Put this under “Mods You Probably Thought Already Existed”. With voxel sinkingyou can play the leg nowendary 1993 first person shooter demise with all the monsters and items rendered in beautifully chunky 3D voxels. While there have been smaller scope voxel mods in the past, this one replaces pretty much every single one of the game’s old-fashioned 2D sprite-based enemies and items, adding a fun new dimension to the classic shooter’s lo-fi creepiness.
Published today by modders on Mod DB Daniel “Cheello” Peterson, Voxel sinking 1.0 runs on GZDooma popular source port that is being heavily modernized demise‘s almost 30 year old game engine. veteran demise Modders with folders and folders of WADs are no strangers to GZDoom, but if you are new to the world of demise
So, voxels are like a three-dimensional representation of typical 2D pixels. As “volumetric pixels,” voxels are simply points in 3D space that are assigned a size and color. Throw thousands upon thousands of them onto the screen at once, and you get a unique kind of 3D graphics that, if you make them nice and chunky, can be reminiscent of classic 2D sprites, but with an added dimension.
Latest games like Nobody’s heaven, Walheim, and tear down have used voxel techniques to achieve their unique looks, and they are often favored when creating destructive, malleable environments. The technology has been around for some time, famously appearing in games like Novalogic’s 1992 helicopter simulation Comanchesthe underestimated year 1996 by Looking Glass New land
Of course, there are no limits to the sky when it comes to classics demise modifications. Some expand on 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 keep the original feel of the game and just makes it “pop” a bit more. That’s a far cry from more typical attempts to cram 3D models into these decades-old games, which are usually more garish than the original aesthetic.
The mod’s creator spoke about this very phenomenon in a stream demoing the new mod with fellow GZDoom developer Nash Muhandes, saying: “If you watch this [the voxel models] from a certain angle it looks like the original sprite.” This cool illusory effect of voxels originally drew Cheello. On the Muhandes stream, they talked about how converting 2D sprites into 3D voxels results in a kind of stunning effect that doesn’t look out of place right away, but more importantly, it fits demise‘s fall, quite naturally in the scene.
Tramping through the corridors of Martian Hell with this mod is no doubt a fun time. Everything from demons to pickup effects and equipment now comes to life, but still looks a lot like the classic sprites. While your actual weapons remain the regular 2D sprites, weapon pickups look extra cool in the environment since they now rotate in place. The mod currently only works on the 1993 original demisebut according to Cheello “sinking 2 Monsters will be completed in the very near future.”
