Crispy Doom 6.0 (Update: Mar 31, 2023)

[MAJ]

@fabian I didn't make myself clear. There are 2 options in the config: "aspect_ratio_correct" (which cannot be configured in the in-game menu) and "crispy_widescreen" (which can be configured in the in-game menu). By default, the "aspect_ratio_correct" option is set to 1, which is the 4:3 aspect ratio, and when I set the "Widescreen Aspect Ratio" option to, for example, 16:10 I get this. To avoid this, I need to set the "aspect_ratio_correct" parameter to 2 in the config to get a normal picture as a result. Therefore, it would be nice to place it in the in-game menu too, so that you can conveniently configure everything as it should.

Edited August 25, 2021 by MAJ

[chungy]

2 hours ago, MAJ said:

To avoid this, I need to set the "aspect_ratio_correct" parameter to 2 in the config to get a normal picture as a result.

That is definitely not normal....

[Lollie]

3 hours ago, MAJ said:

By default, the "aspect_ratio_correct" option is set to 1, which is the 4:3 aspect ratio, and when I set the "Widescreen Aspect Ratio" option to, for example, 16:10 I get this. To avoid this, I need to set the "aspect_ratio_correct" parameter to 2 in the config to get a normal picture as a result.

That "normal" picture is actually incorrect. You're expecting the pixels to be perfectly square - a pixel aspect ratio of 1:1 - which is a perfectly understandable expectation. But the thing is, Doom was designed around the limitations of a 320x200 VGA resolution on 4:3 displays, causing a pixel aspect ratio of 5:4, making the individual pixel 120% taller.

 

 

This is what Crispy emulates when "aspect_ratio_correct" is enabled. It's correcting the pixel aspect ratio to match DOS Doom's intended design.

 

As for the black bars on the left and right sides of your screen: Set your Widescreen Aspect Ratio setting to "16:9" or "Match Screen".

"16:10" fits screens with a resolution of 1920x1200. "16:9" is for your everyday widescreen monitor (eg: 1920x1080, 2560x1440, 3840x2160).

 

3 hours ago, MAJ said:

Therefore, it would be nice to place it in the in-game menu too, so that you can conveniently configure everything as it should. 

Admittedly, I do agree with this. It's obvious why the Setup program exists for Chocolate Doom (and it's still useful for network and audio), but considering how many additional settings Crispy offers on top, maybe all of its Display settings should be accessible in-game.

Edited February 27, 2021 by Lollie

[MAJ]

Guys, what's wrong with your eyes? In a 4:3 aspect ratio, the picture is all flattened and is NOT what the developers intended it to be. For example, pay attention to the fireball, in the ratio 16:10 it looks perfectly round, in 4:3 everything looks oval - what does this mean?

PS And yes, 320x200 is not a 4:3 aspect ratio, which proves that we saw a noticeably distorted picture on monitors in the 90s, which cannot by definition be considered what the developers intended.

Edited February 27, 2021 by MAJ

[chungy]

45 minutes ago, MAJ said:

In a 4:3 aspect ratio, the picture is all flattened and is NOT what the developers intended it to be.

Some of us remember what it was actually like in the 1990s. We used 4:3 monitors and the pixel count didn't matter, any odd screen resolution such as 320x200 got stretched to 4:3 no matter what.

Edited February 27, 2021 by chungy

[fabian]

Please read the links that @Lollieposted. Being round is not a criterion for how it is meant to look if it actually looked oval on the PC screens of its time. You may play Doom as you like but please don't try to convince us others we are doing it wrong. The 1.2:1 pixel ratio is a proven fact, and I don't see a compelling reason to switch it off in the in-game menu. 

[MAJ]

@fabian You misunderstood me, again. :) I do not want to over persuade anyone and do not want the 16:10 aspect ratio to be enabled by default, especially since the field of view there is smaller and the picture is less clear (this is one of the minuses). :) All I want is a CHOICE. Please add the ability to change the "aspect_ratio_correct" option via the in-game menu so that everyone gets what they want.

[Lollie]

@MAJ, in particular, you should read through the Doom Wiki article on Aspect Ratios. This is a detail that has already been established for a very long time, for good reason and with good evidence to back it up. It also isn't unique to Doom — this issue popped up in all sorts of games across all sorts of consoles and PCs from the era. Look towards NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, Amiga computers, etc. Nintendo in particular offers scaling options for NES and SNES games on Switch, and this is a feature that appears in a lot of classic game collections for the same reason.

