderers, rather than the quasi-3D renderers of old. If you don't get motion sickness playing modern games, then playing Doom on an engine with a modern renderer might be helpful.
I think you're overthinking the problem. Doom has a really deep view-bobbing motion along with a slow and deep, not quite in sync weapon bobbing motion. There's no looking up or down, crouching, leaning or in any way not looking directly straight, and Duke Nukem 3D which had all of those things never seemed to bother any of my friends like Doom did.
I've always assumed it was the view bobbing/weapon bobbing combo, though maybe I'm the one underthinking it.
How would you do graphics in Java in a truly portable way? There's Swing but it's terrible and isn't available in every JVM implementation (Android and J2ME don't have it). Then anything that uses hardware-accelerated rendering (OpenGL, Vulkan, Metal) would require native libraries thus nullifying any remaining portability.
I find it slightly weird that a product that's characterized by its attention to resolution and crispiness has no images/video or obvious links to such in their README.
I was irked by this as well. I suspect that if GitHub allowed people to copy-paste images directly into README.md we'd see more images in the description of such projects (not sure if they've added such features since the last time I wrote a README.md).
