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Crispy Doom

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41–50 of 60 posts

Re: Crispy Doom

#41
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.

Re: Crispy Doom

#42

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 b…

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 :)

Re: Crispy Doom

#43
post #5

I would love to see some video recording of this.

Seems like YouTube has a few showcases. Honestly I can't tell a big difference between Crispy Doom and, say, GZDoom. https://youtu.be/5e9jBlDYfW0

I am sure you can switch off that 'extended view' border, but even a few minutes in that hurts my brain.

Re: Crispy Doom

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same with retro emulators. Smooth, blended pixels just feel wrong.

Thing is, CRT displays do a kind of smoothing on pixels

https://twitter.com/CRTpixels/status/1408451743214616587

Re: Crispy Doom

#46
post #30

I wish there was a good Java port of the Doom engine. Seamless portability matters!

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.

Re: Crispy Doom

#47
post #6

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.

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.

Re: Crispy Doom

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 experi…

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.

I think the first Quake it's more fun than Quake 2. And a total conversion called Malice totally owns Quake2.

Re: Crispy Doom

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same with retro emulators. Smooth, blended pixels just feel wrong.

Thing is, CRT displays do a kind of smoothing on pixels https://twitter.com/CRTpixels/status/1408451743214616587

Very noticeable with NeoGeo games. A simple scanline filter (25%) is like night and day with Metal Slug.

Re: Crispy Doom

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same with retro emulators. Smooth, blended pixels just feel wrong.

But old games were not pixelated. The low resolution tied with the blurry, leaky old CRTs made sure of that.

The problem is our monitors, nowadays, are too good so we see pixels that we never saw back then.

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