The New DOOM Thread (2016)

[Machocruz]

Some idiots at RPS said you can't do pentagram shaped rooms in a modern game because it's not realistic and everyone, including classic DOOM fans, would complain. Said it would take a genius to solve this "problem." One of them used New Order as an example of old meets new. I got the slight implication that the NO developers are some kind of high standard and some developers simply aren't more talented than others. I think there are people that really believe everyone working in video games has equal talent and equal capacity. Kids these days, amirite?

Small arenas and corridors are modern, you see. Lack of ambition is modern. Large spaces is "old school" and "niche." The logic is air tight!

 

[DraQ]

Some idiots at RPS said you can't do pentagram shaped rooms in a modern game because it's not realistic and everyone, including classic DOOM fans, would complain.

I thought one of the big ideas behind original Doom (1 & 2) levels was hell gradually seeping into reality and changing in increasingly drastic ways.

Early Doom levels maybe weren't realistic environments besides general feel, but the point is that the latter ones didn't have to be.
When you entered a room and saw that for some reason it had brain tissue for floor or that where you expected a computer panel you now see a demonic engraving or a flesh-framed eye staring at you it was unexpected, disturbing and therefore impactful.
Wandering through generic oblivion gate-like "hell" environment is not.

Proper modern day Doom wouldn't just have pentagram shaped rooms. It wouldn't just have them unexpectedly pop where the players would have fully expected, for example, office cubicles. Not only that, it would have tormented portal system to completely abuse space itself so you would have different areas occupying seemingly the same space, or looping on themselves in geometrically impossible fashions.

 

[Machocruz]

I thought one of the big ideas behind original Doom (1 & 2) levels was hell gradually seeping into reality and changing in increasingly drastic ways.

Yep

Early Doom levels maybe weren't realistic environments besides general feel, but the point is that the latter ones didn't have to be.

Yep

I'm really tired of these harebrained excuses I see from gamers, and evoking "realism" is one of the most abused and empty. I've been around, I've studied a little architecture. Large, cavernous spaces do exist. Twisting hallways do exist. Large military installations do exist. We have a building shaped like a pentagon -it's called The Pentagon. On the other hand, "modern" video game spaces aren't real or logical either. Man sized ventilation shafts everywhere, doors you can't enter, etc.

And more simply, it's a video game, it's a video game with future technology, it's a video game where you fight Hell spawn. Even more simple: people are not going to not buy the game, a DOOM game, because the levels are unrealistic. Say what you will about the masses, but I don't think they are that anal about (or even aware of) level design nuances.

I think people come up with the bullshit they do because they are defensive. They've already bought in. Anything anyone suggests is not an improvement, the devs have it all figured out, whatever.

 

[CyberP]

It isn't just FPS, but TPS, action/adventure, hack n slash, whatever. Next to no professional dev studios commits to good level design anymore. Art direction and graphics takes precedence.
It isn't information lost by a generation gap, or a result of consoleros: nearly every heralded game back in the day had great level design, so it is a bit jarring that so very few have it now a mere ten or so years on. Aside from money (of course) I put it down to level design being a lot harder/complex with modern engines. BSP-based builders and the like had it easy in comparison, and one man alone could make a level. That's no excuse for the shit though of course, I feel I must add for the simpletons here.

Also, the level design of build engine games are quite possibly the best in FPS to date (from a gameplay standpoint), in my opinion.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Art direction and graphics takes precedence.

They ain't doing a good job at those things either.

 

[tuluse]

John Romero threw away Tom Hall's first level designs because they were realistic and boring

 

[DeepOcean]

Brutal Call of Doomy 4 looks worse and better than I expected at the same time. The only getting health by killing enemies is way worse than health kits spread out on properly designed levels but expecting properly designed levels from console shooter designers is like expecting that ADHD console kids would have the attention spam required. At least, you have to be in danger to get your life back what is better than having a health dispenser on every single room like New Order does. Anyway, this could turn even worse in the end because there is nothing stopping them from adding health kits AND gaining health from killing enemies, they can't have the risk of players dying, of course.

WTF was the monster design? They hired Prosper to make those monsters? Brown, mountains of muscle that you can barely notice one from the other? Where the fuck is the disturbing hellscape? The demonic iconography? Dead naked people? Goats? They aren't going to sell this game to children why to make the art design look like Blizzard's version of hell, on the "hellish" level I got the impression I was seeing a WoW dungeon, ohh... silly me, they are going to sell this game to children just 25 year old children.

I dunno if it was because it was obviously a scripted demo but I rarely saw more than two enemies attacking you at the same time and for the supposed next gen "revolution", the levels look small, confined and linear as always. I just saw Wolfenstein: The New Order, Prosper Edition.