 

320x200 isn't a 4:3 aspect ratio, but the thing is... CRTs didn't really care about aspect ratios like that, they would simply stretch the incoming video to fit their screen. And in an era where standard-definition CRTs were king, aspect ratio was rarely considered anyway. CRT resolution isn't measured in "pixels" the same way modern displays are, so resolution and aspect ratio didn't matter in the same way — performance was more important.

 

Inside the spoiler tag below is a comparison image from this thread that I've linked a couple times already. It serves as a clear-cut example as to why the vertically-stretched pixel aspect ratio is the correct one.

Spoiler

On 12/14/2018 at 3:20 AM, Revenant100 said:

A while back, I made this comparison using the Cyberdemon sprite and original clay model as a reference:

 

This is a particularly apt comparison since the clay model appears to be using the exact same pose and nearly the same angle that the Cyberdemon's CYBRG2 pain frame was digitized from. Ergo, this is a near one-to-one match. The left sprite is scaled up to match the horizontal feet distance of the clay model. The right sprite is equally scaled but also has the 1.2 vertical aspect ratio correction applied.

 

Edited February 27, 2021 by Lollie

[MAJ]

My last post on this matter. :) Let me give you an associative example. Imagine, you have been driving a three-wheeled car for more than 20 years and everyone else was driving the same way, well, there was no way to assemble a four-wheeled car for some magical reason. After many years, they even erected a monument to it as a symbol of the era, which coincided with the original in terms of the number of wheels, size and everything else. Please answer the question: is it correct to drive a three-wheeled car? ;)

Edited February 27, 2021 by MAJ

[Shepardus]

38 minutes ago, MAJ said:

All I want is a CHOICE. Please add the ability to change the "aspect_ratio_correct" option via the in-game menu so that everyone gets what they want.

You already have a choice via editing the config file.

 

3 minutes ago, MAJ said:

My last post on this matter. :) Let me give you an associative example. Imagine, you have been driving a three-wheeled car for more than 20 years and everyone else was driving the same way, well, there was no way to assemble a four-wheeled car for some magical reason. After many years, they even erected a monument to him as a symbol of the era, which coincided with the original in terms of the number of wheels, size and everything else. Please answer the question: is it correct to drive a three-wheeled car? ;)

Is it correct to bolt an extra wheel onto a tricycle?

[Lollie]

50 minutes ago, MAJ said:

My last post on this matter. :) Let me give you an associative example. Imagine, you have been driving a three-wheeled car for more than 20 years and everyone else was driving the same way, well, there was no way to assemble a four-wheeled car for some magical reason. After many years, they even erected a monument to him as a symbol of the era, which coincided with the original in terms of the number of wheels, size and everything else. Please answer the question: is it correct to drive a three-wheeled car? ;)

This is... not a good car analogy. Your car analogy doesn't really apply here, sorry.

 

I understand the pain of wanting cleanly-scaled pixels. Doom sadly does not easily lend itself to integer scaling, but there are options.

 

#1: Use the Setup tool. Yes, it's inconvenient to have to use a separate program to access the one setting you need (and I truly don't think there's any problem with simply adding it to the Crispiness settings), but think of it this way: Once you've set up Crispy to look the way you like, you shouldn't ever need to change those settings ever again.

 

#2: Edit the config file "crispy-doom.cfg" in a basic text editor, like Notepad. Look for "window_width" and "window_height". Yes, also inconvenient.

 

#3: Get yourself a 1200p, 1440p, or 4k monitor. When Doom's 5:4 scaling is applied (turning 320x200 into 320x240), the adjusted height will scale up by 5x/6x/9x to fit the height of the screen perfectly. You can live in a world where a car can have four wheels, and it drives just fine, no magic required. (It just happens to be an expensive answer. Like a car. This is another bad car analogy. It's also inconvenient. There's no convenient options, I'm sorry.)

 

The final option is to just, like, live with the scaling. Let it wash over you. You won't notice it while you're actually playing Doom, I promise.

Edited February 27, 2021 by Lollie
turns out we live in a world where modern monitor resolutions exist! 240 divides perfectly into 2160 *nine* times, who knew!

[seed]

Non sequitur territory at this point...

 

The way Doom and many other games of its era are supposed to look like has been established long ago, trying to twist what is known now is going to lead absolutely nowhere, especially when the opposite has been proven repeatedly.

 

Besides,

 

31 minutes ago, Shepardus said:

You already have a choice via editing the config file.

