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

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

#121

Post by sebastos » Tue, Apr 05, 2022, 3:56 AM UTC

benreesman wrote: post #66

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…

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.

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.

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

#122

Post by sebastos » Tue, Apr 05, 2022, 4:20 AM UTC

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…

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.

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

#123

Post by andrewf » Tue, Apr 05, 2022, 5:31 AM UTC

gentleman11 wrote: post #101

anthk wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

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

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

#124

Post by jcbrand » Tue, Apr 05, 2022, 9:54 AM UTC

plorg wrote: post #94

pcwalton wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 pro…

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.

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

#125

Post by amalcon » Tue, Apr 05, 2022, 11:45 PM UTC

mrtranscendence wrote: post #110

amalcon wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.