New official version

So, when is the next official release planned? Just wondering.

plans are for suckers

(hopefully there'll be a beta or something soon)

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/freedoom.git/commit/?id=85c16562e002c3eeca46b4d4d7e4b5f90d7b0c32

Ah, nice to know that a new version is coming soon. :)

Still, what about those flats that I fixed the alignment of, along with the new CEIL3_x flats I made?

http://www.mediafire.com/?xl6lhqkr13wq0aj

I admit I ignored that thread. Seeing it immediately after the other one about rw18_3, it looked like another long and ultimately fruitless argument waiting to happen.

Looking at it now though, I guess fixing those two pixels on cratop1 is a good idea.

Ignored it? I wasn't even trying to start a debate. The thread was only about the flats, with the wall textures thrown in as an afterthought.

What about the other ones, like the new CEIL3_x, which will make it more compatible with PWAD usage? And what about the realigned (properly aligned) flats?

"CEIL3_5/CEIL3_6 - current versions look nothing like they're supposed to."
What are they supposed to look like? Unsurprisingly the answer is something that is almost identical to Doom's version.

"FLAT1 - Added the missing diagonal stripes."
What are they missing from? Predictably the answer is they're missing when Freedoom's version is compared with Doom's version.

I'm sure you believe you weren't trying to start a debate, but we've been over this before. I ask you to show an actual example of a problem which your submissions address, and get a wall of text full of ridiculous exaggerations¹ back. I spend half my Saturday afternoon carefully reviewing your submissions, trying to work out what the point even is, and you post another version of the wall patch even closer to the one Freedoom's had since prehistory.

Can you see why I'd prefer to avoid a repeat of this kind of thing?

—
¹ Freedoom has a strip of hazard warning tape across a grey concrete wall. You claim this is equivalent to replacing a shiny futuristic metal door with rotting wood. What the heck?

They are *NOT SUPPOSED* to look identical to the original graphics from Doom - they're only supposed to look "compatibly similar". Attempting to duplicate the originals is something that ought to be specifically discouraged. Too many of the textures already look far too similar to the textures from Doom, IMO.

I also think we should be skeptical of any attempts to use PWAD compatibility as a motivation for changes like this: once you start down that path, it's a slippery slope towards incrementally duplicating Doom's textures.

Personally I actually like the fact that running under Freedoom gives a distinct and different look and feel. It's kind of like hearing a remix of a song, and it's actually interesting to see how things appear different. Let go of the assumption that PWAD compatibility means that any difference in appearance is a bug - it isn't.

I apologize for being far too argumentative and pushy, I'll try to avoid being that way.

I don't really care that much about the redesigned flats (with the exception of the console flats), but what I do care about is the realigned flats. They're all 100% identical to the existing ones, just with different alignment, so that if PWADs are designing their sector shapes around the flats, they will align correctly (yes, there are instances of this).

Please reject FLAT1 and FLAT4 from my newest flat submission WAD.


In the mean time, how does this console texture look? I'm sorry, I just really think the current one looks too flatshaded and isn't up to par with the rest of the graphics.

This one is much closer to the existing one.





EDIT: I think it's also worth pointing out a couple of errors regarding armor. The DEHACKED file still refers to the Mega-armor as blue armor, despite it being red. Secondly, the frames are swapped. Frame A is supposed to be the brighter frame, and B the darker one. It's currently swapped.


So, a solution for this would be:

* Change Mega-armor pickup string to refer to it as red -OR- Recolor ARM2 sprites to be blue instead
*Swap A and B frames on the ARMx sprites.

Er, you're not ignoring me again, are you?

I changed the strings to read "light" and "heavy" armour instead of referring to colours directly. I think that neatly avoids the issue :-)

(There is a case for the heavy armour being recoloured blue that goes beyond mere aesthetics, but it doesn't seem appropriate to have that discussion right now.)

RjY said:

I changed the strings to read "light" and "heavy" armour instead of referring to colours directly. I think that neatly avoids the issue :-)

Seems like a good solution.

How about this incarnation of the console flat?

The reason the console flats remain unchanged is not to do with this or that incarnation of them. It is, as I was reminded the other day, a deeper issue, which I will try to explain.

Encouraging people to sit here twiddling with existing resources is counterproductive. You could literally sit there for years making minor incremental improvements to the current resource set, while the rest of the world gives up completely on freedoom because of the unfortunate truth that half of it is completely missing or made up of blatantly unfinished hacks or whatever.

