Sprites Doom 2 Minor Sprite Fixing Project - v2.0 Release (updated 11/28/22)

[Cire]

By this time I think we can only assume that this project has been abandoned. Maybe someone would be willing to take over it?

[Cire]

What color in RGB should the white holes in RSKY2 be filled with?
EDIT: Redundant, see Rev'100's Heretic sprite fixing project.
Some fixed Heretic graphics.

[bradharding]

Cire said:

By this time I think we can only assume that this project has been abandoned. Maybe someone would be willing to take over it?

Seems like it. Would step in myself, but am too busy with another DOOM related project.

Cire said:

What color in RGB should the white holes in RSKY2 be filled with?

I guess #9F876F (color 132) would work, same as above and below those missing pixels.

[Dragonsbrethren]

Cire said:

What color in RGB should the white holes in RSKY2 be filled with?

255. You should just disable the transparency.

[Cire]

Like this?:
Redundant, included in R'100's main project.

[Cire]

http://filesmelt.com/dl/HXGRAFIX.WAD
Widescreen friendly Hexen graphics

[Gez]

Dragonsbrethren said:

255. You should just disable the transparency.

Yes.

[Cire]

Did anyone try out my fix wads? Is there anything else that should be fixed?

[_bruce_]

Could the original re/positioning of the Chaingunner and Archvile during shooting have been on purpose since the projectile/energy they are emitting pushes them back?

Overall - fantastic job.

[Cire]

_bruce_ said: "Could the original re/positioning of the Chaingunner and Archvile during shooting have been on purpose since the projectile/energy they are emitting pushes them back?"
Possibly, I'm not sure...
_bruce_ said: "Overall - fantastic job."
If that was refering to the fixes I did - thanks!.

[Xtife]

Sad that this project is on the back burner with so much left to do. Was looking to seeing those last few changes that were pending such as the lost soul sprites.

[Cire]

Totally agree, I just hope someone takes over the project sometime.

[Revenant100]

I sincerely apologize for my absence. I got sidetracked by a lot of real world affairs and I put Doom on the backburner for a while, ending up a lot longer than I intended. That's not an excuse for leaving everyone in the dark, however, so please forgive my indiscretion.

I'll release the next update of my Doom/Doom 2 project within the next few days. I said this was going to be the last version, but I never had the chance to hunker down and tweak the fine details, so another update may be possible. There aren't any major changes planned, but I believe it's the little details that really sell the final result.

I'll also release the Heretic sprite fixing project as well. As I said before, I have it nearly completed, but I left the trickiest tasks last. Cire, I'll take a look at your fixes to see if I can merge anything into my version, but I've likely already covered all of the bases you could imagine.

Unfortunately, I still consider Hexen to be very daunting and complex endeavor.

_bruce_ said:

Could the original re/positioning of the Chaingunner and Archvile during shooting have been on purpose since the projectile/energy they are emitting pushes them back?

These are definite instances of an auto-center option being liberally applied to the sprite offsets without additional adjustments. For the Heavy Weapon Dude, you can tell that the auto-center was applied after the muzzle flash was drawn, causing the jittering. This issue is most common in the side/angled/rear sprites as they didn't receive as much attention as the front-facing sprites, probably because id assumed the monsters would be facing you directly most of the time. However, some of the earliest versions of Doom exhibited obvious instances of unadjusted auto-center artifacts on front-facing sprites, namely the Imp's attacking frames, that were quickly fixed in subsequent patches. Hence, id considered inconsistent sprite offsets to be an issue worth fixing.

[Cire]

Revenant100, no problem, I'm so glad you answered back though, I was seriously worried something really bad had happened to you. :/ Glad to hear you're OK though, and looking forward to your projects!

[_bruce_]

Thanks for clearing that up Rev'100 - as said before... awesome work that's appreciated!

[Blue Shadow]

Cire said:

I was seriously worried something really bad had happened to you.

Wow! Just because he put something, which is a hobby, on the side because he was very busy with real life stuff?

You know that there are things more important than modding for a 20-year-old game, right?

[Cire]

Yeah, true - I guess I was overreacting, sorry, I'm probably too obsessed with Doom, ;).

[Revenant100]

After a much-too-long delay, I'm happy to present version 1.3 of this project. While not a huge update, there are still a number of refinements striving ever closer to the goals outlined in my initial post. The biggest visual difference here would be the restoration of the long unseen pre-1.666 Lost Soul front-facing sprites, which if you haven't seen it yet above, looks like this:


(Outdated, see original post)

I will now direct my efforts towards finishing my Heretic sprite fixing project. I should hopefully be able to get it done within the next few days.

[Reisal]

This is a fantastic piece of work to see some of the mistakes made during game development to be correct, even a full rotation for the SS Nazi's shooting frames!

[Cire]

Fantastic job. I'm eagerly awaiting the Heretic sprite fixing project.

[Xtife]

Awesome, thanks for this

[marxr]

NightFright said:

If you are looking for Heretic and Hexen widescreen HUDs, these have been done already and can be found in this thread (among some other stuff).

The widescreen HUDs available there have been done quite well and don't require a remake IMHO.

Hey, you have any idea where to get widescreen HUD for doom? Right now it looks like this for me, using zdoom:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ehsow5j3z5j56ua/Screenshot_Doom_20130714_221301.png

[Revenant100]

As posted by NightFright, there's a widescreen Doom HUD made by MG_Man here:
http://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=26056

[marxr]

Thanks man!

