Disabling the vanishing corpses...

[Jannak]

I know in Doom 3 there was a way to disable the vanishing corpses by going to one of the scripts and setting it to something, but in Doom 4's case though perhaps there's a similar way?

Since it'll create more immersion I should say if the corpses and gibs stayed on the ground like in the original Doom game instead of disappearing...

[Koko Ricky]

I've noticed some enemies disappear instantly, others do not. What's the duration generally?

[snapshot]

Why do you want useless dead bodies to not disappear .

[VGamingJunkie]

Because they want to be able to look back on all the carnage with a twisted sociopathic grin on their faces, confident in the knowledge that they caused that. Besides, if the bodies disappear instantly, the janitor will be out of a job and we'll never have a Visceral Cleanup version.

[Jannak]

MetroidJunkie said:

Because they want to be able to look back on all the carnage with a twisted sociopathic grin on their faces, confident in the knowledge that they caused that. Besides, if the bodies disappear instantly, the janitor will be out of a job and we'll never have a Visceral Cleanup version.

And to also indicate that you've already been into those areas as a way of not getting lost.

[doom_is_great]

Yes. We need a Doom 4 version of the nitro gore mod.

[Pencil of Doom]

MetroidJunkie said:

Because they want to be able to look back on all the carnage with a twisted sociopathic grin on their faces, confident in the knowledge that they caused that.

Now we are talking!

[Chubzdoomer]

DMGUYDZ64 said:

Why do you want useless dead bodies to not disappear .

It'd be pretty awesome looking back and seeing bodies strewn all over the floor. It could also serve as a navigation aid by showing you where you've already been, similar to in the old games. It definitely wouldn't do any favors for your frame rate, though!

[MrGlide]

itd be nice not to have to check to automap all the time as dead bodies would show you where you've been, I'm not complaining. I'f you've not played it yet it's quite a high quality fps, defenitely one of the best ones I'v played this decade.

[Caine]

i hate vanishing corpses in games especially in a doom game.... strange, old games could handle it

[Doomkid]

I always thought games where the corpses vanish handled it in a sorta silly way. I know it's for performance reasons, but why not have a max corpse limit of 10 or so, and when an 11th corpse is made, the oldest one vanishes. For machines that couldn't handle all the corpses piling up, this is a great way to not destroy immersion. Hopefully I've explained the idea clearly enough.

[Chubzdoomer]

Doomkid said:

I always thought games where the corpses vanish handled it in a sorta silly way. I know it's for performance reasons, but why not have a max corpse limit of 10 or so, and when an 11th corpse is made, the oldest one vanishes. For machines that couldn't handle all the corpses piling up, this is a great way to not destroy immersion. Hopefully I've explained the idea clearly enough.

I like that idea!

[tuo]

Doomkid said:

I always thought games where the corpses vanish handled it in a sorta silly way. I know it's for performance reasons, but why not have a max corpse limit of 10 or so, and when an 11th corpse is made, the oldest one vanishes. For machines that couldn't handle all the corpses piling up, this is a great way to not destroy immersion. Hopefully I've explained the idea clearly enough.

Perfectly, and exactly my opinion, which I already stated in another thread, so at least I am not alone with it :)

Simply keep a list of corpses, with a defined maximum length (configurable), and when another corpse is pushed onto it, and the lenght exceeds the maximum length, remove/burn the oldest one.

This way, people who really want to have them stay (like me), would have the opportunity to tune some .ini file to "corpseListMaxLength : 10000", and cannot complain about "corpses make my FPS drop".

Then again, Enforcer - who played the game very early on PS4 - reported of a very buggy ragdoll implementation, which I haven't seen on PC. Maybe the current setting simply was a solution to get a QA problem off the list on all platforms, and there is an easy way to extend corpse-stay-time.

Tomorrow, I'll check if the final game files can be unpacked with the tools available, and as I won't be the only one, I am sure if there is a way to make them stay, we will know it very soon.

As the game is quite "low poly" (this is not a critique, but a compliment...take a close look at everything, they managed to make the game look great without using many polygons), I am quite sure that at least PC rigs with beefier cards can handle it. (and now, this is no "PC Master Race" comment)

[MajorRawne]

Why would anyone who remembers classic Doom want monster corpses to vanish? Why can a shitty 386 remember eight hundred corpses when a modern computer has to make them disappear? Edit: I know why, it just seems a bit daft.

[Cruduxy Pegg]

Doomkid said:

I always thought games where the corpses vanish handled it in a sorta silly way. I know it's for performance reasons, but why not have a max corpse limit of 10 or so, and when an 11th corpse is made, the oldest one vanishes. For machines that couldn't handle all the corpses piling up, this is a great way to not destroy immersion. Hopefully I've explained the idea clearly enough.

This is what valve did in L4D ages ago. Surprised vanishing corpses doesn't work like that.

[Chezza]

Kill enough Mancubus, Barons and and Hell Knights and the corpses could very much block your eye sight. It can get stupidly messy, especially if the fat corpses or inconvenient ragdolls block switches and alike. You may even get the sense the game is buggier and physics stupider than you initially realized.

[Super Mighty G]

This was discussed in another thread. I don't know anything about it really but the general gist is that you can't just switch off the disappearing corpses without impacting the game performance. Something about lingering scripting attached to now dead enemies not going away and piling up in the memory.

[LittleBurger]

Pegg said:

This is what valve did in L4D ages ago. Surprised vanishing corpses doesn't work like that.

That could work, heck could even have it so bigger chunks of gibbed enemies count as things that could stay.

