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Doom 3 was awesome but i only saw the first 10 minutes of the game since it scared me. Luckily all what i needed for the last and this article can be found in these first 10 minutes, before the first monster appears.

This screen shot shows what i want to point at this time:

Source: Doom 3

Older games often had to reduce the texture resolution to match the hardware limits. The quality of the “Information” label is what you would expect from older games but look at the lower part of the screen shot: This text is sharp like a razor blade!

I was always impressed by the sharpness of their UI on displays and monitors and thought that it was maybe done via real fonts and vector shapes.

NOPE

Surprise! I was wrong. Long story short: The game doesn’t use one texture for the whole UI element. Instead there’s a script language like HTML (but more powerful!) where one panel consists of smaller elements. The content is stored in several textures. Most of the elements are  placed manually but the text-quads are created by the engine (you just enter some text).

Source: Doom 3

The script language is able to animate elements and with this feature you can…
…fake a rotating logo by stretching/contracting it…

Source: Doom 3

…visualize keyboard typing…

Source: Doom 3

…and of course, all this can be interactive which is another awesome feature of the Doom 3 GUI. You can actually “played” this turkey game by pointing & clicking at the monitor – it’s not just an animation!

Source: Doom 3

Thanks for reading! Feel free to contact me and if you know a mod which deletes all monsters in Doom 3, i would love to “play” it and just enjoy the graphics. :)

Links:

Some crazy guys ported the original Doom on the UI of Doom 3 (Thx to Felix Jones)

10 thoughts on “Doom 3 – HDUI

  1. eRiC Werner

    Ahhhww cool! I always was fond of the awesome sharp UI in Doom3! Some developers went Flash for stuff like that. And STILL its not always crisp.
    Didn’t know id created an own type of language for all that ^^ incredible!!
    Thanks for investigating!

    Reply
    1. Simon

      Glad you also noticed the UI quality :) Not many people seem to see how much awesomeness is in some game assets :D Bu

      Reply

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