Oddness in Boom-derived ports you might not be aware of

I've been playing a lot of Plutonia 2 lately. I've been playing in EE, and I noticed the Menu text looked a little... crude.

So I decided to play in chocolate doom and then EE and take screenshots of the menu screen, and look what I found!

Chocodoom:


Boom-derived:


If you don't see it, look at the W's in "New Game".

I talked with Quasar on IRC about it, and he said this is a common Boomism, and that all Boom ports do this to his knowledge. But the question is: Why is this happening? is color translation happening when it doesn't need to be?

Csonicgo said:

I talked with Quasar on IRC about it, and he said this is a common Boomism, and that all Boom ports do this to his knowledge.

I do not have this issue with prboom-plus

Me either in Odamex

CRRED[0x43] != 0x43

Don't ask me why.

Vulture said:

Me either in Odamex

Odamex is Zdoom-based.

Csonicgo said:

Odamex is Zdoom-based.

Is Boom Boom-derived?

entryway said:

Is Boom Boom-derived?

what? are you saying that this is an MBF/SMMU thing or is this an EE bug? I can't tell. All I know is that Quasar said it was since Boom.

Was this the same "non-traditional menu" option that fouled up the menu in Alien Vendetta? That option was removed in Prboom-plus in version 2.4.8.2 (October 2007), and I think it had been made not the default setting some years earlier.

Perhaps the basis for the problem was somehow introduced in MBF, which offered the non-traditional menu as a compatibility option. Though I'm not seeing the problem in WinMBF either.

I think this issue will happen only for patches which could be recolored by engine (because CRRED[0x43] != 0x43). For GUI font for example (it can be red, green, yellow, etc in different places). Looks like EE uses translation table for all GUI patches or something.

<Quasar`> I think when you ask for red text EE actually colors the text red.
<Quasar`> BOOM uses NULL
<Quasar`> for the cr pointer
<Quasar`> which is logically incorrect
<Quasar`> the problem however is not in the code
<Quasar`> it's the BOOM CRRED translation table.
<Quasar`> somebody needs to clean it up so that it is a 1:1 map
<Quasar`> there isn't any reason it should actually be changing any colors
<Quasar`> yet apparently it does

Reminds me of this.

Gez said:

Reminds me of this.

Yup, still needs fixed. Thanks for reminding me. As stating in that thread I had intended to let ptoing put in the lump and test it out but unfortunately he has gone missing for an extended period after stating he had some medical problems and I'm concerned for his health. After that I kind of forgot about it.

Anyway it's not like it's difficult to put in a lump or anything; I was just going to have him do it because that's what he was currently working on when he had to leave - cleaning up eternity.wad.

Is the "W" in "New Doom" appearing red, because I cannot see it in your screenshot.
What I do see is different spacing, and "Quit Game" appears twice and covers the PU-239 sign.

wesleyjohnson said:

Is the "W" in "New Doom" appearing red, because I cannot see it in your screenshot.

That's exactly what's happening. Not the entire, W, just some pixels of it though.

wesleyjohnson said:

What I do see is different spacing, and "Quit Game" appears twice and covers the PU-239 sign.

That's something different; the second "Quit Game" is actually the "End Game" message. For whatever reason, that's the way the pl2 menus are.

I wonder why Eternity even has this in the main menu. It's not supposed to be there and probably a leftover of some incompetent menu tinkering that was quite popular in the early source port era.

Graf Zahl said:

I wonder why Eternity even has this in the main menu. It's not supposed to be there and probably a leftover of some incompetent menu tinkering that was quite popular in the early source port era.

Quite perceptive of you. "End Game" was added to the main menu by fraggle in SMMU. Yes, it causes some issues with wads that replace menu graphics. EE does include a workaround for this in the form of a setting to enable old menu emulation, but I am thinking about removing the option and just always having certain menus draw in compatibility mode.

It's not like End Game isn't available on the F7 key by default.

You might say it's the sort of thing on par with translucent Lost Souls, or Arch-Viles taking no damage from their own explosions. Trivial tinkerings that change the game in ways that are neither completely positive nor negative and please some while enraging others.

DoomLegacy does not have the red spots on 'W' because the whole line is replaced by a legacy.wad graphic, and so is the line below it.
Am also considering a different way to do this because of all the IWAD (FreeDoom) and PWAD that want to replace the menu graphics.

In my opinion every port that alters the order and content of the main menu is doing something wrong. Period.

That's why I changed the order in ZDoom when it was reported to be wrong, despite the complaints of a few users.

Do you really need to alter this to add new stuff? So far nothing could convince me that it's a good idea.

No one ever suggested modifying Plutonia 2.

My initial thought was to fix the BOOM CR* lumps, which are contained in eternity.wad. However, instead, I have removed the automatic application of translations to all menu patches in Eternity due to the fact that all of the translation tables are incorrect and it just might be possible that some BOOM wads have depended on their strangeness in some way.

Did Boom even use them outside of drawing text with the STCFN fonts? And do these font characters even have any colors outside the red range?

Anyway, if any Boom WAD depended on this it'd show in ZDoom which calculates the color translations from the actually used colors in the font. And so far all reports were about errors in projects that were still work in progress and could be fixed on the data side.