…withdrawn at the author’s request (December 22nd 2011)
THE FUNAMBULIST
The Funambulist is a daily architectural platform edited by Léopold Lambert based on the archives of the former boiteaoutils.Its name is inspired by a reflection on the line as the architect's medium. In fact, this line on the white page that ends up spliting two milieus from one another, control the access of the bodies. The act of walking on the line (funambulist is another word for tight-rope walker) thus becomes an act of freedom. It also refers to Philippe Petit crossing illegally the space between the two towers of the World Trade Center in 1974 and the funambulist in Nietzsche's Zarathoustra who dies peacefully as he died from the danger he dedicated his life to.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.ARCHIPELAGOS
Forgive me for my cynicism, but DooM, like games for the Nintendo64, looks really terrible when upscaled and run at higher resolutions on modern systems. It simply hasn’t aged well. My Reccomendation is to avoid this ugliness altogether and stay with Quake II or newer.
It is at least tolerable using the Doomsday engine with the high resolution texture packs and the mods that replace the 2d sprites with 3D objects.
I hope you know it’s spelled Phobos and Deimos, not Phobus and Deimus. The first episode of Doom also does not, in fact, take place on Mars, but on Phobos, one of Mars’ two moons, the other moon being Deimos, which is the setting of the second episode. This may seem like nitpicking, but it can be said art is in the fine details.
Re: TheMisanthropicMeanie
There’s nothing ‘ugly’ about it. I like the look of Doom better than Quake II, III etc.
True though there’s not much point in increasing resolution.
Great post, Viktor. Another game of the era that I think has yet to be surpassed is Daggerfall.
Hey I’m a little concerned the humor didn’t come through enough here, so I want to make a point a bit to explain it a bit more, in order not to misrepresent myself…
As I mention in the article, it isn’t a technical analysis of the engine or even how it really works. There is enough information on this already. Nor do I pretend to understand it. It’s a naive revisit, from the point of view of someone who grew up in this (and Q) generation, playing the games but never digging deeper. An average gamer. Then having studied various things, re-discovering its magic through different lenses. And making “sense” of it. There are mistakes, there are misinterpretations, but all gamers make them. The “analysis” via screenshot, is supposed to be crude (hence the photoshop brush strokes), and the regulating lines redundant. It’s a personal exploration, and yes, also doesn’t talk about Ultima, Shadowcaster or even some really great mods. This was done in order to tie it to a larger context, aka the appeal of the primitive, in and out gaming. I understand its also subjective, some people don’t like hanging out with sprites. I think DooM has aged well in my opinion. I prefer to see the pixels, maybe thats a conservative point of view.
This is a great article, no explanations or apologies necessary.
Go back and play the game using a source port that’s true to the engine, like Chocolate Doom: http://www.chocolate-doom.org/wiki/index.php/Chocolate_Doom
You made a lot of mistakes and comments that are only applicable under jDoom and/or with the high-resolution texture pack loaded.
Hexadecima thanks for the comment.
I mention in the text the importance of playing Doom via jDoom,.. having freelook on, the OpenGL revisiting the game. But dont get me wrong I have spent a lot of time in the old engines. I play doom and doom2 via dosbox which looks like the same thing as chocolate doom. I mention in the text that I toggle between engines, sorry if that didn’t come across, but its in there.
The problem is that it’s hard to revisit a lot of games when the controls have changed us so much along the way. Freelook has maybe spoiled us in a way but it also makes it nearly impossible to go back and replay things like Wolfenstein, though freelook there would be pointless.. at least for me. I had to re-learn strafe etc, which is why I think jDoom was created in general.
That’s not my point. You’ve attributed jDoom bugs to Doom[1] and claimed that a sky texture from the texture pack belongs to Doom 2. There are no mountains anywhere in the actual game; screenshot 12 displays a modification of the Episode 1 sky from Doom 1.
If you really need freelook so much, consider looking at a ZDoom or Doom Legacy derived port. Both of those engines support screen-pinching, which is a trick invented for Duke Nukem 3D that allows freelook in a 2.5D engine like Doom. It causes some distortion, but it largely solves the problem.
