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Comment by sebastos | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

I would love to try this with the Freedoom assets. I play most PWADs with Freedoom too, they look perfectly fine.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

I must admit, I have misinterpreted it.

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.

Sure, some just do pixel art for budget reasons. In those cases it's still a limitation rather than a deliberate choice. But for example Hyper Light Drifter is modern and I consider it one of the best looking games I ever played.

It's not a technical limitation though, which is the thrust of the convo regarding Doom's lack of ray tracing or other fancy effects. Doom was low budget as well but still hired artists. As far as I'm concerned, making a game without an artist is like designing a static HTML webpage in 2022. Yes it will work, but is below the expected standards.

Artistic choices made to adapt to or account for technical constraints are still interesting artistic choices.

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.

I agree with all of this.

I replied to somebody else farther down along the same lines, but I do think the question of what id -would- have made with modern tools at their disposal is really interesting. Because in a lot of ways, id’s story is partially one of quadrupling down on pushing the engine forward. With quake, they hit another local maximum where the look and feel of the game meshed really well with the new engine capabilities. But then after that, one could argue that they had a slow descent into games looking better but at the same time worse. I would almost go as far as to say that it was a good thing that they were limited as they were, because it pushed them into something that looked so, so cool.

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.

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.

Is there a nearest neighbor option? That gets you (mostly) halfway there at least.

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.)

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.

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.

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%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 looks gross!) makes the world dark and blurry, it'd be cool to have the same atmosphere without the pixelation and moire effects.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I don't mind the downer comments because they provide information. Even if I think this is impressive and awesome, I don't want to see the top comment "this is impressive and awesome!" That's a low information comment.

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 love DOOM”, “Modern games focus too much on graphics”.

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 didn't mean high information in a technical sense. I mean its saying something meaningful or adding something to the discussion. For instance, the original comment was about the aesthetic value of the original as a conscious decision by the artists. Sure they were dealing with constraints as all artists do, but their work is beautiful not so much despite the constraints, but because of them. It's kind of like "fixing" a Haiku by removing the restrictions. Yes, you can make it more informative, but is it really better?

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.

Because people like me vote them up, because we prefer interesting, informed critique rather than uncritical positive support.

Grandparent seems to be making a point about the nature of art, and how small variants in the medium make a difference. It will date me a bit, but I'll provide an unrelated example:

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.

Put this comment above the fold and I’m a happy man: that was lucid, evocative, and thought-provoking.

How much of that was VHS masking the primitive techniques, and how much of it was you simply being little and having a young kid's imagination and ability to suspend disbelief? I ask because I've seen old movies on VHS and the special effects didn't seem that much less obvious to me than they would today. Watching Star Trek on a small 640x480 CRT TV, I could still tell the Enterprise was a model and the lizard alien was a guy in an unconvincing suit.

> and the special effects didn't seem that much less obvious to me than they would today

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.

It occurred to me that this was a possibility at the time, so I convinced my parents (who were obviously adults when they watched the VHS with me) to check out the DVD also without explaining why. They agreed that the DVD was worse, but not to the same degree that I thought -- so, probably a little from column A and a little from column B.

Well, I think it's awesome that somebody tried it. I'd feel bad if the creators saw this thread and felt like HN was rejecting their project or something. I was just curious if anybody else felt the same way I did about how old games that lacked physics-based lighting seemed to look so good.

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.

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.

>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.

I find the movement in gzdoom feels slightly nicer than in chocolate for some reason. More slidy maybe

Chocolate preserves Doom's framerate cap (35fps). GZDoom makes it configurable (I think uncapped is the default)

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Crispy Doom is not Boom compatible. Chocolate also builds for Hexen, Heretic and Strife. "Vanilla" usually doesn't imply Boom (Boom isn't even backwards compatible with Doom) but perhaps limit removing.

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.

You can set Crispy's GFX' exactly like Choco. They are pretty close, the setup menu it's pretty much the same'

As another person who didn't grow up with the original Doom, I think its beautiful. Something about it just feels/looks good.

I did grow up with the original Doom, and to me this mod actually restores some of the sense of overwhelming darkness that came from playing it on old, dying, poorly calibrated low-resolution CRT's from the late 80's. No game has ever had so much of an impact as when I first saw the beginning of E1M1, with fireballs coming out of the darkness filled with the sounds of unseen horrors.

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.

>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?

>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.

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

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.

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.

Thank God despecialised edition exists!

Very hard to get hold of though.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

8, you mean. 16 bit allows a big pallete, near true color, but bad gradients.

> but bad gradients

That may be good enough. I would like to find out.

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.

Have you played Brutal Doom?

Agree, hate it

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