“Can it run Doom” will never be the same, thanks to new ray-tracing mod
Is it okay if I occupy the following ideological niche:<p>1. I love original doom.
2. I am very excited about what ray-tracing can do for games.
3. I have a ton of respect for doom modders and the doubtless huge amount of effort that went into this project.
4. I hate how this looks and wouldn&#x27;t play it except as a curiosity<p>To me, the original doom was a piece of art, tuned by artists (I&#x27;ll say it!) to look a certain way on the computer screen. Like a great movie, every frame was a painting - a bright blue soul sphere added a nice highlight on top of a muted brownish-green canvas. A pinky demon standing in front of some mid-level gray barrels with greenish ooze... a spare clip - black, with a little orange.<p>I find that modern games tend to be really visually tiresome and unappealing. Often, this seems to come from overly contrasted, poorly lit scenes. Instead of a painting you get a bad photograph with too much or too little exposure. This seems to be largely the effect you get with ray-traced doom. Instead of the painting that is E1M1, you get this black room occasionally washed out by an awful fluorescent glow.<p>I think ray-tracing has the potential to create some amazing stuff, but retroactively applying it to doom rather predictably just makes... poorly balanced doom.