It also demonstrates another problem with testing in jDoom: tilting the camera up and down *doesn’t* necessarily cause sprites to look like paper cutouts. This behaviour was undefined in the original engine, but in its contemporaries that supported screen-pinching (Rise of the Triad and Duke 3D) the sprites simply tilt up and down, just as they tilt side to side. Anything “razor-sharp” about their presentation has been added by jDoom and is not part of the original game engine.
While I can appreciate the desire to create a piece that approaches the situation from an external perspective, unblemished by too much insider knowledge of the game, the confusion between the tools you’ve use to view the game content and the game’s original presentation makes your stated premise quite discordant with the content and perspective of your screenshot tour. (That being said—reconciling the two would mostly consist of removing material from your article.)
[1] The visual artifacts shown in screenshots 1 and 3 never happen at those locations in Doom. Doom will almost never render sky where there should be walls, and the renderer is generally very stable. No-clipping outside of the level causes a much different and messier visual effect called “hall of mirrors.” The major visual artifact that the game’s engine does display inside of maps, called slime trails by long-time fans, rarely occurs within the original game and is very hard to notice. It consists of a column of pixels extending upward or downward from a floor or ceiling, filled with that surface’s texture.
http://www.doomworld.com/vb/doomworld-news/56381-cyber-archeology-unearths-cyberdemons/
[Going into the void] The effect of what happens when going outside a room’s boundaries is engine-specific. Software renderers HOM, because that’s simple to do, and GL ports just render the next room in z direction if they think it’s worth it, and others, such as prboom-plus, can fill the void with a color (for identification of “missing” mid textures on single-sided walls).
[The fallacy of sprites] – The tilting/compressing of sprites is a tunable of source ports, often deactivated, since one of its drawbacks is that if you stand on top of an object and look down, you won’t see it if t/c is enabled.
[All the texture misalignments you point out] – well hey, no one is perfect. You won’t get around to having to align textures in Unreal99 either, for example.
[Perforated vine walls] – All in the name of speed, which is why we also have things like MIDBARS. Of course in modern maps (and modern games), one does as much as possible with lines rather than textures – but you will know that added geometry is at the cost of rendering speed, which was in essence back then. Don’t blame id for trying to reach the 35 fps goal for that time’s computers.
[Medkits without feathered edges] – looks quite feathered/blurred in the shot. What do you expect? It’s a bitmap/sprite of limited resolution. There exist algorithms like HQ4X that try to provide upscaled images with less jagged edges (cf. gzdoom which has the HQ modes).
[E1M8's green ceiling] – this is a bug specific to the texture pack you are using. The normal textures do not have this.
[E3M6 "Lava texture on top of the..."] FLOOR6_1 is a stone texture, not lava. IMHO, that is red-colored feldspar interspersed with a bit of quartz (like granite, but without mica).
[E4M3 Sever the Wicked] – looks more like the E4M2 cavern.
[MAP16 5 teleporters] That is MAP19.
[MAP28 "Note that even the column is lava textured"] – uh no, REDSTONE1 is still a stone texture.
[MAP06 "Dead simple"] – MAP06, yes, Dead Simple, no.
One should not take the buildings or layout too seriously. Especially when you look at ROTT’s later maps, there is just no explanation within the game world for putting Dopefish shotouts in it.
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hey h2. thanks for such a thorough comment back!
yeah I remember the Dopefish room, one of those later underwater Qlevels right? I thought the regulating lines would be absurd enough; there is humor at play here that maybe didn’t come across completely, sorry. It’s a revisit less from a technical point of view. I only point to things like some of those glitches because I thought they were great; and made Doom a bit more ‘human’ than contemporary games, it was inevitable that some people that have spent more time with Doom through the years would be offended/upset. I haven’t been there in about 15 years. I really appreciate your comments and will go back and double check everything. I’m dying to get to Hexen and take it slow again.
