How Lost Classic Doom 64 Was Revived for Modern Platforms (theverge.com) 26
As if there weren't enough doom in the world right now, this week sees the release of not one but two new Doom games. Doom Eternal is the flashy AAA sequel with incredible graphics and accurately modeled viscera, of course, but you shouldn't sleep on the other: the first rerelease of Doom 64, an underappreciated entry in the series's history. From a report: Doom 64, as the name suggests, was originally designed for the Nintendo 64. It came out in 1997 and, unlike id Software's previous two Doom titles, it was developed by Midway Games. It was the first Doom game to offer any sort of significant graphical upgrade on the original, had all-new levels, and -- depending on your perspective -- could easily have been considered a "Doom 3" had id not released its own game with that name in 2004. Given its original platform, Doom 64 is also a pretty unusual game. Nintendo strongly promoted "real" 3D titles on its 64-bit console, and Doom 64 is only kind of-sort of one of those. The environments are constructed of polygons, and the textures are filtered. But just like the original Doom, you're still limited to movement on a flat plane without the ability to look around you. Next to something like GoldenEye 007, you could have been forgiven for considering Doom 64 a little archaic at the time.
Most introspective episode (Score:1)
Thy Flesh Consumed
"without the ability to look around you"? (Score:1)
must have been some good 'shrooms I was on when I managed to look around me in Doom 1 & 2
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+1 pertinent analogy
Re: "without the ability to look around you"? (Score:1)
So I could, as you say, look around me? 360 glorious degrees? And I also remember up/down with a mouse, even if autoaim had to take care of pesky daemons on a different level.
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Doom did not have the ability to look up and down. Heretic, which used the Doom engine modified by GT Interactive, introduced this feature.
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Heretic was one of the more technically impressive "Doom 1.5" engine games. It worked really well with the old bulky VR headsets with head tracking, too. Being able to move your head to look around was really impressive at the time.
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Turn & look around, yes. Move / look around freely in Z-axis, no. Basically you're moving around in a 2D environment that looks & feels like a 3D space. Iirc, this was necessary to make the math operations doable in real-time on the CPU's of that era. Unlike later games like Quake where eg. you can look at floor or ceiling from any angle.
Re: "without the ability to look around you"? (Score:1)
Thanks for the clarification. I was really unsure on the semantics of 3d vs doon's sprites and faux 3d, but now I'm all better. It's like your powers of explanation are revolutionarily altering.
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I think the modern versions of Doom improved the mouse handling. Mouse was terrible back then. Also possible that the code didn't change, but it's got much better settings for things like sensitivity. But yeah, playing with the mouse back then was terrible.
Isn't it a test of the hardware (Score:2)
to install original doom?
There are things like refrigerators running doom...
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Or use it like a GUI to kill processes ..
http://psdoom.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
Enough of the Nostolgia. (Score:4, Insightful)
I am tired of all this Nostolgia and remakes.
Doom should be a dead title. Not because the 1990's Doom game was bad, because it was a real game changer of a game. But because any new game that will feel like Doom, will no longer be such a game changer.
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So... only game changing games allowed.... got it...
Remakes allow devs to focus on fun instead of lore (Score:2)
Someone put work into coming up with cool demons and weapons in Doom 1 & 2 (lets forget 3 happened). Doom 2016, took those general themes and spun them int
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But because any new game that will feel like Doom, will no longer be such a game changer.
Ironically you couldn't have been any more wrong about Doom 2016. That game wasn't unique in history but it was unique in time. The idea of an arcade shooter bouncing around unloading onto demons gloriously chasing power-ups to exert more carnage was something lost in time for one reason or another. The last game I remember quite like it was Quake 3 and to a lesser extent Unreal Tournament.
When Doom 2016 was released it was definitely a game changer. An incredibly fund and entertaining breath of fresh air i
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"The idea of an arcade shooter bouncing around unloading onto demons gloriously chasing power-ups to exert more carnage was something lost in time for one reason or another."
You can thank Daikatana for fucking that up.
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I didn’t much like Doom 3. Too dark. I picked up Doom 2016 more out of habit and played just a little before going back to Doom II. Doom II was your basic shoot things really fast. Which was what I enjoyed about the game. When hearing about Eternal coming out, I started checking out youtube videos on the upcoming game and then on 2016 and came to the realization that Doom 2016 was what I wanted, a non or lightly story driven game where I run fast and shoot things up. Eternal is just the reboot of II m
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Given how many "Call of Wartime" clones have been pushed out over the last 10 years, an old-fashioned single-player run-n-gun shooter is kind of a game changer. That's why the new Doom games are so highly rated and selling well.
Yeah, the concept of remakes can be annoying, but if they're still better than the alternatives, I'm all for 'em.
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I don't get your point. The goal of this project is to expose Doom 64, a very unique Doom title that could have been its own release in its own right, to people who never experienced it. The Nintendo 64 is the only platform this version was ever released on. It also has a unique musical score and sound, as well as unique maps.
Weird engine changes (Score:2)
The walls are polygonal instead of rasterized sectors. I guess they wanted to do this so they could filter the textures on the N64?
Re: Weird engine changes (Score:2)
My guess is because it came for free. Rasterization is slower because N64 didn't really support 2D graphics in any traditional manner. The 2D games that did exist were just dynamically drawn textures drawn to a 3D surface transformed to take the whole screen.
So, to use 2D strip rasterization, they would be doing all the 2D work + all the 3D work each frame. By simply using textured polygons, they got to drop all the 2D strip rasterization.
(going from memory here on the N64 architecture)
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Going a bit off-topic, but the PlayStation didn't support the common 2D graphics primitives that most arcade and console hardware did at all. While 3D-capable arcade hardware often provided a "text layer" tilemap, 2D sprites, perhaps a road layer, the PlayStation did textured triangles and nothing else. All the UI elements in games are polygons on a flat plane. You saw a similar thing on early PC 3D accelerators that couldn't do simultaneous 2D and 3D graphics (e.g. the original 3Dfx Voodoo that relied o
It's probably better than Doom Eternal (Score:2)
Doom Eternal is what you get when a company like Bethesda looks at Doom 2016 and says "What made it good? Oh right arcade style!" And cranked that up to 11 at the expense of all else. Jump, kill, boom, bang, but only once because now you're out of ammo and the previous amazing novelty of cutting a demon with a chainsaw is not something you need to do twice per fight as every one of your guns is empty even if you glory kill every demon you fight (which you have to anyway for health reasons). But no ammo just
Complex Doom Invasion (Score:2)
Go get yourself Zandronum and Doom II, load up Doomseeker, find a Complex Doom Invasion server, and prepare to get your anus puckered.
Shit is so involved that it can bring the best single-thread processor and best GPU to its fucking knees. Only because it is single-threaded.
Perfect test for single-thread apps.