What are these textures used for?

[HotCoffee]

I found these two textures in DOOM.WAD but I've never seen them in-game, anyone knows what they were supposed to be used for?

 

Edited November 11, 2022 by HotCoffee
minor spelling mistake

[SilverMiner]

they show that Doom reads the disk

[ViolentBeetle]

Those aren't textures. I think those are "loading" symbols, I saw a blue floppy disk over black screen a few times booting Crispy or Chocolate Doom, I think - but obviously you won't be staring at a loading screen for long in a game released in 1993.

[Foxpup]

In vanilla, these icons appear in the bottom right corner of the screen when loading data from the CD or hard drive respectively, eg when changing levels. I don't know which modern ports, if any, still use them the same way. In any case, you're unlikely to see them for more than one frame on a modern system.

[pantheon]

Woof still has the floppy disk! I hope they never get rid of it.

[indigotyrian]

As others have mentioned these are "loading" icons, but I can report that several ports do still have them! I know Odamex has it as an option, and I believe DSDA-Doom and PRBoom have them too. Naturally given the massive improvements in loading speed since 1993 you're generally not waiting very long for a map to load so these almost never show up anyway.

[PKr]

To enable them in Chocolate-Doom or Crispy Doom change show_diskicon to 1 in their respective config files. In Woof the setting is called "disk_icon". That said...

47 minutes ago, segfault said:

Naturally given the massive improvements in loading speed since 1993 you're generally not waiting very long for a map to load so these almost never show up anyway.

 

[Edward850]

53 minutes ago, segfault said:

Naturally given the massive improvements in loading speed since 1993 you're generally not waiting very long for a map to load so these almost never show up anyway.

It wasn't explicitly related to map loading, but resource caching. If any asset needed to be pulled from disk to zone memory that icon was displayed. In effect this means it can show at any point in the game, not just map load.

And in fact it's removal and/or short time had nothing to do with speed but the weird way it gets rendered; Doom originally displayed the icon inbetween frames because it could swap it into the buffer at any time, however modern rendering (especially with vsync) makes that rather inappropriate to do and in some cases makes the icon rather complicated to display. Its characteristics can't be perfectly replicated so it's mostly just an emulation now, which means it has a habit of showing up only after the assets are already loaded rather than during.

Edited November 11, 2022 by Edward850

[heliumlamb]

On 11/6/2022 at 9:06 PM, heliumlamb said:

a blue floppy disk briefly shows up in my visual field's periphery at least 3 times a week.