For that reason, I was asked not to touch the existing console flats over a year ago when your/prdarkfox's first incarnation was posted. I don't believe that situation has changed, regardless of however many different incarnations you make.

RjY said:

The reason the console flats remain unchanged is not to do with this or that incarnation of them. It is, as I was reminded the other day, a deeper issue, which I will try to explain.

Encouraging people to sit here twiddling with existing resources is counterproductive. You could literally sit there for years making minor incremental improvements to the current resource set, while the rest of the world gives up completely on freedoom because of the unfortunate truth that half of it is completely missing or made up of blatantly unfinished hacks or whatever.

Back when the Freedoom project started, I thought this would be a good policy, as well. I specifically tried to discourage contributors from submitting improved versions of resources, in the hopes that I could direct efforts toward completing as many resources as possible instead. I even thought about actively refusing all submissions that would replace something that had already been done.

In the end, I think my attempts to do that were ignored, as can be seen through, for example, the several iterations of the shotgun or the STARTAN textures that the project went through. I'm now not convinced that it was even a good idea, anyway.

Firstly, if there's one thing discouraging people from contributing to the project, I'd say it would be the presence of poor quality resources. While Freedoom contains some resources that are really good quality, there are also others that are comically bad. If resources can be improved, then they should be. If people "give up on Freedoom" it's because it's a project they can't take seriously. Rejecting the work of people who do want to contribute will just drive away existing contributors and discourage potential new ones.

The other thing is that most of the gaps have now been filled anyway. The only big holes left are in sprites. Back in the beginnings of the project there might have been some logic in saying "don't work on this texture, work on that one instead". Now we're at the stage in the project where tweaking / replacing existing resources is pretty much the only thing that can be done. Are you saying that you're rejecting Sodaholic's new texture because he should have been working on eg. a complete set of Baron of Hell sprites instead? Doesn't seem to make much sense.

I also noticed a similar line of reasoning in the recent Blasphemer thread.

I don't think rules like this are helpful. If you want to get things done, make a check list of small tasks to complete. I've found that's a really effective technique.

RjY said:

For that reason, I was asked not to touch the existing console flats over a year ago when your/prdarkfox's first incarnation was posted. I don't believe that situation has changed, regardless of however many different incarnations you make.

IIRC, this was never really explained to me. I was under the assumption that they were being rejected under the grounds of not being similar enough to the Freedoom ones.

Sodaholic said:

IIRC, this was never really explained to me. I was under the assumption that they were being rejected under the grounds of not being similar enough to the Freedoom ones.

This is why good communication is important. I agree that Completing resources*cougharchvillecough* should take priority over improving what we have. It's not like it can't be polished up later.

The new pain elemental sprite is very cool, but I'm not too crazy about the new monster soundfx. Now the game sounds like you're watching a porno flick or something. ;) The pink slug monster sounds really freaky too. Guess I'll stick with the old soundfx for now.

On the subject of textures, I understand completely that Freedoom is and must remain different, but some textures negatively affect the atmosphere in some cases. For example, that GRAYx (can't remember the # offhand) with the horizontal warning stripes feels completely out of place when playing a medieval-style PWAD. It's easy to fix though, by replacing the stripes with something more subtle, like maybe a row of iron rivets or something like that (so it's still different from the original texture).

Well let me start off by apologising to everyone for making such a pig's ear out of everything, especially fraggle, as it's his project I've been messing up, and Sodaholic, whose time I've wasted.

Sodaholic said:

IIRC, this was never really explained to me.

Well I mentioned it when you resubmitted a year later, I said

I've had them in a holding queue since last year, I believe I was waiting for Catoptromancy to decide what to do with them.

but evidently I wasn't clear enough. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

gnudist said:

This is why good communication is important.

Indeed, and that's why I am the wrong person for this job. :-)

hex11 said:

I'm not too crazy about the new monster soundfx. Now the game sounds like you're watching a porno flick or something. ;)

I've never made this association at all. You must have some really strange fetishes, that's all I can say. ;-)

For example, that GRAYx (can't remember the # offhand) with the horizontal warning stripes feels completely out of place when playing a medieval-style PWAD.

Could you give an example of a wad that is adversely affected?

I like the warning stripe. It works well in the maps within Freedoom itself and those designed for its texture set. It's unfortunate that some pwads designed for Doom's texture set end up looking strange, but I don't think you can expect to get perfect matches in every case with Freedoom textures.

