The Apocalypse is Over

Belial said:

I understand that in your world pointing out a flaw that took all the "fun" out of dealing with GZDoom's constant instability and crashes is excessive bitching.

You should see to your system, I've never had any crash with GZdoom that wasn't related to using an older version than was required. EDIT: Not that you actually pointed out any flaw, you just made a sweeping comment about how a Wad was really crappy and that you for some reason still played this wad through. You did mention GZdoom gayness. But that's hardly being very specific.

Belial said:

Some time ago I could've posted almost the exact same words, replacing UTNT with Phobia:TA and GZDoom with Legacy.

So you didn't like Phobia either, should I feel special?

Yeah, you should definitely feel special if you still fail to understand that I enjoyed both wads to the point of not giving up on them despite port issues.

The disappointing endings were a different matter.

Kristus said:

you just made a sweeping comment about how a Wad was really crappy and that you for some reason still played this wad through.

I'd really like to see a quote of me saying anything like that.

My apologies, I suppose I misunderstood you then.

"biggest disappointment in the whole wad"

"Killing one guardian and firing the secret weapon from map01 twice is not a satisfying ending for a wad that forced me to deal with heaps upon heaps of GZDoom gayness."

I suppose this is what threw me off. And the fact that you nowhere in your post mentioned that you actually liked the wad in the first place, which lets face it is not exactly common when it comes to you, and these kinds of Wads.

My belief that this was the case only got enforced when you mentioned Phobia really, since I thought you hated that wad. I seem to recall you mentioning it in the "Most disappointing wad ever" thread.

Now that you have said it though, I suppose I can descipher a sliver of something that could be interpeted as, "I liked this wad, but this and this really brought it down".

I apologise as well for the unnecessary personal remarks. I suppose I don't exactly have a track record of appreciating wads like these, I agree, and yes, back then I looked at P:TA as the wad that I've downloaded Legacy for which then delivered the crashiest ride of all the wads I've played, with gameplay problems to top it off.

Like with UTNT (and to some extent KDIZD) though, after some time has passed I now see them as good wads with more or less severe issues that annoyed the hell out of me. Not steaming piles of crap in general :P

As for GZDoom, I'm not going to agree with placing the whole blame on my hardware, since that port and Legacy are the only GL ones giving me problems. jDoom, GlBoom as well as other GL apps run just fine.

Belial said:

As for GZDoom, I'm not going to agree with placing the whole blame on my hardware, since that port and Legacy are the only GL ones giving me problems. jDoom, GlBoom as well as other GL apps run just fine.

Can you post your hardware specs and the kinds of problems you experience?

Athlon XP 2000+
R9200Pro 64MB
512MB RAM

It likes to hang randomly with a black screen in open areas, like the final map of UTNT, forcing me to kill it with ctrl+alt+del, or just quit to the desktop setting it to the game's screen resolution and brightness. The first thing only started to happen with UTNT, but I remember the second happening back when I was playing stuff like Phocas 2 as well.

GL_VID_COMPATABILITY "TRUE"

try that in the console.

The only 'difference' is that now it hangs with the ZDoom Very Fatal Error window displayed (on the final UTNT map). I still have to kill it since it stops responding.

I doubt that that will help in this situation. That switch is only meant to revert to a lesser graphics mode on older cards. On newer ones all it will do is to disable some GL features the engine normally needs.

Belial said:

The only 'difference' is that now it hangs with the ZDoom Very Fatal Error window displayed (on the final UTNT map). I still have to kill it since it stops responding.

Can you post the crash log? (If you can't save it can you at least try to post the address where it happens?)

Code: C0000005 (Access Violation)
Address: 82A0C89C

Shit. That's inside the GL driver or a system DLL.

I'm not surpriced. 90% of the times I've had issues with Hardware rendered software it has been a matter of upgrading the drivers.

I already have the most recent Catalyst that's available on ATI's site for the R9200 series, so I'm out of options I guess.

Graf Zahl said:

Shit. That's inside the GL driver or a system DLL.

hahahahahahahahahaha

ATI Drivers suck

I has a solution! Belial needs to get a better graphics card. So he can play (a) Doom wad(s).

Also, I got this same crash as Belial (only once, except when I recreated it just now to verify) when playing tcotd:a myself. The system in question uses an Intel chipset for graphics (915 probably, given the machines age). Just thought I'd throw that in, though in this case I can't vouch for how current the drivers are on the machine, as it isn't mine.

Since when did we need 'better' drivers or video cards for that matter to play a GL source port of Doom?