 

[Suicidal Meat Slapper]

Unpromising gameplay. Doomguy doesn't move as fast as a sports car. Everything is washed out and brown with no soul. Annoying as hell takedowns. Literally everything I expected this would be without the guidance of the original Id staff. Sigh. At least it's more focused on action instead of being a poor System Shock 2 ripoff, but everything here has been done before with superior quality. Definitely going to pass on this one.

 

[dunno lah]

John Romero threw away Tom Hall's first level designs because they were realistic and boring

Yet, I find the iterated upon E2M2 and MAP10 really memorable and challenging. (On Pistol Start, of course.)

 

[dunno lah]

Imagine if the hell alien knight looked like a hell knight and each step it took produced a heavy trot like that of the cybie in D1/2.Not only that, if he could also charge at you...My genitals would retract in completely.

 

[dunno lah]

John Romero threw away Tom Hall's first level designs because they were realistic and boring

Is that true or just urban legend?

The first levels of Doom are quite realistic for the time. Episode 1 was quite realistic-looking on many points, but from Shores of Hell onwards, shit just gets weirder.

Just add in tables and chairs and it'd look believable enough.

 

[Tehdagah]

Enemies not attacking while doing a cinematic takedown isn't about player empowerment, it's about dev ego. They need to show off their cinematic takedowns.

If you could be attacked while doing one, you never would because it would be a silly bad decision to. So to make it a viable move, you have to be invulnerable while doing it.

It's not about player empowerment because that would mean actually giving players *power* to do something instead of sitting there watching the cinematic.

I-frames during animations are a necessity and you already answered why.

Especially in co-op.

 

[Fowyr]

Brutal Call of Doomy

I read it as Brutal Call of Sodomy

I vaguely remember that level in American McGee's Alice, where not only floor was inverted (it's relatively easy, look at SS2), but you could find tilted corridors.

 

[Trodat]

http://www.doomworld.com/vb/doom-4-general/73227-why-is-no-one-talking-about-level-design/

hey guize we're not alone

About monsters, this is fan art but this kind of look is what they should try to capture.

 

[Durandal]

Someone should just recreate the level played at the D44M presentation in the original Doom games and play through it without sprinting just to show how fucking ridiculously easy it is.
Maybe even play it with Brutal Doom to add the pointless executions.

 

[vonAchdorf]

http://www.doomworld.com/vb/doom-4-general/73227-why-is-no-one-talking-about-level-design/

hey guize we're not alone

I liked this one:

Level design has been adressed in other posts, here is a leaked picture on coop:

 

[Fowyr]

http://www.doomworld.com/vb/doom-4-general/73227-why-is-no-one-talking-about-level-design/

The original Doom came out of that C-RPG world of dungeon mazes like Might & Magic, Ultima, Gauntlet, etc. Those may still be just as popular today given the number of roguelikes and titles like Etrian Odyssey and Legend of Grimlock out there (there's a lot on Vita and 3DS), but generally mazes and keys and secrets and all that aren't expected as much in FPS, especially since Call of Duty and Half Life became the standards. Call of Duty brings mission structure and team focus (military) and Half-Life brought the cinematic event-driven approach to things where it feels like you're exploring but you're really on a string of set pieces.

Heh. Decline is universal, brother.

 

[Infinitron]

Glad to see support for my theory.

 

[Lyric Suite]

It was a good theory and most likely true.

 

[DraQ]

Proper modern day Doom wouldn't just have pentagram shaped rooms. It wouldn't just have them unexpectedly pop where the players would have fully expected, for example, office cubicles. Not only that, it would have tormented portal system to completely abuse space itself so you would have different areas occupying seemingly the same space, or looping on themselves in geometrically impossible fashions.

Proof of concept - you could fuck the euclidean geometry so hard that it just keeled over and died using 1998 tech and I'm not even a pro(s)per mapper:

click teh pichurz

Pointless (but prosperous):

since it can also represent a few things that most 3D engines today can't,

And those would be?

It can technically represent 4D space, where you have multiple areas existing in the same 3D game space. There is a particular map in which you have to travel 720 degrees in a circle to return to your starting point.

Trivial to do in UE1.

Like I said, it should be possible to make Poincare's Sphere level in UE1 (haven't tried, but seems technically plausible unless something bad happens), which is far more impressive than anything possible in DN3D. Hell, I don't think you can make Odyssey-style centrifuge in DN3D which isn't hard to do in UE1.

