I’m a HUGE fan of 2.5D shooters and was wanting to goof around making retro style pixel art textures similar to the ones from that era.
Turns out it’s a massive pain to figure out.
I can’t seem to pin down an exact texture size they used. I can’t find any textures for sale that are pixel art style like those games. And I can’t find any of the originals for reference.
Anyone have any suggestions?
If you have Doom or any other game that uses WAD files then you can extract all the textures from the WAD with a WAD extraction tool.
some technical details here also,
textures are in many sizes…(most of tiled wall textures are 64x64)
Wow, just 64x64?
Cool, thanks!
I know Duke Nukem 3D used something like 64 x 128 textures for the Aliens an such. At least from all the sprite sheets I’ve found at least.
Oh, yeah. I’m guessing they just load an atlas for each enemy then swap around the position.
If I WERE to get to that stage I would either do clay animation, or basic quake-esq models.
Right now I’m only goofing around with pixel textures for funsies.
@Not_Sure speaking of clay animations I wonder what making characters and such out of Playdoe and making sprite animations by taking photos. Might be kinda interesting 
I’m like 10 steps ahead of you on this one.
What you need is a rotating cake stand and mark off the positions so you can rotate it for each animation.
Also, instead of playdough, get some wire, foam wrap, and paint on latex. It takes some doing, but you can make some pretty nifty looking figures for less than $10 each.
You’ll be looking at 64…128 texture sizes. Basically, power of two, but non-standard. Also, they’ll be using a pallete, 256 color top, but probably less than that per texture. Doom I simulated lighting in couple of areas, and since the game originally run in 256 color mode, one way to simulate lighting is to allocate several “ramps” in the level palette, just for lighting purposes. So it could easily be 16 base colors per texture.
Also… post a link to the project if you decide to take on it seriously. Proper recreation of retro level is something I could be interested in.
Cool, will do.
I need to work on BB when I can though.
Thanks for the info, too!
Sure, makes sense. I also have a project on hold.
I did give a try to sculpting few character sketches, when this subject came up in the past, though…
Interesting. Honestly I have no idea what foam wrap is though haha.
Not bad. Better than I could do.
I’m not sure what I would do for the genre if I ever did go forward.
Demons on Mars is one of those all time greatest wabi-sabi concepts. Right up there with samurais in space or work place comedy with ghosts.
I kicked around “Billy the Kid versus The Space Martians” for a while, but I don’t think that would work with 2.5d. Well, it worked for Outlaws, so maybe.
I was also thinking maybe an Event Horizon type deal, or crazed computer in space, but less System Shock and more Magnetic Rose crazed computer.
Or maybe The Thing, but in frontier times, but that doesn’t do a lot for weapons.
Or maybe The Thing, but on a exoplanet colony that went silent. But I think I want to keep that one for my opus if I can ever get the time and funds to make it.
But I’m also a fan of plane old fantasy. I also like the idea of a battle mage type game like Heretic, Hexen, and Witchaven.
At any rate, I would want lots and lots of gore and shock and awe moments. Stuff like setting people on fire and kicking heads in Blood. And lots of gibs and blood like with Brutal Doom. Basically I want the game to just drenched with gore and over the top brutality.
And I want it to be fast and chunky game play. None of this starting with a pistol business.
This may help you with scale and sizes:
I’m doing a 90s sprite based fps too and took me a while to enstablish the right scale of things, I’m more toward Blood kind of scaling.
For hud elements all huds of those games (even Hexen 2, Quake and Quake 2) are on base of 320x240 screen size.
Now consider that the hud in Doom took 40 pixels, so screen raycast was calculated on 320x200, but luckly you don’t have to give a damn.
In unity sizes the canvas must be set to Scale With Screen Size with a Reference Resolution of 320x240, pixelsPerUnit 32, Match Width or Height at 0.5. Then Ui elements atlas should stay on 32 pixels per unit and this way you get the right scaling based on those games.
For weapon scaling on screen if you don’t do with UI, you may need a different calculation, I do have the weapon on a separate ortho camera as I need it to move with player as my sprites receive lights. This is my operation to get the right ortho size:
public float GetOrthographicSize ()
{
return (float)r_virtualResolution.y / (float)r_pixelsToUnit / r_scaleFactor;
}
virtualResolution is 320x240 in this case you need only the height, pixels to units I set them to 64 and scale factor to 4, as my weapon sprites pixels per unit are at 128. This way you get the right size for weapons identical to those old fps.
When digital cameras first came out I made a simple claymation of a star shaped thing walking down a wall. Took hours and never liked the results. Of course, I suck at both sculpting and photography so anyone who doesn’t is way ahead of me. I did make some “animations” with all my Warhammer 40k minis though. Recreated scenes from Aliens. But that was so long ago they are on floppy.
Upload to youtube - don’t they have a floppy uploader?
I’d really like to see that. My son is toying around with all his transformers with stop motion. It’s fun to see him have fun with it and also to see him - work through stuff and talk about his story - playing out the scenes while he is setting them up. Good stuff!
LOL. All my floppy discs have been collecting dust in a box at my parents house for more than 20 years. I’m sure they have all been demagnetized and I have no drive to run them on if they weren’t! I’m sure I could get a 3.5 floppy drive somewhere for less than the cost of a candy bar, but I’m not sure I could hook it up to my laptop.
There are few external floppy drives being sold on amazon…
You’d be surprised how durable floppy disks are.
(Btw, I’m pretty sure it’s disk with a “k” when referring to non-optical drives).