Sure, one example of that texture looking out-of-place is near the start of feudal.wad. The tall room with pillars has some steps with that texture along the sides.

Edit: and yeah, I agree that the warning stripes look great in techbase style maps. I guess one possibility would be to have two differently named versions of that texture. The default (more subtle one) could have the original name, so it fits in with any existing PWAD, and the current texture could be named GRAYxB or something like that. Of course that would require modifying all the IWAD maps that use it (which sounds tedious but can thankfully be scripted with wadlc and wadldc from xwadtools) but maybe I'm the only one who ever noticed this anyway...

RjY said:

I've never made this association at all. You must have some really strange fetishes, that's all I can say. ;-)

He must be into impse.

I aligned to that warning stripe in both my levels.
For any usage, it is possible to need a set of texture fixes that are cleaned up of any overly visible differences. There are an indefinite set of these are any PWAD could of made heavy use of any texture feature.

There could the following PWAD patches made available. Then such compatibility tweaking could be limited to working on these patches, and the main FreeDoom textures and levels would be left alone. The fixes PWAD would only need to be added by the user when a specific PWAD needed them. There would be much fewer instances where they would be used and the whole FreeDoom project would not have to react to each tweak.

Hightech_fixes.wad : PWAD with more modern wood features.
Feudal_fixes.wad : Remove visible modern features from tech textures so they are universally usable in non-tech wads.

Usage:
doomlegacy -game freedoom -file feudal_fixes.wad feudal.wad
This loads freedoom textures then feudal_fixes changes to those textures, then the PWAD

I dunno, I think that just making the existing version of the texture into an alternate texture with a different name is a better solution. This way, no extra PWADs are needed, and the existing Freedoom levels can still look the same.

It should be done all at once so the level designers can fix their levels only once. I prefer to fix my own levels, so I can work from my originals. This means that there would have to be a long period where both names referred to same FreeDoom texture. Then once the name migration occurred, the texture of the original name could be modified to theme neutrality.

I have much doubt that a suitable theme neutral design, that substitutes for the original in all uses, could be reached without becoming the original. Thus this idea is open-ended in how close to the original to become and there will always be found another PWAD that depends upon some detail of the original texture.

Experimentation on the actual textures is best done as I said, with a separate texture lump. After a few years, it will be found which PWAD needs it and how many alternatives are needed for those other special PWAD problems. During this period, the main FreeDoom textures will be left alone. Unless a good number of problem PWAD are found, this will be the final solution too.

Unless a good number of problem PWAD are known now, there is no pressing need to make texture modifications to FreeDoom now.

I am not crazy about all those other textures in the lump either (for UltFreeDoom I think, and unfinished).
I do not use them because they may not be permanent.

We could also use some new textures for some common situations that are missing.
* brick flats that actually match the brick walls (with names that match)
* a selection of table tops (formica) (tan, beige, white)
* A flat to match compgray exactly
* Some plain matched texture and flat of some other colors besides compgray and concrete grey (wood, tan, off-white, yellowed, chem-stained, oily-black, dirty-white, oil-stained-concrete, dark-blue, dark-green, dark-yellow, light-yellow)
* carpet
* Tech equipment textures, a few dials, meters.
* A selection of computer screens with useful displays.
* * Industrial tank and valve
* * Some color displays (not all green).
* * Flat screens with thin borders, as I assume CRT displays, and green only displays, will have been long gone.
* A selection of grills and common wall panels, of various widths. (We currently have only two choices of louvers).
* Some drawers and cabinet fronts.
* Concrete with warning stripe.
* Flat with tire tracks in various directions (blank, N/S, E/W, turn)

RjY said:

Well let me start off by apologising to everyone for making such a pig's ear out of everything, especially fraggle, as it's his project I've been messing up

Hey, just giving my opinion. I don't consider it "my" project - I don't even maintain it any more.

Sodaholic said:

I dunno, I think that just making the existing version of the texture into an alternate texture with a different name is a better solution. This way, no extra PWADs are needed, and the existing Freedoom levels can still look the same.

That seems like a good solution, and all the levels in freedoom could be identified and fixed at the same time (by searching for uses of the old texture and replacing with the new). Heck it could probably be scripted.

Jon said:

Heck it could probably be scripted.

SLADE 3 can do that.

Wait, I have to commit the code first. I think I'll just leave it as a console command for now and worry about an user-friendly GUI later.

