Page 1 of 134

Smooth Doom [WIP 2.0 TEST? WOWIE ZOWIE]

Posted: Tue Mar 25, 2014 3:16 am
by Gifty
Smooth Doom is a spriting project/general enhacement that adds newly drawn frames to all of DOOM's weapons and actors. What does this mean? Well, the game's pixel art will look much more lush and slick, like a Metal Slug game, or Earthworm Jim, or any game you like that has really elaborate sprite animation. Imagine Perkristian's smooth weapon mod, but applied to the whole of DOOM.

The goal is to continually sharpen the visuals in this way without altering any of the gameplay (save for some optional mutators). Since cross-mod compatibility is kind of a nightmare, I've decided to make Smooth Doom as much of a general enhancement one-stop shop as possible, with snazzy (totally optional) effects including casings, particle effects, and a custom gore system, to name just a few!


:arrow: DOWNLOAD ME!


Public Service Announcements:
:!: 1:1 vanilla faithfulness is the mission statement, but small incongruities do crawl through from time to time. I try to get on these as quickly as possible, but if you do notice anything, be sure to let me know!
:!: This mod is developed for GZdoom (make sure to use the latest version!), and will not work with other ports such as Zandronum. Cross-port compatibility isn't planned at this time.
:!: The extra options/goodies are available through the in-game options menu; people often think they're in a separate archive, but they're actually all in the main file! Just press ESC and everything will be in the options menu!

Changelog
Spoiler:

Re: Smooth Animations Project - Take 2!

Posted: Tue Mar 25, 2014 3:35 am
by Captain J
say hello to new world, mr. thread of victorious future! and again, i'd like to see the mancubus and arachnotron's normal 'n smooth death animations too!

Re: Smooth Animations Project - Take 2!

Posted: Tue Mar 25, 2014 5:17 am
by Ctrl+Alt+Destroy
Very interesting. Really liking the imp death animations! Definitely following this.

Re: Smooth Animations Project - Take 2!

Posted: Tue Mar 25, 2014 6:51 am
by zrrion the insect
I'll have to take a look at this. It looked very cool.

Re: Smooth Animations Project - Take 2!

Posted: Tue Mar 25, 2014 2:16 pm
by Ctrl+Alt+Destroy
I really love all of the changes (excluding the gore bits), everything feels really nice and still feels like good old Doom at its core. I really hope to see more additions. Keep up the nice work!

Re: Smooth Animations Project - Take 2!

Posted: Tue Mar 25, 2014 4:55 pm
by Onslaught Six
I think the flesh popping off the Chaingunner needs to fly off the body faster, even if it means "altering" the animation even more. (Then again, I always disliked the Chaingunner death.)

Also, are you using the sprites from the Sprite Fixing Project as a basis?

EDIT: Took a peek under the hood at the errors.
Spoiler:
I don't understand why you're getting these errors. Are you actually loading the Perk smooth weapons file alongside this? Why?
Spoiler:
Here's why. Here's your code:
Spoiler:
The reason the error is happening is, these need to replace the originals, and they need to be named differently. NewRedCard should suffice, or whatever you want.


Also, it's important to note that as-is, it doesn't work with The Ultimate Doom. Someone really needs to make a "Doom 1/2 compatibility pack" mod...

Re: Smooth Animations Project - Take 2!

Posted: Tue Mar 25, 2014 10:19 pm
by Gifty
It hadn't even occurred to me to use the sprite fixing project as a base. I certainly try to fix any weirdness where I see it, but I guess that's redundant if someone's already done it for me. :P The thing with the chaingunner animation is that the flying gibs are actually supposed to be flung backwards, so they stay in the air a little longer than would seem obvious. I know what you mean, though, for the longest time I thought they were supposed to be flying to the left and it looked weird.

@script errors:
I had tried renaming the cards, but what seems to happen is the name change severs their connection to the appropriate doors, and they cease to open anything.

The perkweapon redundancy just made me slap my face. I had perkweapons in my autoload, then I was running this mod on top of that. SIGH.

Ultimate Doom compatibility has been weird since the beginning. I figured out that the revenant/chaingunner sprites don't play nice for some reason; if you just delete their sprite folders it's all good. I'd just post up a version without them, but I'm holding onto this idea that there should be a simple way to make it work without deleting anything.

Re: Smooth Animations Project - Take 2!

Posted: Tue Mar 25, 2014 10:46 pm
by Onslaught Six
The reason it doesn't work is you have partial sprites for them. Ultimate Doom doesn't have those sprites but ZDoom doesn't care about that (it basically treats Doom 1 & 2 as the same game) so it spits out an error because it goes, "Hey, there's some Chaingunner sprites here but not all of them, and there totally should be."

