Doom from 1993 rebuilt with Unity

A few days ago, Doom from 1993 was officially re-released by Bethesda.

Beside all the Bethesda.net drama, people found the game is not running as good as the original. For example, it has long loading times, the sound is off, capped at 30fps ...

Spoiler: Video - Doom rant

Then they found it's not the original code, but an Unity rebuilt:

Spoiler: Screenshot

https://twitter.com/noteinso/status/1154809291641151488

Not sure if good or bad news for Unity Technologies, that such a famous game has been rebuilt with Unity, because it runs poorly. Not sure if the original developers are happy about it either.

 

Even without much thought put into the optimization before the release, what is a shame really, it shows how flexible Unity can be, and that there's more to it than staying in the comfort zone known from earlier Unity versions.

We've got more debugging and optimization tools than before. Not to mention DOTS, jobs, burst and performance by default, which seem to be moving in the right direction, just more people need to use them.

 

Honestly in my opinion, they should have never even used Unity for this. The guy is right in the video - the engine for doom is tried and true, it works on practically everything. I could understand if an Indie got the rights to remake this in a modern engine, but Bethesda is not indie by any means so they could have hired the correct people to make the engine work on modern platforms and avoid loading screens, etc altogether.

A game like Doom shouldn't need DOTS, Jobs, Burst, etc.

But something tells me the loading screens aren't coming directly from the game itself, but communicating back and forth to Bethesda servers and awaiting responses from the server. Which need I ask - what's the point of that?

The entirety of what they did is a mess in my opinion. While I love Unity and always have, I do think it was a waste of time, effort and money to port it over to Unity when it already had an engine built for it, the game built and all they had to do was write the correct exporters to work with said platforms. Now perhaps them exporters are harder to make than they appear and perhaps wasn't worth the effort to make them, not sure - never made an exporter like that before so I really can't say on that matter.

 

I'm super curious how they implemented lighting in the Unity version to recreate the original Doom look, which is pretty sophisticated. With all palette tricks Doom uses, I guess it's difficult to recreate that look when using standard Unity Light's for example.

I'm looking forward to gameplay videos, so I can compare it to the original version. Perhaps I buy when it becomes available on Xbox, for research purpose

 

It didn't need it back in 1993

But if you throw a modern game-engine at it, everything is solved by generic and more complex algorithms. In the early days, according to various GDC Classic Postmortems, a game engine was part of and made for that particular game. These weren't generic beasts at the time like today.

For example "path finding" in early titles was basically moving from tile to tile in pseudo-random directions towards the player. With today's game engines, you have that complex NavMesh thing which can do so much more, but it alone probably requires more horse-power than the entire Doom game.

Have you watched "The Early Days of id Software"? I feel like here is the right place to post it. It's such a great talk, I watched it multiple times already and find myself watching it another time just now. Romero is such a good speaker!

Spoiler

 

Oh I totally get what you mean, but my point was - why did they even use Unity for for remakes? The engine they used could have easily been made to export to the proper formats to run on the newer systems. As the saying goes "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" lol.

I believe I've seen that video before, love watching the history of old game companies and such.
makes you realize - we got it sooo much easier now days with tech in general. But at the same time it's a doubled edged sword - things are easier, but at the same time things are much more complex now days. It's only easier in terms of generic generalized game engines like Unity and the entire internet to research what you want to learn.

 

This.

I suspect some licence / third party and data collection.
But supposedly their removing / removed online requirement.

 

They probably used Unity so it would be easy to port it to new platforms. The original Doom (1993) was a DOS game. But yeah, it is sad/silly they did not build a remake that ran properly.

 

This is so true. I was talking with someone the other day about art and programming and making games in the earlier days vs. making them now, and there's one difference that stands out the most to me.

In the old days the computers could do a lot less than we could dream up, so if we were able to do something really cool it felt amazing. There was a limit to what they could do, and our abilities/ideas often went way beyond that limit. Bending a computer to our will was so cool and so rewarding, because we were making it do what honestly appeared to be magic. It felt really good. "Hey, wow, look what we made it do!" We realized we did something great and exciting, and it made us push for even more.

Nowadays, computers and game engines can do way more than a single person can dream of doing. The bar of ability is set much much higher. So as a developer, there's always this feeling that we could have done more, but time and talent only go so far. There's always the idea that it could be better. You could take the greatest artist or coder out there and give them all the time they need to make a game, and instead of everyone being in awe when it's done, there will be people pointing out flaws and how it could have been even better. Because the systems are so powerful these days that yeah, it could be. The developer might realize they did something cool, but they also realize it wasn't as good as it could be.

