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DOOM · CLASSIC MODE WEAPONS
This is a short trailer I made for the release of “Classic Mode” gun position, a mode that I created late in the production of DOOM. It doesn’t show of all the guns in this mode, and I might make another video for that, but what I wanted to do here is write a little about how this mode came to life.

I made a classic shotgun pump animation way back in 2012 when DOOM was being rebooted because I loved the original 1993 version so much. I always wanted to use it somehow, but what I really wanted to do was a classic weapon position like the original DOOM game. I had a few ideas as to how this could work over the years and definitely wanted to use my shotgun pump animation as an homage to the original. After major animation was complete and before I attempted the credit sequence, I tried using a simple offset pose to achieve this result. Unfortunately, it would not be quite so easy as all the blends were terrible and it looked really buggy, popping to the normal pose and just generally unpleasant. However, it did have potential. I remember it being a late Friday night in January 2016 when I attempted this.

Because it was the end of production and the programmers were extremely busy trying to get the game to run smoothly, I wanted to make this mode without causing a lot of work for anyone else since I was trying to make it for the shipping release. That weekend, I came up with a plan to make an alternate set of anims and only replace the necessary ones in order for this mode to work. This also included setting up a few duplicate game files and replacing all the references to the animations so that all of the sound tags, ammo count, and weapon swapping would still work. It was a tremendous amount of work making each animation in the center pose and then updating the files, testing, seeing what was missing, what broke things. This included everything from grenade throws to melee hits, standard bringups/bringdowns, mod swapping, intros, etc. Basically every single standard animation needed to start or end in the classic center pose. Some weapons, like the gauss cannon, needed to have their basic idle changed to be more appealing in this view. This caused a cascading effect of problems with handles covering the view, or hovering in space during melee attacks.

I was determined to get it done though, and by the end of the weekend I had converted every single player weapon in the game including the new pistol(which I toyed with the idea of going left handed). Later in the week, I even converted all of the multiplayer and snapmap weapons so that it could be used in those game modes as well. All that was needed was a menu button to swap the game files and hence, swap the weapon pose. Unfortunately, there were a ton of bugs to squash in the main game. There just wouldn’t be time to test this mode thoroughly and it was put on the back burner as far as features go.

After I finished the credit sequence, I was completely drained. But…I decided to give this one more push to see if it would stick. A negative result of the method I chose was that I had to maintain two duplicate game files which controlled all the first person animations, files which were constantly in flux with bug fixing and dlc work. Because of this problem, I needed a reliable way to keep classic mode in-sync with any fixes done to the main game. The initial version was done manually, but there’s no way I could track all the changes made over the course of several months. As a result, I decided to write some mel scripts which would analyze the game files I needed to update and then with a key change file, it would replace them in the one that would be used for classic mode. Another long weekend of work and it was working flawlessly. Slow…but it produced an identical file to the original except that it has the new animations instead of the old ones. This gave me confidence that this mode could actually make it into the game.

Unfortunately, it still did not make the final cut. Thankfully though, it was decided that we would put this mode in with one of the updates we would be putting out for the game. Took almost a month and a half after the game came out, but it finally saw the light of day!