 

And it's plain unnecessary, especially since it's something the vast majority of players will never mess with.

[MAJ]

1 hour ago, Lollie said:

#1: Use the Setup tool.

By the way, if the "Force correct aspect ratio" setting is disabled in this tool, then the "aspect_ratio_correct" option will be set to 0, if this setting is enabled, then the value will be set to 1. You cannot set value 2 of the "aspect_ratio_correct" option via the Setup tool. It would be a good option to allow the value to be set to 2 via the Setup tool, since all the same, you always have to go into it. :)

[Lollie]

...Yeah, any setting that is only accessible via editing the config, should have at least one way to access it in-program, even if it's only via Setup. I agree with that. I actually had no idea "aspect_ratio_correct" went higher than 1! It has the effect of forcing 1:1 pixels, and handles the whole "when the user resizes the window, automatically calculate a new window size to fit" thing properly.

 

Incidentally, it took until now for me to realize that the config does in fact have an "integer_scaling" option too. This setting isn't available to edit via Setup either. Both settings come from Chocolate Doom, so I guess these two settings would be better handled upstream — if they get handled at all.

Edited February 27, 2021 by Lollie

[Gez]

3 hours ago, MAJ said:

Guys, what's wrong with your eyes? In a 4:3 aspect ratio, the picture is all flattened and is NOT what the developers intended it to be. For example, pay attention to the fireball

Not a valid example, sorry. It's a small pixel art thing. It was drawn using Deluxe Paint's circle tool as a reference, which did not take the aspect ratio into account.

 

What does really matter for what the developers intended is 1. the digitized images of real-world things, such as the sprites for the marine, cyberdemon, mancubus, etc. or the title screen compared to the cover art; and 2. the hardware of the era which was 4:3 CRT monitors displaying 320x200 resolution with vertically stretched pixels.

 

What the developers did not intend it to be is to be rendered on LCD monitors that can only handle square pixels. Those things didn't even exist back then -- liquid crystal display was limited to the very primitive screens of calculators and the like.

 

2 hours ago, Lollie said:

It serves as a clear-cut example as to why the vertically-stretched pixel aspect ratio is the correct one. 

I think Nootrac's mancubus example is even better, due to how drastically the manc's flamethrowers change shape without aspect ratio correction.

Spoiler

On jeudi 13 décembre 2018 at 2:53 AM, Nootrac4571 said:

Not that I think anyone needs convincing, but I made this, which I think is reasonably interesting and a bit relevant:

 

With the cyberdemon, one could argue that they wanted to make the monster chubbier in-game or something. But there's no arguing that shapeshifting cannons are intended.

[chungy]

12 hours ago, Lollie said:

...Yeah, any setting that is only accessible via editing the config, should have at least one way to access it in-program, even if it's only via Setup.

Unless Fabian wants to deviate moreso from Chocolate Doom, it's probably not going to happen. One of the driving themes of Chocolate Doom is to be simple in its setup and use, and not overloading the user with a ton of unnecessary options is part of that, especially to force a display of the game that is objectively wrong.

 

Trying to use a 1:1 pixel aspect ratio for Doom is one of these "objectively wrong" items, and while it's somewhat trivial to keep the advanced configuration working via manual editing of the config file, it's not going to ever be part of Chocolate Setup.

Edited February 28, 2021 by chungy

[seed]

Damn, I had no idea the cannons look so awful without correction, wtf.

 

No, this is clearly not what id envisioned.

Edited February 27, 2021 by seed

[Lollie]

1 hour ago, chungy said:

One of the driving themes of Chocolate Doom is the be simple in its setup and use, and not overloading the user with a ton of unnecessary options is part of that, especially to force a display of the game that is objectively wrong.

While this stance makes sense for Chocolate (my stance of "all configurable settings should be available in-program" is just one that I hold for all programs tbh, not specific to Doom), something needs to be brought up here.

 

When "aspect_ratio_correct" is set to 0 in Crispy, its behavior is even more wrong: The frame will stretch to whatever size the window is set to.

 

 

This is a deviation from how Chocolate handles this setting. Chocolate's "aspect_ratio_correct = 0" is identical to Crispy's "aspect_ratio_correct = 2".

 

So, probably safe to assume that this is an unintended feature, lol. This explains a lot.

Edited February 27, 2021 by Lollie

[seed]

Heh, that's some W I D E Doom right there lmao.

Edited February 27, 2021 by seed

[Alaux]

9 minutes ago, Lollie said:

While this stance makes sense for Chocolate (my stance of "all configurable settings should be available in-program" is just one that I hold for all programs tbh, not specific to Doom), something needs to be brought up here.

