Doom 1 E1 unrealistic space

[Klear]

I'm well aware of that PDA message. It's one of the few things I remember from Doom 3 actually.

["JL" was too short]

The proliferation of nice starry skies in PWAD resources pretty well puts the lie to any idea that you couldn't have a good-looking sky that conveyed the impression you were on the surface of a Martian moon.  Or at least did a more credible and immersive job of it, notwithstanding the question of whether it's actually photorealistic to what you would see from Phobos's surface. 

The gravity and atmosphere thing is easier to handwave away.  Artificial gravity is nearly ubiquitous in sci-fi even where it's physically unrealistic (and where you have artificial gravity you can have an atmosphere).  Terraforming the surface of an asteroid-like moon until it resembles a particularly picturesque set of heavily vegetated mountains from China is, uh, not a common sci-fi trope.

The real take-to-heart message is that, at this point, there's probably absolutely nothing to be gained from having an extended discussion about it.  Everyone ought to realize that the E1 sky breaks immersion if you think about it for a nanosecond.  Everyone ought to be able to come up with some (relatively) convincing arguments for how to handwave parts of it away, and everyone ought to be aware of the limitations of those arguments and not defend it past the point where it becomes unambiguously dumb.  And everyone ought to realize that you can't actually travel back in time 30 years and tell Adrian Carmack "yo, people are actually going to notice stuff in three decades, so make sure your i's are dotted and t's crossed", so it's probably not worth spending any more of your life thinking about it.

Edited August 22, 2023 by jerrysheppy

[RataUnderground]

For years it seemed to me that these mountains were just gray rocks forming the crater wall. It was only after learning about the source photograph that I realized they had vegetation.
Anyway, it is a landscape that excites the imagination.

[tornado potato]

6 hours ago, BeachThunder said:

It's an in-universe holographic sky display. UAC upper management decided to project a picturesque vista of some Chinese mountains in order to boost UAC employee morale.*

 

 

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*I'm just making up shit.

 

Ha that would be a cool idea for a wad. You run around a normal looking level with these skies, but towards the end you break out of the dome and get to see the real, desolate atmosphere

[Klear]

Or the other way around, like in this april fool's Blastwave.

[Naarok0fkor]

5 hours ago, ducon said:

Because there’s a chainsaw in a nuclear plant.

 

[Liberation]

7 hours ago, Biodegradable said:

The UAC managed to successfully terraform Phobos at least partially before the demonic invasion took place.

 

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I'm also making shit up. ;^P

 

I'm pretty sure that is legit actually. 

[Herr Dethnout]

I hate a lot E1 Sky... Man, this kind of unrealistic stuff just makes the game unplayable.

[Cursed Lemon]

Everything has to be bright and cheery at first so it can be dark and ominous later :B

[Tycitron]

As Blasphemous as it is to say this, this is why i use the wad "darkskies.wad" where it just touches up the alpha skies a bit and gives EP1 and EP2 better looking skies for the environment. Mainly Episode 1 though, cause i don't really have any issues with Episode 2's sky already. But i like how the Alpha one makes it look like there is smoke/clouds blocking out the Hell sky so the reveal of Deimos being above Hell itself is hinted at in a cooler way through the entire episode. You can see the red hellish sky seeping through from under the clouds/smoke.

Edited August 22, 2023 by Tycitron

[janiform]

16 hours ago, zokum said:

On e1m1 the zig-zag area is much larger when viewed inside than from the outside. Given that we have non-euclidian geometry, the mountain range in the distance is rather uninteresting.

 

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. How is the zig zag room smaller when viewed from outside? Short of faking it with teleports, I don't see how non-Euclidean geometry would be possible in vanilla Doom.

 

Edit: okay, I think I get what you're saying - the height of the interior is greater than the height of the outdoor sector. I'd never noticed this!

Edited August 23, 2023 by janiform

[zokum]

28 minutes ago, janiform said:

 

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. How is the zig zag room smaller when viewed from outside? Short of faking it with teleports, I don't see how non-Euclidean geometry would be possible in vanilla Doom.

 

Edit: okay, I think I get what you're saying - the height of the interior is greater than the height of the outdoor sector. I'd never noticed this!

It happens when sky texture is placed in such a way that you see no building when there is an area with walls there. This is also seen in Quake. American McGee's DM2 Claustrophobopolis has a good example of this. Sky boxes screw things up very easily :)

[stonedbaroness]

Its jarring at first especially since E1 is set on Phobos, but I've liked the idea that the UAC had the sheer scale of resources/budget to just casually terraform Phobos. It also just looks really cool and organic!

Edited August 23, 2023 by stonedbaroness

[zokum]

Phobos is so small that in order for it to have those mountains, it would have to be a bigger moon. That would also solve the artificial gravity problem. In a world with teleportation, having the ability to bulk up a moon seems fairly minor. One interesting feature of Phobos is that it has a crater that isn't all that different from the intermission picture.

Deimos makes even less sense as a location. It has a mean radius of 6.2 kilometers. Not sure about the intermission pic scale, but it should cover a large portion of the moon's surface. In-game it appears to me that the surfaces of both of the moons are quite big, much bigger than in reality.

If id had had wikipedia back in 1993, the game would probably have been set on Mars, not Phobos and Deimos. They had it on Mars in Doom 3 and Doom 2016.

[TheUltimateDoomer666]

According to Romero, the original black sky from the alpha "made for rather drab outdoor areas. So we decided to give Phobos and Deimos semi-breathable atmospheres. We attributed their miraculous appearance to the power of the Anomalies." (Source: Interview from The Official Doom Survivor's Strategies & Secrets)