The easy fix is to, of course, just include all the Chaingunner anims that you don't have in the mod. This is a messy solution and breaks a few generally accepted "rules" about how you're "supposed" to do things in a mod (although Xaser's 5th Episode had the Mancubus and Revenants in Doom 1 verbatim). Mind you, if/when you get around to doing a Smooth Animated Chaingunner, the problem will disappear.

Most of the Sprite Fixing Project is stuff like fixing offsets for monsters (a lot of them seem to have been automatically generated; makes a lot of sense but doesn't exactly make them look as good as they could be) but also there's some minor stuff like, for example, Baron and HellKnight hooves change colour from frame to frame sometimes. I'm not sure if the error is present in your versions.

I dealt with some of the key problems you're mentioning when I made a small personal mod to replace the skull keys with some rune keys from Quake. (I'm doing a side project with Quake bullshit.) I wanted to keep map compatibility, just replace the skull keys with the other keys, but I wanted to redefine them instead of just replacing the sprites.

The solution you're looking for is in a lump that you wouldn't otherwise normally touch called LOCKDEFS. Check the Wiki:
http://zdoom.org/wiki/LOCKDEFS

My solution was simply to use ClearLocks at the start of my LOCKDEFS file and then basically redo the original Doom lock defs with slight differences.

So for example, here's the default RedCard lockdef:

Code: Select all

Lock 1 Doom
{
	RedCard
	Message "$PD_REDC"
	RemoteMessage "$PD_REDCO"
	Mapcolor 255 0 0
}
All you need to do is, after using ClearLocks, define this new lock:

Code: Select all

Lock 1 Doom
{
	NewRedCard
	Message "$PD_REDC"
	RemoteMessage "$PD_REDCO"
	Mapcolor 255 0 0
}
The Doom locks are already tied to the numbers ("Lock 1" etc.) so by re-defining them with your new actors (NewRedCard) it'll work perfectly with almost all existing maps. (The only ones it'll conflict with are, for example, ZDoom levels with their own LockDefs lumps. But that's a given, isn't it?)

Re: Smooth Animations Project - Take 2!

Posted: Wed Mar 26, 2014 2:45 am
by jmickle
While I like the concept of higher quality animations for doom, the approach you are taking for the enemy sprites is just detrimental to the feel of them. For instance regarding the baron and chaingunner animations in the OP: they suddenly have no weight to them. The chaingunner gibs are just floating down, at a constant speed seemingly unaffected by gravity (the original has this problem, too, but it is disguised somewhat by the lack of frames) and the baron swing is completely unnatural.

It just takes some thought put into how the movement would actually work: quick movements should be over a short amount of frames, long movements over more frames. The natural instinct is just to add in frames between all the others, but your time would be better spent on specific areas of the animation, and using timings to improve snappiness and weight.

The animator's survival kit would be a super valuable read for anyone contributing to this project, it explains all these things I'm trying to so much better.

Re: Smooth Animations Project - Take 2!

Posted: Wed Mar 26, 2014 9:11 am
by sdk2k9
Ok, why does this not work with Ultimate Doom.

Re: Smooth Animations Project - Take 2!

Posted: Wed Mar 26, 2014 9:12 am
by Captain J
read what Onslaught Six said before, please.

Re: Smooth Animations Project - Take 2!

Posted: Wed Mar 26, 2014 9:27 am
by sdk2k9
Ok I don't understand what he's saying. So let someone else sort it out

Re: Smooth Animations Project - Take 2!

Posted: Wed Mar 26, 2014 9:38 am
by Tapwave
sdk2k9 wrote:Ok I don't understand what he's saying. So let someone else sort it out
Basically the Chaingunner sprites are incomplete. So in doom2 it doesn't matter since the frames can be found in the IWAD. However UDoom doesn't have them.
Thus, i suggest opening the mod with SLADE or somesuch, comment out the chaingunner definition (and the other doom 2 enemies), and save it as a separate wad. Then load this instead of the base mod when you play Ultimate instead of 2.

Re: Smooth Animations Project - Take 2!

Posted: Wed Mar 26, 2014 9:49 am
by sdk2k9
terranova wrote:
sdk2k9 wrote:Ok I don't understand what he's saying. So let someone else sort it out
Basically the Chaingunner sprites are incomplete. So in doom2 it doesn't matter since the frames can be found in the IWAD. However UDoom doesn't have them.
Thus, i suggest opening the mod with SLADE or somesuch, comment out the chaingunner definition (and the other doom 2 enemies), and save it as a separate wad. Then load this instead of the base mod when you play Ultimate instead of 2.
Right I got it working. What I did was open the mod up with 7zip (You can also open it with WinRaR) and deleted all the stuff that had anything to do with the Doom 2 enemies. I could upload it for other people having trouble.

Re: Smooth Animations Project - Take 2!

Posted: Wed Mar 26, 2014 10:03 am
by sdk2k9
Ok new problem. What the hell happened here? I was playing Ultimate Doom, when I saw this.