 

When "aspect_ratio_correct" is set to 0 in Crispy, its behavior is even more wrong: The frame will stretch to whatever size the window is set to.

 

 

This is a deviation from how Chocolate handles this setting. Chocolate's "aspect_ratio_correct = 0" is identical to Crispy's "aspect_ratio_correct = 2".

 

So, probably safe to assume that this is an unintended feature, lol. This explains a lot.

Is that a 21:9 window? I've always wanted to see aspect_ratio_correct = 0 on a 21:9 screen.

[Lollie]

The internet tells me that it's 3.65:1! For comparison, theatrical widescreen is 2.39:1.

 

But why stop there? We can go as wide as our monitors will allow.

 

Tall Doom is also valid.

Edited February 27, 2021 by Lollie

[Alaux]

14 minutes ago, Lollie said:

We can go as wide as our monitors will allow.

That's horrendously wide. I love it.

[seed]

Rofl this is reaching the absurd now.

 

Doom is W I D E R than the entire universe.

[Juza]

Anyone else think the mouse feels weird in the newest version? It feels very smoothed out and it throws me off.

[chungy]

7 hours ago, Lollie said:

When "aspect_ratio_correct" is set to 0 in Crispy, its behavior is even more wrong: The frame will stretch to whatever size the window is set to.

 

This is a deviation from how Chocolate handles this setting. Chocolate's "aspect_ratio_correct = 0" is identical to Crispy's "aspect_ratio_correct = 2".

You are comparing the latest release version of Chocolate Doom while Crispy tracks the development branch instead. Chocolate's development branch does the same thing:

[Lollie]

Oh god no, it's spreading. Why is this the new behavior? Surely even less people would want this scaling mode as a feature, right?

 

...I say, glancing longingly at Tall Doomguy's beautiful monolith-like mugshot. How could I possibly say No to him. (I'm saying No though, this is hell.)

[Eric Claus]

7 hours ago, seed said:

Rofl this is reaching the absurd now.

 

Doom is W I D E R than the entire universe.

 

New source port proposal, T H I C C DOOM

[chungy]

4 hours ago, Lollie said:

Oh god no, it's spreading. Why is this the new behavior? Surely even less people would want this scaling mode as a feature, right?

Because without aspect correction enabled, it's assumed the primary purpose is to fill the entire monitor the player is using. We had way more requests for doing that compared to forcing a 16:10 aspect ratio. The latter can still be done by disabling aspect correction and enabling integer scaling.

 

With aspect ratio correction, the only intent is to display Doom as the developers intended it to be displayed, as in 4:3, which causes pillarboxing or letterboxing on monitors that aren't 4:3 (usually pillarboxes as monitors are more often wider than 4:3 rather than taller).

 

Catering to a wrong aspect ratio is not a goal of Chocolate Doom.

Edited February 28, 2021 by chungy

[Lollie]

8 hours ago, chungy said:

Because without aspect correction enabled, it's assumed the primary purpose is to fill the entire monitor the player is using. We had way more requests for doing that compared to forcing a 16:10 aspect ratio. The latter can still be done by disabling aspect correction and enabling integer scaling.

 

With aspect ratio correction, the only intent is to display Doom as the developers intended it to be displayed, as in 4:3, which causes pillarboxing or letterboxing on monitors that aren't 4:3 (usually pillarboxes as monitors are more often wider than 4:3 rather than taller).

 

Catering to a wrong aspect ratio is not a goal of Chocolate Doom.

But... At the very least, the old behavior results in a less wrong aspect ratio. Compared to this new behavior, which foregoes all forms of aspect ratio by stretching the output to fill whatever resolution is thrown at it.

 

Oh well. I play with the corrected pixel aspect ratio anyway, the original behavior still exists, nothing is actually lost here. Just very weird to make this behavior the one that is available via the setup tool, while the old behavior is stuck behind config-editing.

Edited February 28, 2021 by Lollie

[VoanHead]

So I realize this might come off as a stupid question, but how come Crispy doesn't display the endoom screen? I tried going into the setup executable to see if there's an option to turn it on but there's nothing, tried going into the crispness menu ingame also nothing at all. I understand why you (idk if it's the one guy or small team working on this so I'll say guys) guys might've turned it off, it'll get annoying seeing that pop up and having to manually close it after you finish a session of doom, but I always liked em b/c I'm weird like that :(.