Why didn't PSX Doom include the PC Levels?

[Biz!]

I figured since PSX Doom runs at a stable frame rate, and since the PSX uses Discs for storage, that it would have had the original PC Levels, did it have to do with the rendering engine or was it also just a space issue like with the Jaguar?

[Tom2007]

i think it was the custem lighting engine that was use for PSX Doom. and they use Doom Jaguar levels for Doom1 

[Graf Zahl]

A PSX only has 2MB RAM plus 1 MB VRAM, which also needs to hold the frame buffer. So you have to deal with a lot more constrained resources than the PC version. The PC version really needs more than 4MB to avoid swapping textures in and out - meaning that on the PSX you had to cut down resources - textures in particular - quite a bit to make the game fit.

 

Making use of the Jaguar levels just meant not having to cut them down again.

 

[Gez]

The Jaguar levels were available and had been deemed good enough for console release.

 

They could have started from the PC version, but then they'd have had to spend more time trimming and testing them; like they had to do with all the levels that had no Jaguar version (Doom II, Final Doom), which probably would have resulted in better-looking levels (as they wouldn't have needed to trim those levels as much as they were for the Jaguar) but on the downside, less original levels because development time was not infinite.

[Kyle07]

As far as I know, the DOOM II levels have worse framerate, compared to the Jaguar levels. So you could argue, that using the Jaguar levels was the right choice, correct?

 

I don't know how much demanding the DOOM II levels are in comparison to the DOOM 1 pc levels. Maybe a little bit?

[Individualised]

The Jaguar levels being cut down (unless you count the levels that are missing entirely) has nothing to do with storage limitations, it was for performance reasons. Therefore PSX Doom being on a CD doesn't help unfortunately. You're thinking of the other cutbacks that were originally made on the Jaguar port (missing textures, missing monsters, no final boss level, basic game presentation/"fluff").

Edited March 7, 2023 by Individualised

[Catdark_]

The PS1 was a technologically limited because that the PlayStation was built for low poly graphics and limited graphics and in the 90s most processors that ran doom were high cost such as Intel Pentium III also some of the pc levels are larger or have more linedef triggers that would have to modified or cut in order to run smoothly on the PlayStation 1 TL:DR ps1 wasn’t powerful for some PC levels

[Individualised]

13 hours ago, Catdark_ said:

The PS1 was a technologically limited because that the PlayStation was built for low poly graphics and limited graphics and in the 90s most processors that ran doom were high cost such as Intel Pentium III also some of the pc levels are larger or have more linedef triggers that would have to modified or cut in order to run smoothly on the PlayStation 1 TL:DR ps1 wasn’t powerful for some PC levels

PS1 Doom does not use polygons to render levels though. It uses a hybrid hardware/software rendering approach, where each individual column is rendered in hardware in a way that makes it functionally similar to the software renderer from the PC game. Most of what you say here isn't relevant, and your comment about the Pentium 3 is strange. The Pentium 3 was introduced in 1999, Doom was designed for 486, so that makes no sense. The average person absolutely did not have a Pentium 3 even when they first came out, that's like expecting people to have the latest Intel i9 processor today.

[the_kovic]

PSX DOOM essentially forks the Jaguar codebase. The Jaguar versions of DOOM 1 levels already existed and reusing them probably saved the PSX devs some time and effort. This was not the case for the DOOM 2 levels (and Thy Flesh Consumed levels) so those were based on the original PC levels. However, it must be mentioned that not even those are not the same as the PC versions and they couldn't have been. The PSX DOOM engine has a critical limitation - it can vertically tile a texture only a couple of times. This put a hard cap on how tall sectors could be and forced the devs modify some levels (Perfect Hatred, The Crusher) or cut them completely (Industrial Zone, Living End).

[Catdark_]

On 4/9/2023 at 10:54 AM, Individualised said:

PS1 Doom does not use polygons to render levels though. It uses a hybrid hardware/software rendering approach, where each individual column is rendered in hardware in a way that makes it functionally similar to the software renderer from the PC game. Most of what you say here isn't relevant, and your comment about the Pentium 3 is strange. The Pentium 3 was introduced in 1999, Doom was designed for 486, so that makes no sense. The average person absolutely did not have a Pentium 3 even when they first came out, that's like expecting people to have the latest Intel i9 processor today.

