| abstract
| - While the press release beta is in many regards similar to the completed releases of Doom, there are various differences with the finished game.
* The player has a counter for his remaining amount of lives by the status bar face, and an additional life is added each time a soul sphere is picked up.
* Messages are displayed on the right side of the status bar, replacing everything but the ammo for the current weapon and the health percentage, for a couple of seconds or so. The messages use a small yellow font and three lines can be displayed at once.
* The game keeps score, and adds points for killing monsters. The current score can be viewed in the automap.
* There is no ARMS or FRAG panel on the status bar; an ITEM panel in its place keeps track of the number of demonic items collected instead. The weapons currently owned appear on the status bar when viewing the automap, they are represented by their pickup sprites rather than numbers.
* The end of the chaingun muzzle is hidden by the circular plate before it.
* The rocket launcher fires slower, recoiling after each shot.
* The plasma gun is slightly different and fires alternating green and red bursts.
* The BFG9000 fires 40 of the same bursts fired by the beta plasma gun with each shot.
* Imps throw the red plasma balls fired by the beta plasma gun.
* The lost soul is gray and has alternating yellow and blue energy around the skull instead of flames. They attack from afar with an invisible hitscan effect rather than a charging attack. When killed, this lost soul dies in a green explosion, leaving behind a floating pile of bones.
* The baron of hell throws a sphere-like projectile instead of the one used in the release version. This sprite was later reused as a part of the arachnotron's plasma attack's explosion in Doom II.
* Many other sprites not mentioned here are different in appearance.
* Lifts are much slower than in the finished game.
* The ouch face appears whenever the player walks on a damaging floor.
* The light amplification visor uses a green colormap, which imitates night vision goggles. This suffers from the same bug as the invulnerability colormap in the release version.
* The partial invisibility effect uses the inverse black and white colormap reserved for invulnerability in the finished game.
* Invulnerability doesn't use a colormap and the radiation shielding suit doesn't tint the screen green.
* The player cannot gib monsters.
* The sky is black over a low range of light brown mountains. A portion of this sky is eventually used as the F_SKY1 placeholder flat used to assign a sky texture as the ceiling to a sector during design.
* The sound effects and music are absent.
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