Questions on SNES Doom

[Mattfrie1]

How different was the engine of Snes Doom to the PC version? I know a few of the obvious things were changed, like no floor and ceiling textures, but how different was it compared to the PC version? I know the engine was developed by Williams Entertainment specially for the Super Nintendo and it's version of Doom.

Also, is it true that the game was censored to a degree by Nintendo? I read that they said no Hell references (still in there though) and no blood from gunfire, to make it look less violent. I also noticed that all decorations of dead people and monsters have been removed, maybe to also make it less violent. Is it true that it was censored, or just because of cart limitations that they had to get rid of all this stuff?

[Maes]

There's a fair amount of detail here. Quite a lot of stuff was removed mainly due to memory limitations, most notably all non-frontal monster animations, which also lead to gameplay quirks. Some weapons function differently (e.g. the shotgun fires a single, very powerful bullet, chaingun can fire single bullets). Hell decoration was indeed removed but there's still a whole episode taking place in Hell, so it was kinda pointless (but I guess it helped with RAM memory and cart space issues). Blood and particles were also removed both due to concerns and system limitations. The automap system was reimplemented with a special SuperFX overlay rotating mode, and the engine is the very least tailored to the SuperFX capabilities and limitations (e.g. it doesn't draw the screen in block as a large bitmap, like the original engine does, but instructs the FX chip how to texture polygons. Much like an OpenGL port).

[DuckReconMajor]

I still don't understand the always-facing-the-player thing. Do the monsters still move as normal, but only show the front sprites, or are the monsters really always facing the player? If they are, is it like a constantly running Face Player function, because that seems like it would be harder for the system to run.

[wildweasel]

DuckReconMajor said:

I still don't understand the always-facing-the-player thing. Do the monsters still move as normal, but only show the front sprites, or are the monsters really always facing the player? If they are, is it like a constantly running Face Player function, because that seems like it would be harder for the system to run.

They only show the front sprites. It behaves as if all the rotation graphics were removed, and the front-facing graphics were changed to Angle 0 (all directions). If monsters were to infight, at least one of them would appear to be shooting backwards.

[Mattfrie1]

So that means that if you were to see from the monsters view point, they could be looking another way and not at you? Because I know you can't sneak up on monsters in the SNES version, while you could in the 32X, except it made them look blind sometimes in that version.

Also another question, how were the deathmatches in this game? I know you could deathmatch by using the Xband modem (which doesn't work anymore). Did the Doomguy sprites only have front sides too, or was it all sides?