Though do blood splatters disappear? I haven't really tried to see if blood splotches go away over time.

[Edward850]

MajorRawne said:

Why would anyone who remembers classic Doom want monster corpses to vanish? Why can a shitty 386 remember eight hundred corpses when a modern computer has to make them disappear? Edit: I know why, it just seems a bit daft.

If you knew why, then it wouldn't seem daft to you. Would you mind actually explaining yourself? Because there's a very blatant technical reason and "daft" certainly isn't part of it.

Edit: Who cares I'll tread obvious ground anyway:
Ignoring the part that the CPU isn't the thing needing to to do the remembering (that would be your RAM, as your tiny cache in a 386 wouldn't even be enough to keep part of the level, why am I explaining to you how a computer works); the thing is Doom in 1993 didn't need to remember every corpse, it just needed to be able to hold the level in RAM. And it did. Remember the entire level exists and is active at once, including every single actor that's on that map, so every enemy you kill is still there. They always were and no additional memory is needed. A modern game has vastly more complex AI and general actor routines that require globs of memory, so much so that the actors don't even exist in stasis, they are spawned in dynamically as you progress. So how do you, in an environment where the game can already use 5GB at its lowest, keep spawning in new actors? Well you remove the old ones of course. Couldn't be any more obvious if you tried.

See? Simple. Daft doesn't even fit.

[Tritnew]

I'm completely fine with the disappearing bodies, we all had to deal with It In DOOM 3, so I'm used to It.

[tuo]

Edward850 said:

Edit: Who cares I'll tread obvious ground anyway:
Ignoring the part that the CPU isn't the thing needing to to do the remembering (that would be your RAM, as your tiny cache in a 386 wouldn't even be enough to keep part of the level, why am I explaining to you how a computer works); the thing is Doom in 1993 didn't need to remember every corpse, it just needed to be able to hold the level in RAM. And it did. Remember the entire level exists and is active at once, including every single actor that's on that map, so every enemy you kill is still there. They always were and no additional memory is needed. A modern game has vastly more complex AI and general actor routines that require globs of memory, so much so that the actors don't even exist in stasis, they are spawned in dynamically as you progress. So how do you, in an environment where the game can already use 5GB at its lowest, keep spawning in new actors? Well you remove the old ones of course. Couldn't be any more obvious if you tried.

See? Simple. Daft doesn't even fit.

While your technical analysis is perfectly sound, I think it is a wrong assumption to state that there is no way to make them stay, as other games with similar large levels, similar amount of enemies and similar graphical fidelity are able to do it.
And those enemies are not any more "dumb", quite the contrary.
To name the games: Bloodborne and Dark Souls III.

You would of course need a way to unload the enemy and the connected AI at death, and replace it by simply a ragdoll of the same enemy.

I can understand why they simply didn't want to invest more time into it:
- they'd need to implement mentioned "exchange AI enemy for stupid ragdoll" seamlessly, test it, think about the Summoner, SnapMap etc.
- as mentioned above, big enemies could block line of sight, so you might need to implement a further method to "gib" the dead enemies to remove them
- buggy ragdoll physics might even take away immersion (Bloodborne and Dark Souls III are the same...the dead enemy ragdolls sometimes are hilarious

From a production standpoint, I completely agree that they simply didn't care to implement this feature, but I don't think it is "unimplementable".

[Spectre01]

People seriously defending disappearing corpses here? It was one of the core aspects of the classic games that Romero even stressed was a major feature to add more realism and grittiness to the game.

[Caine]

Tritnew said:

I'm completely fine with the disappearing bodies, we all had to deal with It In DOOM 3, so I'm used to It.

Doom 3 is a Doom on its own.

disappearing corpses is just stupid and lame, even old games in 3d etc. had non-disappearing corpses! and old games also were cpu hungry etc.

[VGamingJunkie]

I found Resident Evil 4 kind of funny. Initially, the villagers' corpses would remain onscreen but then, at some point, they just start disappearing.

Also, Doom for GBA also had disappearing corpses but that was because of the limited hardware. Doom 2016 for PC should have the option to disable or at least delay it.

[Wugo Heaving]

I can understand the bodies vanishing, but is there absolutely no trace of a kill? Not even blood stains? It does seem weird that you could return to a room where there was a huge fire fight to find it sparkly clean.

[jazzmaster9]

Caine said:

i hate vanishing corpses in games especially in a doom game.... strange, old games could handle it

Because old games are less resource intensive than new ones?

[jazzmaster9]

rileymartin said:

People seriously defending disappearing corpses here? It was one of the core aspects of the classic games that Romero even stressed was a major feature to add more realism and grittiness to the game.

If it's to make sure my game runs at a buttery-smooth frame rate. I would gladly have vanishing corpses. Im a Heretic I know.

EDIT: sorry for Accidental Double Post.

[DooM_RO]

jazzmaster9 said:

If it's to make sure my game runs at a buttery-smooth frame rate. I would gladly have vanishing corpses. Im a Heretic I know.

EDIT: sorry for Accidental Double Post.

Probably, I blasted a large group of hellspawn with my Rocket Launcher and the gibs caused a frame drop.

[Caine]

jazzmaster9 said:

Because old games are less resource intensive than new ones?

and new pcs are more powerful?

is the intelligence really dropped the last 10-20 years? geez....

[Almonds]

Caine said:

and new pcs are more powerful?

is the intelligence really dropped the last 10-20 years? geez....

you genuinely have no idea what you talk about in each post you make, do you?