Modder ‘Cheello’ has released a new video, showcasing their amazing Doom Voxel project. As the title implies, Doom Voxel aims to turn all of the game’s 2D sprites into 3D voxels. And, as you will see below, the results are quite stunning.
Since this project will turn the original 2D sprites into 3D voxels, it manages to retain their original art style and aesthetics. This is crucial for a classic Doom 3D project. Truth be told, some older projects attempted to turn Doom’s 2D sprites into proper 3D models, however, the results were mixed.
Doom Voxel will be using GZDoom. Thus, and unfortunately, it won’t be compatible with the Doom Path Tracing Mod. After all, Doom Path Tracing is currently using the PrBoom and not GZDoom. So, I seriously hope that Cheello will work together with sultim-t in order to make these two mods compatible with each other. Seriously, Doom Voxel with real-time Path Tracing will be the best 3D retro mod for id Software’s classic FPS.
There is currently no ETA on when Doom Voxel will release. So, enjoy the following video and stay tuned for more!
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lame
That is running sooo slow, I don’t know if it’s because its a captured video or that is the real performance of the demo. But I don’t understand how a relatively limited implementation of voxel engine in Doom can run around… 10-15 fps?
It needs serious improvements at the level of coding, Sam.
Seems to be closer to 35 frames, which is what the OG Doom on DOS was capped at.
No. 15fps tops. 30fps is somewhat fluid. What is in this video does not represent 30fps at all.
It was difficult to tell at 720p, but the 2D sprites still looked like 2D sprites.
Downvote if you like Epic Games Store.
N**ga, who’s we?
That’s really cool and gets rid off of the biggest complaint I had with Doom for years – sprites rotating with the camera, because iD was too lazy to make 8 directions sprites for everything.
I don’t think it was an issue with laziness, I think it was an issue with textures using too much memory. Consider it a technical limitation (this was a DOS game after all).
Textures could have been loaded and unloaded as needed from the disk. Not every level requires all mobs, walls, floors and objects either, so this also could give additional savings.
Hard drives were significantly slower back then, and a lot more fragile/unreliable. They were not suitable for dynamically loading texture data while playing a game. They also didn’t have very much storage capacity, so games had to be small.
I don’t know when texture streaming was first introduced, however in those days it was unheard of (I don’t remember hearing about it until well into the 2000’s).
They were slower, but they weren’t THAT slow. I remember entire Doom II loaded in like 10s on my old 486 I got when I was 8. Also WAD AFAIK is an uncompressed format more for the convenience than anything else. Plus Doom textures when dumped out of the WAD are like 4kb each, and that’s after conversion to PNG. The original ones probably are much much smaller. I think it’s more of the fact that Carmack didn’t think about adding streaming than it wasn’t possible back then.
MSDOS had a hard-coded limitation of 640 KB of RAM for the entire system. Early on games had to use whatever tricks they could to run within that limitation, and when people did upgrade to amounts of RAM beyond 640 KB games that wanted to use the extra RAM had to bundle an upper memory manager to allow bypassing the memory limitations in DOS.
Also, hard drives in 1993 were very slow, and many people still had older computers with slower drives than were being sold in 1993 (this was the pre-Windows 95 days when many people were still just running MSDOS by itself). id Software had to account for the PC hardware that they expected their customers to be using, which wasn’t going to be the latest and greatest, and some manufacturers at the time were still making hard drives with capacities ranging from 10 MB to 30 MB.
Also keep in mind that DOOM originally shipped on floppy disk, and those had a maximum capacity of 1.44 MB, so unless they wanted the game to take up a couple dozen floppy disks they had to keep it small. Note that I think it may have come on 4 floppy disks originally (not referring to “Ultimate DOOM” here, which was a later release), and archive(dot)org shows a DOOM 1.2 release in 1994 with 4 floppy disk images, so that’s probably correct.
Isn’t there a mod which fixes that, though?
Beautiful Doom or something…
That would be better than 3D voxels.
From what I can tell its just the full bodies on the ground and ammo boxes, maybe a few other things but I didn’t notice any. The gore left behind from explosions for example was still forward facing sprites.
Why is the gameplay like 15fps? It makes it very hard to tell the difference between the OG version as the sprites in the original moved like they were low frame rate (due to being sprite based and not having many frames in-between angles). I would assume the voxel based enemies would move with more fluidity but this sh**ty video makes that impossible to see.