I was just noting the highest power processor at the time not everybody needs an Intel Core I9. Thx for pointing that out.

Edited June 29, 2023 by Catdark_
I may have got the processor wrong but I will do research

[RonLivingston]

somthing interesting about Plutonia, I know PSX Final Doom Didn't include the rest of those levels

[aboyes1989]

Indeed, it has what, five?

 

Despite the strange map set, PSX Final Doom remains my favourite Doom game. Love the atmosphere, and I think the levels that were ported over are some of the better ones from the PC WADs.

[Individualised]

1 hour ago, aboyes1989 said:

Indeed, it has what, five?

 

Despite the strange map set, PSX Final Doom remains my favourite Doom game. Love the atmosphere, and I think the levels that were ported over are some of the better ones from the PC WADs.

Shouldn't have been called Final Doom though. Almost half of the game is Master Levels for Doom 2, yet the box and advertising material made no mention of this and acted as if it were a faithful port of the PC version with original PSX Doom's atmospheric music and visuals. The back of the cover art was pretty much identical to the PC versions and implied that the full Evilution and Plutonia campaigns were there when in reality PSX Final Doom has only a small collection of levels from them. Weird how no one back then seemed to catch on that much to the blatant false advertising other than hardcore Doom fans.

Edited June 29, 2023 by Individualised

[Devalaous]

I was actually fine with Master Levels being on there, as I had previously never known they existed (My 'Doom Collectors Edition' that has sourced my IWADs for decades was missing them)

 

What annoyed me more was 'over 30 levels!' when it was exactly 30.

[Rudolph]

Ideally, Playstation Final Doom should have contained two discs: the first one would have only been Final Doom maps and the second one would have contained the entirety of The Master Levels for Doom II plus levels that did not manage to make the cut for Playstation Doom.

[Edward850]

1 hour ago, Rudolph said:

Ideally, Playstation Final Doom should have contained two discs: the first one would have only been Final Doom maps and the second one would have contained the entirety of The Master Levels for Doom II plus levels that did not manage to make the cut for Playstation Doom.

It has been said already in this thread, Playstation Doom does not suffer from storage limitations. It is unknown why Final Doom was cut the way it was, but storage was not the reason at all. There's about 18 minutes worth of music and 200 MB of data on the disc, and that's assuming the data isn't also including the audio tracks. We are either talking barely more than half of the disc, or not even a half. There's room for both.

Edited June 30, 2023 by Edward850

[Deathbringer2]

On 4/10/2023 at 2:54 AM, Individualised said:

PS1 Doom does not use polygons to render levels though. It uses a hybrid hardware/software rendering approach, where each individual column is rendered in hardware in a way that makes it functionally similar to the software renderer from the PC game. Most of what you say here isn't relevant, and your comment about the Pentium 3 is strange. The Pentium 3 was introduced in 1999, Doom was designed for 486, so that makes no sense. The average person absolutely did not have a Pentium 3 even when they first came out, that's like expecting people to have the latest Intel i9 processor today.

I once heard that, ironically, the Playstation was designed so much for full 3D, the big new thing in gaming, that it couldn't actually handle 2D very well, which is why, say, the Arch-Vile was cut, it had "too many sprites". 

Then I moved to Japan and found out the Playstation had a ton of 2D games over here, like sidescrolling shooters and 2D RPGs which could have run on the SNES, they just used the storage of a CD Rom for much bigger worlds and FMVs.

I've got Playstation Doom to VPO before, but it seems to happen based on the number of sprites rather than the architecture (so, in other words, has nothing to do with "visible planes"!). Go to Suburbs and activate everything, then watch the infight and you might get a VPO.

[Individualised]

1 hour ago, Deathbringer2 said:

I once heard that, ironically, the Playstation was designed so much for full 3D, the big new thing in gaming, that it couldn't actually handle 2D very well, which is why, say, the Arch-Vile was cut, it had "too many sprites". 

Then I moved to Japan and found out the Playstation had a ton of 2D games over here, like sidescrolling shooters and 2D RPGs which could have run on the SNES, they just used the storage of a CD Rom for much bigger worlds and FMVs.

I've got Playstation Doom to VPO before, but it seems to happen based on the number of sprites rather than the architecture (so, in other words, has nothing to do with "visible planes"!). Go to Suburbs and activate everything, then watch the infight and you might get a VPO.

