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“Can it run Doom” will never be the same, thanks to new ray-tracing mod

arstechnica.com

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Re: “Can it run Doom” will never be the same, thanks to new ray-tracing mod

#101

Post by gentleman11 »

anthk wrote: post #46
dleslie wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

>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 ga…

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

Re: “Can it run Doom” will never be the same, thanks to new ray-tracing mod

#102

Post by [deleted] »

jstummbillig wrote: post #81
sebastos wrote: post #4

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 w…

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…

[deleted]

Re: “Can it run Doom” will never be the same, thanks to new ray-tracing mod

#103

Post by dwringer »

nigma1337 wrote: post #39
millimeterman wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: “Can it run Doom” will never be the same, thanks to new ray-tracing mod

#104

Post by bko »

benreesman wrote: post #82
bko wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

“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.

Re: “Can it run Doom” will never be the same, thanks to new ray-tracing mod

#105

Post by simulate-me »

tekni5 wrote: post #31

I played a bit of it, it's pretty interesting parts look really good while others not as good with a bunch of bugs here and there. I think I still prefer the original graphics, but with more development and tweaking this could be a good way to replay doom. 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…

The part starting at 1:51 where there are demons up on the ledge running back and forth casting shadows was pretty cool.

Re: “Can it run Doom” will never be the same, thanks to new ray-tracing mod

#106

Post by alpaca128 »

alar44 wrote: post #97
t0suj4 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: “Can it run Doom” will never be the same, thanks to new ray-tracing mod

#107

Post by wongarsu »

nomilk wrote: post #14

Technical breakthroughs don't seem correlated to enjoyment, at least not in the short term. My favourite game still has 700 AD graphics and no sound effects, at least until someone blunders.

Many people enjoyed the original Doom, and that was a technical breakthrough (first real-time 3d engine with non-orthogonal surfaces). Of course adding raytracing to Doom doesn't add much enjoyment, you'd have to redesign the game to exploit raytracing to achieve that. And Super Mario or a game of Poker with friends might still be more enjoyable than that, but there's room for different categories of enjoyment

Re: “Can it run Doom” will never be the same, thanks to new ray-tracing mod

#108

Post by IE6 »

sgillen wrote: post #32

Am I the only one who thinks this actually looks pretty good? Maybe it’s because I did not play the original doom when it came out.

I agree. I really liked some of the "UI Enhancements" the ports of Doom to a more modern engine brought and on the surface this looks very similar but I am sure it feels a lot different (since its ray tracing and not just fancy lighting). I'm excited to try it!

Re: “Can it run Doom” will never be the same, thanks to new ray-tracing mod

#109

Post by alar44 »

alpaca128 wrote: post #106
alar44 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: “Can it run Doom” will never be the same, thanks to new ray-tracing mod

#110

Post by mrtranscendence »

amalcon wrote: post #83
benreesman wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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-…

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.
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