[ART] Jesen

Jesen 

 

Resources used: Quake palette, my own resources, Happy Time Circus 2, Zekhmet project, Texture Town, /3/ Anon old stuff archive [Marlin Studios Great Textures of Europe, Truespace 4 textures], System Vices, DaWerecat, Mek's Box 'o Skies, Comtex, LibreQuake, Ikwhite texture pack by Killjoy featuring edited Iikka Keränen textures

Wad file: >download< 

Breaking news: 97TH CENTURY FOX HAS DONE IT! Done what? Well let me tell you. Just shy of a year ago, I posted Finitude Engine to this topic. I wanted to make something using the advanced features that the Eternity engine offers, although the main focus were undoubtedly sector portals. However, I wasn't able to wrap my head around how they worked, and the whole thing turned into a mess and I became too frustrated to finish it. That was the end of my escapades into Eternity mapping, until almost a year later, when I was adding my old art to this blog. As I was writing some additional commentary for Finitude Engine, I found it quite interesting. Something about the way the classic Doom colormap lighting looks on slopes was quite cool to me. And so my interest in Eternity was reawakened.

I've certainly had a fascination with Eternity for quite a while, but I was never able to fully get into the port. It's got its own quirks and sometimes using it would get frustrating in some manner and I'd move on to some other port. However, it holds something special that's unique to it. A promise of keeping that classic Doom feel while taking the game into all kinds of interesting and new directions. It's something that kept me from simply forgetting about it. And so I came back. Last Monday, I decided to try out The Hellspawn Spectrum. I found myself instantly amazed at all the interesting new geometry, and even more so at the fact that it all still felt like Doom to me. I think I was sold. Over the course of the week I've been getting a better grip on Eternity mapping. It took a while, and it did get confusing and frustrating, but eventually I was able to figure out how to make a functional sector portal! I gotta shout out @Meerschweinmann for these example maps, which proved vital for helping me figure portals out.

Another thing I figured out is how to use the fact that Eternity saves low res screenshots in 320x200 to my advantage. After some digging I found out how to use Aseprite's pixel ratio feature to stretch the image to 4:3 without distorting it (I followed this guide) and after I was done editing the image, I simple enlarged it, thereby keeping distortion to a minimum. A lot better than my previous process, where I had to downscale a 1440x1080 Nugget Doom screenshot to 320x240 before working on it.

After I felt confident enough that I had figured out how portals work, I moved on to making something substantial with them, and this is the result! The table is the most visible example of portal use, but there's also a roof on the building to the left which became mostly obscured in the final shot. After the scene was done, I decided to draw an old friend of mine.

Fun fact: I added a ton of tree sprites, and as I usually do I renamed them all to existing Doom sprites. However, I renamed one to COL5A0, which I had forgotten was the first frame of the beating heart pillar sprite. That certainly caught me off guard as I placed one of those trees and saw it blinking in and out of existence. I found it funny so I reckoned I was just gonna time the moment I take my screenshot so that it's on the frame where the tree is visible. Well, by the time I got around to actually taking it, I had forgotten all about it, and I just realized that I took it when the tree wasn't visible :P