Hmm... so can anyone tell me why there is a random little outdoor space behind the trainstation booth that requires the spider key, and inside that space there is NOTHING but some coloured tiles and zombies?? There's a little floating exclamation mark in the middle but nothing happens with it. I didn't gain anything but the loss of ammo from going in there.

The little floating exclamation mark indicates failure. So either you or Tormentor failed something there. My bet is that there's a DECORATE object he forgot to put in the wad, but is used in the map anyways.

Kaiser: Since we have dynamic lights and unreal skies and models and god only knows what else.

Graf Zahl said:

Don't you mean: Your computer's instability? Strangely enough I get very few complaints about that and most can be tracked down to some system specific issue.

Exactly! Personally I've had little issues with GzDOOM, most of my problems came from slow generic hardware, or outdated GFX cards.

Kaiser said:

Since when did we need 'better' drivers or video cards for that matter to play a GL source port of Doom?

We need better drivers in the sense that they don't crash. It's not the first time I got reports of ATI crashes that, when I was able to track them down were the cause of the driver not being able to handle certain GL commands as it should be expected.

And please don't even start with the infamous fog bug.

John Smith said:

The little floating exclamation mark indicates failure.

Have you played this yet? The little floating exclamation marks mean something special or interactive at that spot. They're not the same as the exclamation marks you're thinking of.

yes I have played it, but I still automatically associate "floating exclamation marks" in ZDoom with the mark of failure. sue me or something.

I have to agree that the key hunting is boring. Hard to find the bazillion keys you need and then to remember where that door was :( Other than that it was great. Good atmosphere, nice texturing and nice mapping. Also the borrowed monsters from blood are nice and the hellhounds scared the shit out of me, nicely done.

Tormentor667 said:

@Nick - Use the shotgun from the graveyard to take them out.

To all others who found this a bit frustrating in terms of gameplay: Try to think of it as a new game, not Doom related. It's so much inspired by Resident Evil and equal games that comparing it to Doom makes it very hard. The weapons are supposed to be weak as it makes one single enemy more of a challenge as it is in Doom :)
Though thx so far for your feedback!

You know there's a reason why they turned Resident Evil 4 into an over the shoulder shooter with very simple and straightforward keyhunts. HINT: It's because the origional Resident Evil trilogy was complete shit.

Kaiser said:

Since when did we need 'better' drivers or video cards for that matter to play a GL source port of Doom?

I went through a time warp and found a copy of an unannounced remake of KDIZD for GZDoom from 5 years in the future. I only managed to take one screenshot before I lost the WAD, but I hope this gives you a good idea of where Doom mapping is headed.

http://xs.to/xs.php?h=xs321&d=07456&f=ClassicDOOM3_1.0.png

Dead link is dead..

apparently the imageshack of the future is shit.

AlexMax said:

It's because the origional Resident Evil trilogy was complete shit.

Well, I think that's a question of personal taste. I myself loved the original Resident Evil trilogy and I might think that I wasn't the only one considering the success of these games ;)

Kaiser said:

Since when did we need 'better' drivers or video cards for that matter to play a GL source port of Doom?

Myself, it was since I got a laptop with Vista preinstalled on it (I tried to get one with XP instead, since I wanted to wait at least for the SP1 before going Vista, but unfortunately...).

The GZDoom renderer provoked nasty hangs-up all the time. (The ZDoomGL renderer didn't, though.) Once ATI had updated its drivers, though, these hangs-up have disappeared.

However, I still have issues with the software renderer. From time to time it just kills the display driver, and after a period of time where the screen don't update Vista kills ZDoom with a crash and tells me the display driver has recovered from a serious error, yadayadayadada...

Weird as it may seem, I still need 'better' drivers to play a software port of Doom -- but OpenGL works so I don't complain.

There's a Doom mod I really quite like to play that I'd really have difficulty playing on a regular, old fashioned graphics card of the kind that I need to simply play Doom in software mode. What's it called again... I know, Doom64 Absolution TC. ;)

The more that gets added to Doom ports, the higher the spec of hardware needed to run said ports will be. That stands to reason and I don't see a particular difficulty with that. I never really understand why people make comments like "OMG what do you mean I need X MHz to play a Doom WAD" when, clearly, the WADs in question are offering so much more than what you would expect or could get in vanilla Doom. The WADs in question are not just Doom but Doom plus additional stuff (whether a person likes the additional stuff or not is a separate argument). It's even less of a valid criticism of the port in question if the error is, as it would seem in this case, due to faulty hardware or buggy drivers not complying with agreed standards.