[NightFright]

I am not sure whether or not this qualifies to be added to the project, but I think it would fix nicely, anyway.

I realized the help screens (HELP1 for Doom, HELP for DOOM II) have a few minor glitches. The most obvious one is the word "QUICKSAVE" which seems to start with an "O" since the bottom line of the letters had been cut for some reason. Especially on HELP1, many letters have red pixels which seem to be leftovers from sloppy copy-paste/conversion work. Letter edges are missing, there are some pixels where there shouldn't be etc.

I have cleaned up the screens (even HELP2 which is only shown in Doom Shareware) and you can check the result here. You would have to zoom in closely probably to see the difference, but at least you should be able to see the fix for the "Quicksave" word.

Download:
Doom 1+2 Help Screen Fix (134 KB)
(Contains the BMPs for HELP, HELP1, HELP2 and a small wad which you can use to check it ingame.)

Comparison screens:
Doom 1 help screen comparison (left: original, right: fix)
Doom 2 help screen comparison (left: original, right: fix)

If you think these are worth being included with your project, feel free to use them.

[Revenant100]

Your fixes look fantastic! I'd love to include them in an update. I hadn't thought about checking the art screens, so I appreciate the contribution. I'll be sure to do the proper testing first, but I believe these additions shouldn't break any existing compatibility.

Anyhow, I have been planning a small update to my Doom sprite fixes recently. Having already meticulously gone through the sprites many times before and mined all the useful art from the available WAD resources, it seems there's not much left to do except for some final sprite offset adjustments. However, there's actually one big step I've wanted to take for a while that has to do with the following images found in the first printing of the Doom manual (originally noted by Gerolf on the ZDoom forums):


Of course, these are the firing frames from the lost A8 rotation angle for the Player and the Former Human and Sergeant. Seeing these sprites rekindles my belief that full rotation sprite sets do exist for Doom's monsters (at least for these non-symmetrical humans). Do they still exist today? We don't know. Hence, the idea I've been considering: I'd like to contact a current or former id employee as to the possibility of digging up and releasing these lost sprites.

However, the only person I can think of contacting who may be able to help would be Romero. Could anyone here vouch as to whether any of these contact methods are more reliable than the other? Better yet, has anyone ever asked him of such a thing before? If it's already known that he doesn't have these resources or can't release them, I don't wish to pester him further.

Naturally, acquiring these lost sprites is a pretty remote pipe dream, but I don't believe there's any harm in simply inquiring about them.

[NightFright]

After looking closer, I found similar issues on HELP as I did on HELP1 and HELP2 with specific letters, in this case "D", "F" and "P" which had some oddly colored pixels. I have cleaned those as well now.

Additionally, I removed the ugly black/dark green pixels from WIURH0 and WIURH1 (intermission "You are here" arrows), similarly as it has recently been done in the Doom Retro port. Those pixels really look like conversion errors to me. Legibility of the images increases considerably ingame after doing this.

All the lumps are included in this small wad which you may feel free to merge with your project:

Fix WAD for HELP screens and WIURH0/1 (198 KB)

A variation would be to include shadows properly, for even better (IMHO perfect) ingame legibility, even though it deviates a bit more from the original:

Top row: Original
Middle: Cleaned
Low: Cleaned with shadows

Download that WIURH version (with shadows) here (2 KB)


*EDIT Dec 21, 2013*
Same treatment for WISPLAT:


Left: Original
Middle: Cleaned
Right: Cleaned with shadows

Download WISPLAT variations (1 KB)


*EDIT Dec 22, 2013*
HELP1 slightly updated. Redownload menufix.wad if you got it before already.


*EDIT Dec 25, 2013*
Looking at the mugshot, I also noticed black squares on the sides of the face. This gave me the opportunity to also edit away some other minor inconsistencies.



On the left side, you see the originals. Notice in the upper row how I edited the eyes (added the blue part which you can also see on the original STFEVL0 - you only see this on rare occasions, and since the skin color didn't seem to be right in the middle of the eye, blue seemed to be a better choice), while on the lower shots, you can see improvements for the eyebrow pixels and the mentioned black pixels on both sides of the head.

I have compiled full packages so you can test everything at once.

Download GFX fixes for Doom (HELP1/2, WIURH0/1 w/shadow, mugshot fixes - 164 KB)

Download GFX fixes for Doom II (HELP, mugshot fixes - 96 KB)

[axdoomer]

The lost soul has a vertical black line that can be seen in frames SKULA6A4, SKULB6B4, SKULC6C4 and SKULD6D4. It always looked more like a bug than a shadow to me.

Picture: http://i.imgur.com/iUdtXYg.png

[Holering]

Revenant100 said:
(originally noted by Gerolf on the ZDoom forums):

[/B]

Wow that's amazing! That really is sad we don't have resources to the full rotation set (actually, all the animations left out) after all this time. Those actually show more detail than the official sprites for some reason (maybe interpolation is playing tricks on me, but I can almost make out the teeth on shotgun guy); they remind me of the baddies from Quake 2 and 4.

Best of luck to this project. Hope you or someone gets in touch with someone and gets this stuff.

[_bruce_]

Nice Aryan enhancement to the player face sprite ^^
The added shadows to wisplat and wiurh look fine but may be a bit overdone. I'm curious how it will look in action on the intermission screen.

p.s.:
Not sure about that vertical line in the lost soul frame... and I though I was anal about pixel art.