PlayStation was absolutely designed for 2D, it features sprite hardware. You may be thinking of the Sega Saturn which was the opposite of what you said (designed for 2D, with 3D capabilities shoehorned in after, when SEGA realised it was the next big thing)

[Kyle07]

19 hours ago, Individualised said:

Shouldn't have been called Final Doom though. Almost half of the game is Master Levels for Doom 2, yet the box and advertising material made no mention of this and acted as if it were a faithful port of the PC version with original PSX Doom's atmospheric music and visuals. The back of the cover art was pretty much identical to the PC versions and implied that the full Evilution and Plutonia campaigns were there when in reality PSX Final Doom has only a small collection of levels from them. Weird how no one back then seemed to catch on that much to the blatant false advertising other than hardcore Doom fans.

Well if no one complained on console doom that levels were missing or replaced, then why should you start to complain with Final Doom?

[Individualised]

29 minutes ago, Kyle07 said:

Well if no one complained on console doom that levels were missing or replaced, then why should you start to complain with Final Doom?

Because the amount of levels missing in the first PSX Doom are negligible compared to the amount missing in PSX Final Doom, to the point that PSX Final Doom can barely be considered Final Doom. If they had a strict time limit they should have atleast not bothered with Master Levels for Doom 2 and spent more time on porting more Final Doom levels instead.

[Dark Pulse]

On 6/29/2023 at 8:51 AM, RonLivingston said:

somthing interesting about Plutonia, I know PSX Final Doom Didn't include the rest of those levels

 

14 hours ago, Edward850 said:

It has been said already in this thread, Playstation Doom does not suffer from storage limitations. It is unknown why Final Doom was cut the way it was, but storage was not the reason at all. There's about 18 minutes worth of music and 200 MB of data on the disc, and that's assuming the data isn't also including the audio tracks. We are either talking barely more than half of the disc, or not even a half. There's room for both.

 

The reason for this is simple: lack of RAM.

 

To keep the explanation simple, every "type" of monster (with a few exceptions) requires some space of the memory. Put too much monster types in the map, and the game will run out of memory and bomb.

 

You may notice that in the GEC Master Edition (which has conversions of these levels), a lot of the Plutonia maps have reduced enemy variety and other tricks to boost up the difficulty while keeping the types of monsters low (for example, Nightmare monsters).

 

Not much can be done about it, really. The PS1 only has 2 MB of RAM, and after things like the game executable and various other things, only about 1.4 MB of RAM is left to actually store the running level. On PC, you needed 4 MB (and for Doom 2/Final Doom, 8 MB) to have everything you needed. Sacrifices had to be made, and in this case, those sacrifices were to the more complex maps in terms of monster variety.

 

Also, Final Doom PSX was made while work on Doom 64 was being done. Tim Heydelaar dropped in on our forums for awhile some years back; he did all the conversions for PSX Final Doom. It was, in his own words, "a cash grab." So that also probably has something to do with it.

Edited June 30, 2023 by Dark Pulse

[Individualised]

1 hour ago, Dark Pulse said:

 

 

The reason for this is simple: lack of RAM.

 

To keep the explanation simple, every "type" of monster (with a few exceptions) requires some space of the memory. Put too much monster types in the map, and the game will run out of memory and bomb.

 

You may notice that in the GEC Master Edition (which has conversions of these levels), a lot of the Plutonia maps have reduced enemy variety and other tricks to boost up the difficulty while keeping the types of monsters low (for example, Nightmare monsters).

 

Not much can be done about it, really. The PS1 only has 2 MB of RAM, and after things like the game executable and various other things, only about 1.4 MB of RAM is left to actually store the running level. On PC, you needed 4 MB (and for Doom 2/Final Doom, 8 MB) to have everything you needed. Sacrifices had to be made, and in this case, those sacrifices were to the more complex maps in terms of monster variety.

 

Also, Final Doom PSX was made while work on Doom 64 was being done. Tim Heydelaar dropped in on our forums for awhile some years back; he did all the conversions for PSX Final Doom. It was, in his own words, "a cash grab." So that also probably has something to do with it.

The lack of levels almost certainly had more to do with the cash grab aspect than RAM limitations though. They already cut out a lot of enemy variety in the few levels they did port.

[Dark Pulse]

8 minutes ago, Individualised said:

The lack of levels almost certainly had more to do with the cash grab aspect than RAM limitations though. They already cut out a lot of enemy variety in the few levels they did port.