So, how about this?

http://www.mediafire.com/?s677z5p40h3f27y


CEIL1_1 - Fixed some awkward looking orange pixels to be brown like the rest of the texture.
CEIL3_5 - New vertical brick shape (different than the last ones I submitted, in order to avoid it looking like Doom's)
CEIL3_6 - New vertical brick shape with tan light (different than the last ones I submitted, in order to avoid it looking like Doom's)
CONS1_x - New console flats, these look much better than the current ones that are in Freedoom. (Please just use these, the Freedoom console flats look very bad in their current form)
FLAT4 - Realigned to be aligned like Doom's alignment in case any PWAD's sector shapes are built around it, and the jarring contrast of the background is slightly eased (but the flat is otherwise the same as the current Freedoom one).
FLAT5 - Realigned to be aligned like Doom's alignment in case any PWAD's sector shapes are built around it (but the flat is otherwise the same as the current Freedoom one).
FLAT5 - Planks rearranged to be arranged like Doom's arrangement in case any PWAD's sector shapes are built around it (but the flat is otherwise the same as the current Freedoom one).
FLAT8 - Bricks rearranged to be arranged like Doom's arrangement in case any PWAD's sector shapes are built around it (but the flat is otherwise the same as the current Freedoom one).
FLOOR5_4 - Bricks rearranged to be arranged like Doom's arrangement in case any PWAD's sector shapes are built around it (but the flat is otherwise the same as the current Freedoom one).
SLIME16 - Godawful extremely grainy appearance of the original Freedoom flat removed, restored brightness and coloration to be similar to the original Doom 2 flat (it still looks very distinctly different from id's official version, though).



I think that the realigned/rearranged flats are important, as the current flats would look very messed up in PWADs if they built any sector shapes around the alignment/arrangement of the official id flats. These are otherwise identical to Freedoom's current versions, so it keeps the distinct Freedoom appearance, and adds more PWAD compatibility.

Sodaholic said:

I think that the realigned/rearranged flats are important, as the current flats would look very messed up in PWADs if they built any sector shapes around the alignment/arrangement of the official id flats. These are otherwise identical to Freedoom's current versions, so it keeps the distinct Freedoom appearance, and adds more PWAD compatibility.

Texture misalignment is an example of a case where changes would seem reasonable. The only thing that I am concerned about is issues like this one for example ("Freedoom's grass is too dark"). That's something that I consider an unreasonable objection, and I think we should avoid, because it's a slippery slope towards simply duplicating the original textures. If we accept that it's a "bug" when a texture is darker than the texture in Doom, where do we stop? It's only a short jump before we start "fixing" all the other textures as well. Eventually we potentially end up in a situation where the textures just end up as clones of the Doom textures.

It should be obvious why we don't want a situation like that - firstly because it destroys the distinctiveness of Freedoom, and secondly because it's a legally dubious thing to be doing.

wesleyjohnson said:

It should be done all at once so the level designers can fix their levels only once. I prefer to fix my own levels, so I can work from my originals. This means that there would have to be a long period where both names referred to same FreeDoom texture. Then once the name migration occurred, the texture of the original name could be modified to theme neutrality.

I disagree with this proposal. It adds a whole load of extra complication and duplication for what seems like very little benefit. The git logs show that there have only been 3 changes committed to Freedoom's textures in the past two years. It seems unlikely that any texture changes would cause big enough disruption to be worth the effort. Easier to just change the textures, and make the minor changes to fix up the levels where necessary.

fraggle said:

The only thing that I am concerned about is issues like this one for example ("Freedoom's grass is too dark"). That's something that I consider an unreasonable objection, and I think we should avoid, because it's a slippery slope towards simply duplicating the original textures

While I did offer to create a changed version, note that I'm not the one that proposed it in the first place, and that I never bothered going through with it because of the same reasons that you listed.

Conjecture: If these textures are changed in the next release, then I won't see them until I get that next release.

Possible outcomes:

1. If nothing else is done, then that release will have a bunch of levels with broken texture alignment. Don't like this choice.

2. When new textures are introduced, one person alters the texture names in any affected level.
Then I will only get a copy of those changes myself when I get the next release. Any level submit between the time of the texture change and the release will introduce bugs. This will occur until the level submitter syncs with the changes done to their level map.

3. Introduce the new textures and renaming in a working wad posted for level developers. Get it out before the release so level developers can adapt, sync, etc.... endless variations ....

4. Other ideas.??