“Can it run Doom” will never be the same, thanks to new ray-tracing mod
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
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.
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 looks gross!) makes the world dark and blurry, it'd be cool to have the same atmosphere without the pixelation and moire effects.
Now if only the up-scaling artists could collaborate with Smooth Doom. That would be a great way to play.
The amount of actual 3D polygon detail you need to imitate that is quite high - compare WarCraft 2 to WarCraft III and Starcraft 2.
That may be good enough. I would like to find out.
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.
(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.)
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.
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.
But imagine a raytraced imperial starship hangar in Dark Forces instead.
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.
However I agree it's nothing more than a fun exercise.
I suspect if a different article (say, the project GitHub) had been submitted the comments here would be much different.
I doubt anyone seriously thinks that this makes all other DOOM ports obsolete.
> 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
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.
It also seems like you are missing GP's point. "Better" is a loaded word because it implies a quality by which to measure, but Chocolate is better than Crispy for the exact purpose GP suggests it; it's more accurate in terms of the presentation and limitations of the original. Chocolate looks, sounds and plays like the original, with few compromises.
I thought it was interesting that the linked article said it became reminiscent of Doom 3 in terms of the darkness and horror, but I think Doom 3 was chasing that same darkness from the original that somehow became less dark over the years with the emergence of better display technology.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
High information comments don't have to be critical but they often are. Because it's saying something in opposition to the original post. That's why you often see threads that go back and forth between criticism and response. If you agree, you don't need to say anything.
This guy doesn't have zero interest in it. He mentioned he loves doom, the technology and modders but thinks this takes away from the intended well crafted aesthetic value of the game.
I’m all for spirited and informed debate, but “high information”? You mean in the Shannon sense or the compresses worse than a petabyte of zero sense?
I think that was a meaningful comment that adds to the discussion. I don't think it was snarky or negative just to be negative.
When I was little, one of my favorite movies was The Wizard of Oz. I have a cherished memory of my grandmother loading the VHS tape, and explaining what it was like to see color on the screen for the first time.
Many years later, my then-S.O. confesses that she's never seen it, so we rent the DVD. The DVD of the Wizard of Oz looks like garbage. It's obvious where the backdrops meet the ground. The costumes barely work. The trees in the Tin Man scene are straight up hilarious. If you've ever watched the original Star Trek series on DVD or Netflix, picture whatever special effect is most obviously fake to you (for me, it's The Doomsday Machine); the whole movie looks like that.
My grandmother had one experience with the film, never having glimpsed a color motion picture before. I had a different experience, watching from a worn VHS tape whose low fidelity masked a lot of the results of the relatively primitive techniques. My then-S.O. had a third experience, as would a child watching a digital version of the film today. Just because that experience is different (and, in many ways, worse) doesn't mean that the film never should have been digitized. Likewise, grandparent's preference for the original more primitive rendering doesn't mean that the ray-tracing mod never should've been made.
While I understand where you come from, there is still a difference of the medium.
Eg: I have seen Blade (1998) on a VHS first, except it was a pirated copy of a pirated copy. It was a very dark, almost noir toned story, somewhat visually akin to Sin City. Years later, when I saw in a decent quality on a (still analog at that time) TV I didn't recognized it first. And again, years later on a digital TV it became just a bunch of ads for Snipes on a highly lit backdrops and ugly CGI. Somewhat similar, though not that jarring, is my story with Babylon 5. Even when it aired I could see the effects and CGI (they were pretty obvious most of the time) but now the difference of quality (and 38" vs 14") sometimes distracts from immersing to the story.
BTW only with Avatar I finally couldn't reliably distinguish where the CGI starts or ends, but it was a top notch one. I still see the "lame" CGI (especially when a fake motion blur is cranked up to 11) even on a high budget films, like all that comic book adaptations.
My theory is that it has to do with how the the screen was always painted with such a bright and wide-ranging palette. One of the other posters described it well as a local optimum. With Doom-style sprites, the art team can decide exactly how the creature / object will look on the screen at render time. Once you introduce physics-based rendering, you always have to consider not just the color of the asset but also the texture, reflectance, and its surroundings (lighting, ambient occlusion, etc.). It's actually very similar to the difference between a painting and a photograph, now that I think about it.
I guess what I'm getting at is that if you want each frame to be a painting in a physics-based rendering paradigm, it could turn out that this requires WAY more work to achieve because you have to contend with a combinatorial explosion of interactions between your many assets and light sources. I suspect some studios will assume that all they have to do is take some nice-looking assets and "bump the lamp", but I think ray-traced Doom is a big clue that that won't work out very well. And sure, it will be cool for a few minutes while you marvel at some effect that is only possible with a ray-tracer, but they won't get replayability for free out of that. After a while, the player will get sick of pitch dark hallways with swinging overhead lamps full of glowing crystals or whatever.
My prediction is that ray-traced games may simply find a different approach to beauty. I'm picturing the difference between some renaissance masterpiece and a beautiful black-and-white photograph. Each pretty in their own way.
> 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.
The art direction was simply chosen based on the available technology.