Perhaps. But a LOT of Final Doom levels also have a hell of a lot of monster variety. The Casalis loved their Revenants and Chaingunners, after all.

 

I was able to get my conversion of Neurosphere fairly close (obviously no Archie, there was an MP-only Cyberdemon as well), but not every map is gonna be that simple.

[Herr Dethnout]

9 hours ago, Deathbringer2 said:

I once heard that, ironically, the Playstation was designed so much for full 3D, the big new thing in gaming, that it couldn't actually handle 2D very well, which is why, say, the Arch-Vile was cut, it had "too many sprites". 

Then I moved to Japan and found out the Playstation had a ton of 2D games over here, like sidescrolling shooters and 2D RPGs which could have run on the SNES, they just used the storage of a CD Rom for much bigger worlds and FMVs.

I've got Playstation Doom to VPO before, but it seems to happen based on the number of sprites rather than the architecture (so, in other words, has nothing to do with "visible planes"!). Go to Suburbs and activate everything, then watch the infight and you might get a VPO.

Yup, the PSX was made with 2D in mind, and the reason why they added a support for 3D was, ironically, thanks to Virtua Fighter lol

 

It doesn't help that in the west there's was kind of campaign against 2D games by the Game journalists. E.g. Symphony of the Night got bad reviews initially only for being a 2d Game. lol

[Kyle07]

I don't know if the 3D consoles were planning 2D only. But in the 90s no one cares if a console port was different from PC. It was what it is.

[Dark Pulse]

The PlayStation is a weird case because let's not forget, originally it was going to be a CD addon for the SNES. So a lot of its design philosophies are actually fairly similar. (The PS1 SPU can be considered an evolution of the SPC700 in the SNES, for example).

 

That said, to say it was "made for 2D" is also a bit of a lie. Naturally it had some stuff that tended very well to 2D, but it was obviously a machine made with 3D in mind, and indeed, 3D as the main selling point.

 

The Saturn, on the other hand, was built to be more of a 2D powerhouse. But that's also why it lost the war of that generation - not only was it tricky to do 3D on (quads instead of triangles), it also had some extremely powerful processors, but to maximize power and framerate you essentially had to multithread your program in a way it liked - and this was an era where relatively few programmers had experience doing that sort of stuff.

[Individualised]

7 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

originally it was going to be a CD addon for the SNES.

Not exactly. The CD add-on was separate thing from the original "PlayStation" which was simply a SNES but manufactured by Sony and with the CD add-on built in (similar to how Panasonic manufactured a version of the GameCube with DVD playback as a result of their deal to manufacture DVD drives for Nintendo). Everything else you said still applies though - the PlayStation is an evolution of the SNES hardware in many ways.

Edited July 1, 2023 by Individualised

[Rudolph]

On 6/30/2023 at 2:20 PM, Dark Pulse said:

Perhaps. But a LOT of Final Doom levels also have a hell of a lot of monster variety. The Casalis loved their Revenants and Chaingunners, after all.

 

I was able to get my conversion of Neurosphere fairly close (obviously no Archie, there was an MP-only Cyberdemon as well), but not every map is gonna be that simple.

Could they just not have ported the maps with a less diverse monster population? Doom on a controller is already harder than on a mouse and keyboard, so I do not think the players would have really minded a downgrade from Plutonia's hellish difficulty.

[Dark Pulse]

1 hour ago, Rudolph said:

Could they just not have ported the maps with a less diverse monster population? Doom on a controller is already harder than on a mouse and keyboard, so I do not think the players would have really minded a downgrade from Plutonia's hellish difficulty.

That'd be a question for Tim, if he ever returns here.

 

The only other reason I could have for why they did not is that Carmack was a stickler for the presentation, and might've thought that too much removal of too many monster types, or the height crunching limits needed due to the original (pre-GEC) renderer, was too much of a compromise to make.

[Individualised]

3 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

The only other reason I could have for why they did not is that Carmack was a stickler for the presentation, and might've thought that too much removal of too many monster types, or the height crunching limits needed due to the original (pre-GEC) renderer, was too much of a compromise to make.

I suspect that at the time, id considered Master Levels for Doom 2 to be a higher quality product than Final Doom, and pushed for its levels to be included. Therefore there was less time to work on the Final Doom portion of the game.