Option for Wider Sprites/Skies

[Pixel Eater]

It seems to me that ID Software designed the maps in one aspect ratio and the monsters, weapons and projectiles in another. Rocket ends, Imp fireballs and Cacodemons are some examples of where they display as tall ovals instead of circles. If I force a 16:10 ratio (on a 16:9 screen) the sprites display properly but the level geometry and certain textures (e.g. round or diamond ceiling lights) then look stretched.

It would be excellent if we could zoom between widening the sprites by 111% and shortening them to 90% (to keep Caco's etc. from getting too large) while keeping uniformly square in between. Separate options for the sky and active weapon would be great too. I know, the result wouldn’t be authentic to the original release but it might be closer to what they intended

I am not a coder (yet) so I thought I would put this out there in case someone found it of interest. I am guessing a potential difficulty would be resizing the hit boxes?

[Gez]

Just write some TEXTURES lump to rescale stuff however you want it scaled.

[Graf Zahl]

It seems to me that ID Software designed the maps in one aspect ratio and the monsters, weapons and projectiles in another. Rocket ends, Imp fireballs and Cacodemons are some examples of where they display as tall ovals instead of circles. If I force a 16:10 ratio (on a 16:9 screen) the sprites display properly but the level geometry and certain textures (e.g. round or diamond ceiling lights) then look stretched.

That's not correct. Eiter everything is correct or nothing. But since all assets have been designed for the same pixel ratio it cannot be partial.

[Pixel Eater]

Gez,

I read a tutorial on how to do that and managed to correct the sky, however I don’t think that helps with the Sprites. Neverthless, I am starting to understand Slade and have manually imported a resized front image of the Cacodemon and it works! It seems even the hit box is adjusted.

It looks like this is turning into a mod I’ll be releasing instead of a feature request


Graf,

My observations are correct, though I do respect your decision not to implement my suggestion. Part of my belief comes from an article that says ID used separate systems for mapping and graphic design. I don’t for a second believe the artists meant for rockets to look oval from the front or back

[Rachael]

I don’t for a second believe the artists meant for rockets to look oval from the front and back

Doom was designed for a non-square pixel screen. I don't for a second believe that the invulnerability sphere was intended to look this way - yet on square pixel systems - it does.

pinva0.png (938 Bytes) Viewed 998 times

Want an even better example?

heada1.png (6.16 KiB) Viewed 998 times

If that doesn't make the case, have you seen cacodemons eat web pages? - the 404 page shows the cacodemon resized correctly to the non-square pixel aspect ratio that Doom actually uses, and that GZDoom automatically corrects to. As you can see, it is very different from the sprite attachments as shown here.

[Pixel Eater]

I do believe they were meant to be seen that way- it's too much of a coincidence that it looks like a perfect circle when translated into the 'wrong' (square) aspect ratio. It would be kind of weird for an artist/s to consistently elect to draw ovals in that manner. I'm sure the Imp designer was slightly annoyed to see their creation look so thin in the game.
My mod isn't trying to be true to what we got when Doom came out, I'm just trying to capture "what could have been". Btw I agree the level geometry and probably textures were designed for non-square display.

[Chris]

It would be kind of weird for an artist/s to consistently elect to draw ovals in that manner. I'm sure the Imp designer was slightly annoyed to see their creation look so thin in the game.

The in-game graphics for creatures and such are sourced from higher quality models. It's not as if they didn't know the vertical scaling would happen, so no doubt their development pipeline included an inverse scaling for sprites and wall textures to ensure they display correctly in-game. Maybe some select images were erroneously not pre-scaled, but unless the artist(s) can tell you which ones, it would be pure guesswork.

[InsanityBringer]

I've always suspected the circular sprites being circles when uncorrected is just them starting off with a circle produced by the circle tool in deluxe paint, which does not appear to account for aspect ratio (would be a little weird if it did since its made to work on multiple different kinds of screens, I think). I just fired up DP2 to test it, and it indeed doesn't care in 320x200 256 color mode. (also DP's circles are better than the circles I've seen in some newer editors, which is kind of sad) They make a blue circle for the soulsphere, a red circle for the cacodemon, and a green circle for the invulnerability, and then draw the details on top of that.

On the other hand things drawn entirely from scratch like the status bar face were probably done by eye and since they were presumably working with your typical crts of the era, they ended up looking right when corrected because they were drawn corrected. Likewise the photosourced things like the humanoid models, the programs they used probably compensated and squished them a little so they'd look good when corrected. The Doomguy sprite does seem to match the proportions of the model when corrected.

[Ed the Bat]

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Aspect_ratio

[Pixel Eater]

Deluxe Paint should draw exactly what shape you tell it to no matter what space you're working in. What changes is the shape of the pixels which constitute that shape.

Here is a drawing I've made in the same pixel aspect as Doom displays, so WYSIWYG.

Drawing made in adjusted ratio

Notice that to draw the first two (approximate) circles I had to drag the cursor over either a 5x4 or a 4x3 grid area (and others are possible depending on scale intended). The third is what ID Software consistently drew- over a 4x4 grid, which looks nothing like a circle in Doom's aspect ratio, unless we view it in square ratio:

Drawing seen in square ratio

In which it was likely drawn. I trust ID knows what a circle looks like

Check out the chaingun on Spidey when in the game:

Squashed chaingun

SPIDA1D1.png (17.72 KiB) Viewed 894 times

It matches the third "circle" of the first drawing.

[Rachael]

Since I am understanding your request a little better, this is clearly an editing issue and should be brought up in such subforum.

The reason for that is because what you actually want is a mod. The mod would change the shape of only certain objects in the game as you are pointing out. For some textures you may have to actually modify or redo such textures in order to more closely match id's "intent" when creating them.

Therefore, it is beyond the scope of the engine to directly support such a feature. It turns out that it is already quite possible and that such aesthetics should fall directly in the hands of the user, themselves. While yes, this does require overcoming a bit of a learning curve, this is not significant, and even as a novice modder I believe with the tools and documentation available you could have something workable within a week.

[Pixel Eater]

Thanks Rachael,

I think it is ready to upload, I will look for the right place for it

And here it is: viewtopic.php?f=46&t=57544