So in the old days, we felt like wizards, and in modern days the computers are the wizards. I'm not a wizard anymore. I'm just trying to keep up.

I probably haven't explained it very well since I just got up about 20 minutes ago and this thread was the first thing I read. Basically, I used to feel like I could make magic with a computer, and now I feel like the computer makes the magic. Subtle difference, but a crucial one. And that makes me a little bit sad.

 

I wouldn't say making games in general is easier than just to be.
Sure, making same game as 20-30 years ago is much easier. But also there was different demand.
It was required to know hardware in depth. Manipulating on registers etc.

Now this days, difficulty is more less the same, only shifted with tools available to use.
So instead of making simple pong in early 90s, I would go for 2.5D platformer with 3D effects, particles, pretty lights and shadders. Or maybe even go for 3D. Still challenging as hell. But I don't need focus anymore on hardware memory managements.

If that makes sense.

 

Records your ip, puts your email in their db (if email is required) ready to spam the hell out of you later for Bethesda offers and promos perhaps?

 

They 100% did this to get around the fact that Doom has been GPL code forever, huh? Like, it wouldn't have been particularly challenging to drop in the login bits in the source, but this is absolutely because they can not use the source.

Anyway, Bethesda incompetence on display once more, I guess.

 

Could it be just running on an emulator in unity?

 

No, if it were an emulator, we still wouldn't see weird manifestations of problems in things like the load times (which this is full of, my F***ing god), or anything like that. Hell, even capping at 30 fps is weird because one of Doom's big selling points when it was new was the fact that its FPS cap was 35.

Hello, yes, I'm old enough to remember that.

This is honestly a complete mess and the more I'm reading into it, the more baffling it gets. The only reason to do this would be to ensure that the porting process is easier, but the amount of work to get to that point is such that I can't honestly imagine this actually provided any real benefit.

 

There are tons of doom clones on the market. So anything happened here, is rather a big failure, with very little to no effort. I will rather see it doing more harm than good.

 

https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/27/8933167/doom-login-requirement-being-removed-bethesdanet-drm

If it does become popular, having basically all versions running in a nice modern fully-featured engine, adding IAP or DLC to it now becomes fairly trivial. I would suspect that doing it in Unity does making porting (and maintaining) easier, but also gives them a lot of flexibility in the future.

 

Thread reminds me of this...

https://forum.unity.com/threads/wip-doom-i-clone.472815/

 

Honestly, see, I want to agree with this, I do, but honestly?

It's Doom, ZG.

Even I've ported Doom to things.

I have a tub of peanut butter pretzels I also tossed some smarties into and I am pretty sure when I'm not looking somebody is playing Doom on it.

This is like bringing a nuclear weapon to a thumb war.

 

Shame they didn't do a doom with RTX like quake II

 

There is significant difference what and what @neginfinity attempted to do, and what Bethesda did. And I am not talking about completion stage.

 

This already someone did before them
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2280/Ultimate_Doom/

 

So have they re-made the whole thing, or are they basically using Unity as an IO/rendering layer and still running the originals under the hood in some fashion? That would somewhat make sense, just thanks to the sheer number of platforms which Unity already supports. Why port to all of those yourself when you can port to one middleware platform which will do a huge amount of the rest for you?

Hmm... would this be necessary? Surely they would own copies of the code from before its GPL licensing, and thus be able to re-license those however they want.

 

Near I can tell, it's literally a port, and part of the loading issues come from how they're loading texture and map data, which just... it honestly makes no real sense to remake Doom like this. It's not just an IO/Rendering/Audio layer or anything. It's Doom, remade. They are just using Unity and, somehow, not even using it well.

 

I agree, but all those ports to printers, fridges and touchbars is really geeks doing what geeks do best, doing something for the sheer challenge. This is a product and a marketing tool. https://slayersclub.bethesda.net/en They ported it Unity to leverage it, not for geek cred or coolness. Some nerd sticking Doom on an ATM is badass... Bethesda releasing the original Doom on iOS is meh.

 

John Carmack already ported Doom to iOS in 2009.

--Eric

 

While the doom source is pretty bad, the platform abstraction is pretty descent

 

This is just another nail in the coffin of Bethesda's reputation with the more hardcore community. How much does that matter? Who knows.

Personally, I won't buy another Bethesda product again... unless Obsidian builds it for them.

I really don't understand what's going on there. Are they hemorrhaging money and in dire straights? Their most recent stuff seems to just be in such bad faith.

