<\/p>\n

Gif: id Software \/ Cheello \/ Kotaku<\/figcaption><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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File this one under \u201cmods you probably thought already existed.\u201d With Voxel Doom<\/span>, you can now play the legendary 1993 first-person shooter Doom<\/em> with all the monsters and items rendered in beautifully chunky, 3D voxels. While smaller-scope voxel mods have existed in the past, this one replaces just about every single one of the game\u2019s old-school, 2D sprite-based enemies and items, granting the lo-fi goriness of the classic shooter a fun new dimension.<\/p>\n

Released on Mod DB today by modder Daniel \u201cCheello\u201d Peterson<\/a><\/span>, Voxel Doom 1.0<\/span> runs on GZDoom<\/span>, a popular source port that vastly modernizes Doom<\/em>\u2019s nearly 30-year-old game engine. Veteran Doom<\/em> modders with folders and folders of WADs are no stranger to GZDoom, but if you\u2019re new to the world of Doom<\/em> mods, it\u2019s an essential utility for adding more functionality to the original game (such as mouse look, jumping, or crouching) as well as playing really cool mods like the Doom<\/em> \u201cmegawad\u201d Sigil<\/em><\/span> from the game\u2019s co-creator himself, John Romero.<\/p>\n

Voxels, then, are like a three-dimensional take on typical 2D pixels. As \u201cvolumetric pixels,\u201d voxels are simply points in 3D space that have a size and color assigned to them. Throw thousands and thousands of them onscreen at once and you get a unique type of 3D graphics that, if you make \u2018em nice and chunky, can call to mind classic 2D sprites, but with an additional dimension. <\/p>\n

Recent games like No Man\u2019s Sky<\/em>, Valheim<\/em>, <\/em>and Teardown<\/em> have utilized voxel techniques to achieve their unique looks, and they\u2019re often favored when creating destructive, malleable environments. The technology has been around for some time, famously appearing in games like Novalogic\u2019s 1992 helicopter sim Comanche<\/em><\/span>, Looking Glass\u2019s underrated 1996 Terra Nova<\/em><\/span>, and 1999\u2019s action-adventure great Outcast<\/em><\/span>. In action, voxels can give off a somewhat \u201cretro\u201d vibe and that\u2019s what makes adding them to classic, sprite-based first-person shooters such a cool concept.<\/p>\n

Of course, the sky\u2019s the limit with classic Doom <\/em>mods. Some expand the original game, while others try to add more modern gameplay features. What makes Voxel Doom so cool is that the change in graphics manages to preserve the original feel of the game while making it \u201cpop\u201d just a little bit more. That\u2019s a far cry from more typical attempts to jam 3D models into these decades-old games, which usually ends up looking garish rather than true to the original aesthetic.<\/p>\n

The mod\u2019s creator talked about this very phenomenon in a stream showing off the new mod with fellow GZDoom developer Nash Muhandes, saying that \u201cif you look at [the voxel models] at a certain angle, it looks like the original sprite.\u201d This cool illusory effect of voxels is what drew Cheello to them originally. On Muhandes\u2019 stream, they talked about how the transformation of 2D sprites into 3D voxels results in a kind of mindblowing effect that doesn\u2019t immediately look out of place, but rather fits, especially in Doom<\/em>\u2019s case, quite naturally in the scene. <\/p>\n