Did You Know? – The Slayer’s Visor and expanding texture technology

After 25 years, a series like DOOM is guaranteed to collect its share of fun facts and interesting trivia. Thankfully, you don’t have to be the world’s most dedicated fan or a development insider to learn some of the coolest stuff about this franchise – you have us!

DID YOU KNOW:

At one point during the development of DOOM (2016), the texture on the DOOM Slayer’s helmet visor contained more data than the previous three main DOOM games combined.

Though optimized for its release, the level of technical prowess available to the team at id during the time of DOOM (2016)’s development was so advanced compared to its predecessors – so much so that a single visual detail has the potential to fit more information than some entire games from its past!

“Just one texture. It's amazing,” says id Software’s Chief Technology Officer Robert Duffy, who has been with the company for over 20 years. “DOOM 3 shipped on a CD, which is 550MB, but the (visor) texture – counting everything like the specular (map), bump (map) and everything – was like 800MB or so.

Specular mapping and bump mapping (the latter being a graphical advancement innovated by none other than DOOM 3 itself) grant a texture on an in-game model the appearance of a light-reflecting surface and a three-dimensional texture, respectively. These features help create reactive and immersive environments in real time – a feat that gets even more impressive when you then must compress down all that data in a smooth-running, ripping and tearing final product.

“We obviously cut (the visor’s file size) down for ship to be a reasonable size,” says Duffy, “but it speaks towards the complexity and amount of effort that goes into a modern AAA game.”

Meanwhile, the original DOOM and DOOM II take up virtually zero real estate by today’s multi-terabyte storage standards, with some iterations of the 1993’s DOOM compressing to the size of the webpage you’re reading this on