 

Plus they are owned by one of the most evil corps, Zenimax. Indie hating company, google Zenimax Prey for the gods

 

And based in a country that allows it. I would have loved to see Mojang challenge them concerning the whole "Scrolls" fiasco but I have to imagine that it was far easier to just "license" it. I wonder if and how much they paid for that.

 

Yeah, US patent/trademark laws are fubar

 

https://arowx.itch.io/doom-retro-remake-level-1

I'm amazed they managed to get it to run slowly or load slowly even on the Switch. I've hand made the first level in Unity in 3D and it runs fine in WebGL (for me at least).

I would guess that they generated the original levels files* into scenes, that could account for loading times maybe, if they then lit the scenes in Unity that could bloat the files sizes.

*I didn't know about the DOOM level files system when I made the remake. And since then I've seen demos that let you fly around all the Doom levels in Unity with the levels loading dynamically so still amazed they managed to get it to run slowly.

 

You can never recreate the exact feel of a game in another engine. Heck I pretty sure if I throw out my code base and redid the game it would lose some feel even using same engine. And feel is everyrging in a classic fastpaced shooter like this

 

...Yes you can. Like, I'm not even sure what this statement has grounding it in reality. You absolutely can do this, to the point where I've even recreated Quake 3's movement code and used it to navigate Q3 challenge maps using the exact same techniques. I've recreated the way old games handled their palettes in Unity with a single shader. Ultimately, all you really have to worry about its how input is handled, and a lot of the time that only doesn't really work perfectly because some older games used interrupts for input processing.

Hell, a few Doom ports look and feel the exact same while using none of the original game's code.

It's also the same in a lot of Sonic the Hedgehog fangames, where people meticulously recreate the game's physics to the point where you could drop the same levels in and not tell the difference.

Most of it comes down to timing, which is not impossible at all to recreate. The only reason your game would feel different is if you made a specific effort to change it or if you didn't take notes.

 

Technically, this is true. Especially, if you're trying to create snowdrop engine using doom's original engine haha.

Anyway aside from pedantics recreating a low tech game in a better engine, is possible.Like you said it just takes a fine eye for details, texturing, models and sound. Honestly as an indie, apart from learning purposes I don't see the point.

 

Well, Dusk did a very good job in Unity.

 

I meant the mechanics and the controls. It's hard to get it same, haven't tried this unity doom clone but I bet it does not feel like the orginal. I won the Swedish championship in doom 2 in 1995 so I probably would notice

 

No, all those are pretty well represented in the loads of ports out there and interrupt timing can be gotten around simply because it turns out you can kinda just brute force it in a bunch of ways.

 

If it's a port you still have the original code base with all of its timings, mainloop etc

 

Well, you can be John Carmack himself, if you haven't tried it, you wouldn't know if your statement is true or not.

 

For the sake of brevity, near everyone calls them ports despite them being engine remakes, with sourceports being used to refer to things that are just moving the Doom code to another platform. Also, in your attempt to be really pedantic, you didn't actually address the other examples where people have recreated the exact functionality of other games as well.

 

Gosh thats nitpicking.

You can not recreate, because before we used this.



And now we use this


And we will worry about few ms for single player game, with humongous hit boxes?

 

Actually back then we used keyboard only, even if the game did have mouse support.

 

Doom ports are just compiles for a certain instruction set, and maybe change some libs to work on target platform.

Recreating a game from scratch will not be the same game, like I said. I would probably not be able to recreate my own game from scratch and end up with what makes it such a loved and unique experience. There will be subtle differnces

 

No wonder the movement is outta wack, dude you got your mouse upside down!

 

I don't support Zenimax so can't buy the game and try

 

And, again, it comes down to knowing what the values are and what they're for. If somebody tells me that I can remap some values using "low_value_2 + (value - low_value_1) * (high_value_2 - low_value_2) / (high_value_1 - low_value_1)," I did not port their code from their engine which might contain this:

Code (CSharp):

1. float Remap(float currentValue, float low1, float high1, float low2, float high2)
2. {
3.     return low2 + (currentValue - low1)*(high2-high1)/(high1-low1);
4. }

 

Unity is a high level engine, I bet you will not end up with the same thing.

 

This is valid point.
But you can have completely different response time and feeling, by selecting different input device.
Some love long strokes on mechanical keyboards.
I prefer flat short strokes for example.
However, I don't even remember what PC keyboard I was playing on 20 years ago.
Sure was mechanical, but that was most I can remember

From back then, more to my mind stuck AMIGA input hardware than PC

 

I think its say more about the team that ported it over. Thats pretty pathetic considering doom can run on a etch a sketch and an apple watch

 

Why not? What is Doom doing so close to the metal that makes this impossible?