Hm. I feel one has to read my comment very carelessly or interpret lot of words very unfavourably to arrive at that conclusion.
I mean you even see this in mainstream western art theory with colors. Only very very recently have painters had a full spectrum of colors and hues available without heavy constraints on some of them like price, toxicity, ability to mix or age in the presence of other colors.
The workarounds painters used could be highly technical, like using combinations of colors that causes optical illusion-like effects implying the difficult color. Or they could be not at all, like simply choosing to paint a setting where you wouldn't need to represent the difficult color.
These later changes, this opening up of technique and color, doesn't diminish the artistic merit of works that came before and had to struggle directly against those constraints. I don't think any artist at any time has been totally free to express their vision without technical constraints.
I think there's a lot of value in understanding the constraints when approaching a piece of art, and some value in trying to understand what the artist may have attempted without those constraints. But the constraints don't really affect the merit of what the artist did accomplish, only what they felt able to attempt. This feels really similar to me.
If you think about it, there are many artistic media that are extremely limiting. I mean, consider literal paint! The way that we receive art is surprisingly dependent on that limitation. Once upon a time we were painting on cave walls with crappy dyes. The tools and the painters kept getting better and better, and by the 17th-19th century you have masters contributing some of the most important art of all time. And then, all of a sudden, when we arrive in the 20th century we get color photos, and photoshop, and it’s all somehow _too powerful_. The Mona Lisa done in PS just isn’t the same. And I think it’s more than nostalgia that makes me say that.
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
At least that's what I get from this demo.
I recorded a little of gameplay on max settings, it brings my 2080 ti down on rare occasion with 2 light pass, I also did the optional DLSS it offers, not sure if that does anything to performance: https://youtu.be/61x-AKLRoFo
I will say, seeing the ray tracing clip here with the dynamic shadows sort of gave me that same feeling of seeing Doom for the first way back in the early '90s.
If you only develop one part of your renderer (and that's all a single exercise like raytracing is going to do for you), you're setting yourself up for artefacts down the road. I've seen it a hundred times.
It's like putting a powerful engine in a stock Toyota Tercel. What will you accomplish? You'll blow out the drive train, the clutch, the transmission, etc., because those factory parts aren't designed to handle the power of an engine much more powerful than the factory installed engine.
Raytracing basically only renders the shadows and to some extent, transparency. What you really want to do is redevelop your entire graphical pipeline, all the major visual assets (models, textures, uv maps, particles, rigging and animation) at the same time, over the course of a release. And don't forget your level design!
I'm proud of you guys wanting to do this. Three cheers! Falling in love with raytracing, rendering, etc., is one of the greatest things you can do for yourself. And you WILL fall in love with it if you can just force yourself to stick with it a year or two and experience the amazing progress you'll make.
But do it right, okay?
My advice, find a good project, with qualified developers who will assign issues to you (especially in the beginning, until you get the hang of it yourself) and guide you in your quest for sick graphics. Thirty to 45 hours a week, eleven months a year, is all you'll ever need to do (I refuse to believe anyone is so busy that he or she cannot make time for that, especially considering how important it is).
And don't worry about being embarrassed or not having dependencies installed the first time you clone the repo. You have to start somewhere and almost every one of us were there ourselves at one time. So no one will say anything to you and very, very slowly after lots of trial and error you will finally just look it up on youtube.
Now get out there and do it!
Ironically, your advice is essentially "make an indie game", but it's way easier to get noticed by writing impressive hacks that excite people than by developing yet another indie title that's overwhelmingly likely to just get buried on Steam. The vast majority of indie titles will never attract articles on Ars Technica. So this is poor advice even if your goal is to optimize for maximum audience.
Separate the purpose of the project from its presentation in the article to reapply these thoughts towards the presentation in the article and I think we'd be on the same page though.
iPhone Safari
I guess it has to do with those annoying behind-content ads that the tap is somehow going through to.
I guess I expected them to have their own thing, I don't know. WordPress just seems so.... I don't know the word, maybe pedestrian? Is that harsh?
What’s that, some board game from the dark ages?
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_chess#Milestone...
The lighting moves around so fast shifting from dark to light as energy balls and fireballs are thrown around it is hard to track where the enemies are and it's frustrating but perhaps this is what such a chaotic event would look like?
Theories: Doom's 35fps framerate cap; try an "uncapped framerate" port like GZDoom. Another thing could be the pseudo-3D look up/down used in many software renderers of that vintage; the world is skewed rather than rotated, so that vertical walls remain vertical when projected onto the viewport. Modern 3D-accelerated ports don't do this. (Or you could turn lookup/down off)
Neither theory explains Source nausea, unless perhaps you also played it with a low framerate.
Ex. run the base game at an insanely crummy/low resolution. On low(er) it’s possible to run a model to kinda “upscale” in each frame in a performant way.
Or even this CNN initiative from Intel where they took Grand Theft Auto & “painted” it with dashcam footage from rural Germany: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P1IcaBn3ej0
The results are pretty interesting— all “brown” southern CA mountains were green like in Germany
Looks beautiful.