Status bar face

In the center of the status bar, a player may see his character's face. It reacts to the environment in the game, as follows:


 * The face bleeds as the player's health diminishes. The health ranges corresponding to each face type are as follows:


 * Note that in the Sega 32X and Game Boy Advance ports, the status bar face does not bleed at all, although the rest of the features of damage (progressively messier hair, closed eyes when dead, etc.) are there. Conversely, in the Super NES port, the blood on the face is much more pronounced, and the cutoffs for the next-worse-looking face are higher; what would normally be from 20% to 39% appears at below approximately 50%, for example.

The face explodes when the player dies in the 3DO port, and when the player experiences a gibbing death in the PlayStation port (right image).


 * The player turns to look in the direction from which a damaging hit originates. This gives a helpful visual cue as to the direction attacks are coming from.


 * If the player picks up a new weapon, the face momentarily displays a malicious grin.


 * If the player keeps firing a weapon repeatedly, or is taking damage, the face grits its teeth.


 * If the player is hurt, yet has a net gain of more than 20% health during the damaging event, a rarely displayed "ouch face" expression of shock and pain is shown (originally intended to represent a net loss of 20% health or more; this has been fixed in many source ports and even through a binary hack). This face also appears in the Doom press release beta when the player enters a damaging floor, and sometimes in the PlayStation and Sega Saturn ports when the player is hit from behind.


 * If the player is invulnerable (because "god mode" is active or the player has picked up an invulnerability powerup), the player has glowing golden eyes, similar to the demon's.

Technical
The names of the face graphics have the form STF[type][health][frame], where the text [type] represents one of several conditions currently being experienced by the player, [health] is a digit denoting his approximate current health, and [frame] is an optional extra digit signifying a repeating animation sequence.

The possible values of [type] are:

Additionally, STFGOD0 appears while an invulnerability powerup or the iddqd cheat code is in effect. Note that in vanilla Doom, STFOUCH4 is never actually displayed due to the ouch face bug (the player cannot pick up objects after being killed, so he cannot gain more than 20% health and end up in the 1% - 19% range).

The number [health] can take on the following values:

The graphic STFDEAD0 takes over when the player is killed.

Trivia

 * The face appears several times inside Doom 3, including on the cover of "GameHOG" magazine and as part of Super Turbo Turkey Puncher 3.
 * The face's appearance is an homage to the status bar in Wolfenstein 3D.