Hexadecima – thanks also for such a great explanation. I’m going to find ZDoom and check everything you mentioned. Thanks!
The Doom world is sacred, and a masterpiece. In no way is this an attempt to claim authority on it, but rather an homage to its amazing qualities. (or just a personal recollection). This was my way of just trying to understand some of it a bit more, absorb it after leaving for so long, from another point of view. I collected screenshots over a year and a half with no real goal in mind, just things that I found curious, as an ex-gamer. I printed all of them out and have been looking at them for a while now. Call it dumb or naive or whatever, but there are amazing things that happen when you slow down in these rooms and just hang out. It might be a personal thing and thats totally fine with me. It will have a different memory for everyone.
also, as there are many things to correct and recheck, i want to point to the fact that this text is less about the specific glitches/spaces of Doom itself, than about the general appeal of the primitive. It is only my opinion as someone who grew up gaming, abandoned it and recently went back to some of the same spaces. Of course things change after 15 years! And I understand that a lot of reads liek an outside looking in, but thats exactly the point of the text – an archeology removes oneself from the world/ or keeps a clinical distance. thats the reason for the sometimes awkward phrasing.
but anyway i really appreciate the feedback; i’m going to get back into this.
Forgot one thing.
One of the major points of this text was to put Doom screenshots on an architecture blog. Of course it’s nothing new, but I only wanted to say that the “architecture” of that world is so often times more exciting than anything on ArchDaily for example. That might seem like a trivial point but I think it points to a larger issue, which I mention in the text… the empathetic landscape. Compare renderings by decade on http://rndrd.com for example. Personally, I feel less and less attracted to the over-polished images of Foster’s Masdar and more to 90s era renderings such as this one –
http://rndrd.com/606990/Itsuko-Hasegawa-Architectural-Design-64-January-1994-87.
Going further maybe we can speculate on the warmth of drafting or even drawings and doodles. This sort of thinking can quickly spiral into a rejection of optimization and makes me want to live in the forest and carve into wooden tablets, which isn’t something i think should happen at all.
I could have easily omitted the screenshots and left this text as just that. But I think the screenshots, whether they are correctly labeled or not, change the tone of this text into something that isn’t pseudo intellectual. (again apologies if the location is wrong occasionally, I had to go back and re-find some of the things I saved a year ago, I will fix it and that will be that). I could have also omitted any comments on the screenshots, or not made really messed up arrows or dumb regulating lines.. but again, the same thing. There is a kind of absurdity in pointing to the modules/proportions of a game world.
Because Doom was constructed with such tight parameters, I’m sure many of the design decisions were made out of pure necessity. So it has some kind of self-generating logic built into it, which aligns it more with an emergent system. Call of Duty (1 2 or 3) never gave me the same experience as Doom for example (or jDoom). it’s insistence on making bridges, houses, trees to put you into that specific era in history is just dead on arrival to me. It doesn’t transfix. Doom transfixes.
Your analysis of the Doom engine and the architecture of this old game is very interesting and I thought you did a very good job of describing the design and the interesting architechtural gems that are resident in the Doom world.
Thanks for this post.
Very nice article, and I like your point about the fantastic world vs. the imitations of reality that came later.
On the other hand, some of those screenshots only look like that because you’re using a modified game. There aren’t any mountains in the original sky for Doom 2, for example. That must have been some special background graphic added for that engine. The normal background is just a sorta polluted brown sky. And I’m not positive all those texture alignment errors are in the original game (although there are lots.) Also, if you use zDoom, you can use mouselook without having sprites be quite so distorted and flat when you look down at them.
Anyway, thanks for the thoughts on the architecture. They really clicked for me, and helped me out with something I’m working on.
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They did not paint the textures “pixel by pixel”, they wrote a program that could convert digital images into the format they used in the game. That is how the cyberdemon almost looks like a modern 3d model, because it was actually a latex model photographed out from different angles to create the sprites, in conjuction with the program I mentioned. I think they made latex models for Mancubus and Arch-ville to, not sure though.