Talk:Map unit

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Revision as of 17:55, 8 April 2014 by Gez (talk | contribs)

id units

Should I add information about id's own possible scale? It works pretty terribly if one actually tries to translate stuff, but it seems official as far as I can tell.

If you look at the press release blurbs in the Doom Bible, it mentions that 'Wolfenstein's walls ... were always eight feet thick.' The 0.4 readme says that 'you can't climb up higher than 3 feet.' John Carmack once tweeted asking if developers still used "Wolfenstein units", which he defined as being 8 pixels per foot.

There have been several interviews where Carmack erronously stated that Doom used 320x240. If you turn the status bar off in the 0.4 and 0.5 alphas, the view is y-sheared 19 pixels down from the horizon, which is one pixel off from placing the horizon at 120 pixels on a 240 tall resolution if you align it to the bottom.

I'm unsure if id decided on a larger scale for Doom, but if it's the same between it and Wolf 3D, it seems that they ignored the tall pixels as far as the 3D world was concerned (yes, the artists did take it into account for the 2D art like the title screen). Enemies look too fat without the correction, as it's been stated that they used 640x480 images scaled down to 320x200 when capturing footage of the clay models. However, the Soul Sphere and various projectiles like the Imp fireball are only spherical with square pixels.

I could try contacting Romero or Hall, but I'd rather not bother them with such triviality. Sodaholic 20:42, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

Go for it. --Gez 22:55, 8 April 2014 (UTC)