While I can't say I have seriously level designed in many engines, I can only assume that the fact that I have seen exactly zero beyond-3D constructions in any recent game means that this capability is fairly hard to duplicate and/or nearly unique. Or possibly every 3D engine has this capability and instead every level designer in the industry is absolutely shit at anything requiring imagination beyond linear corridors. Its probably a 50/50 chance either way now that I think about it.

I'd wage that the latter is the case - most people have little imagination and usually a level designer concentrates on working hard to avoid violating geometry and to represent fairly natural environments in games, rather than on going Mc Escher on player's sorry ass (I'd LOVE this kind of shit in stalker past the Scorcher).
And thus, endless warehouses of crates are born.

Hell, even Wizardry 8 had capability to violate spatial geometry in real 3D - it used it in two of its retro dungeons.

Stitching together different parts of level geometry doesn't seem to be rocket science, Build's solution was actually rather crude since the stitch point was an entire sector, which imposed a series of limitations, like not being able to construct levels where the direction of down would change as you travelled. UE1 stitches parts of the level using pretty much arbitrary planeswhich means that you can, for example, make corridor that bends upwards and loops around, where floor will stay floor, even upside down. You can make the loop non-360 degree too.

Buildings with larger interior are trivial. I'm going to try and make a dodecahedron and stitch each of it's faces with the opposite one, with necessary 36 degree twist. If the recursive rendering doesn't make the engine fart blood and die (it doesn't with ordinary endless corridors, but then it only follows one branch, not about six - I may need to limit visibility somehow), I'll have Poincare's Sphere.

If that fails, I'll try something easier, maybe hyperbolic geometry or "just" an asteroid where you can walk on entire surface? Shit, I really need to play with the editor a bit - I know the basics, but haven't built anything nearing playable state.

Pics relevant:

Anyway, some shots of a very basic non-euclidean map I threw together in ol' UT some time ago just to see if it would handle it gracefully :prosperous: :

Overwiew - the map is is essentially a dodecahedron with opposite pairs of faces identified with each other with pi/5 twist (using warp zones to stitch the geometry with itself).

A burst of DP shots traveling around level.

Self.

A single Redeemer missile traveling around level.

Conclusion:
Old Unreal engine is - as you can see - surprisingly robust and good at withstanding abuse, but player pawn code would have to be modified to make crossing the boundaries truly seamless - as it is it doesn't map entry rotation to exit rotation properly, presumably by not allowing player pawn to roll, even transiently.

Full 3D too, so none of that "2.5D was superior because wonky stuff hurr durr".

It's just that you need imaginashun to make truly imaginative stuff and modern designers have none.

 

[DraQ]

John Romero threw away Tom Hall's first level designs because they were realistic and boring

Actually, if we're speaking about the same designs, Tom Hall's designs would have made Doom much better by introducing a healthy helping of mindfuck to replace all the derp. On the surface they would work similarly, so I don't really see any realistic way for them to harm Doom.

 

[DraQ]

BSP-based builders and the like had it easy in comparison, and one man alone could make a level.

So why not take a BSP-based tech, make map's skeleton and plaster it with statics?

It's doable. The overhead would be negligible. Maybe it wouldn't allow for arbitrary shaped rooms (for that we'd need some way to paint statics on top of geometry like they were textures), but it would still allow doing freaky things with geometry and whatnot.

 

[theSavant]

Everything is washed out and brown with no soul.

I just thought of chocolate looking at the brownish environment of the hell-level. Maybe Bethesda has a secret contract with food industry suggesting people to eat chocolate all the time while playing Doom. The flying monster balls also look like chocolate truffles. Oh man... this totally kills the horror.

 

[DraQ]

http://www.doomworld.com/vb/doom-4-general/73227-why-is-no-one-talking-about-level-design/

The original Doom came out of that C-RPG world of dungeon mazes like Might & Magic, Ultima, Gauntlet, etc. Those may still be just as popular today given the number of roguelikes and titles like Etrian Odyssey and Legend of Grimlock out there (there's a lot on Vita and 3DS), but generally mazes and keys and secrets and all that aren't expected as much in FPS, especially since Call of Duty and Half Life became the standards. Call of Duty brings mission structure and team focus (military) and Half-Life brought the cinematic event-driven approach to things where it feels like you're exploring but you're really on a string of set pieces.

Heh. Decline is universal, brother.

I still disagree with H-L butthurt. H-L was sane enough to keep most setpieces in the background where they didn't interfere with the gameplay or set them up cleverly enough to prevent significant interference either way.

 

[Lyric Suite]

He should have said Half Life 2. Also, wasn't the original Call of Duty a real FPS also? From what i remember it was the second one that introduced the decline elements. You know, the one that also happened to be multiplatform right out of the box.