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phobosdeimos1
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Graf Zahl said:



So, give me an alternative that

a) has a comparable feature set and
b) is as easy to use

There's a good reason why the OpenAL branch is going nowhere.


There isn't, I'm starting to really get back into Zdoom since this thread,

another great thing about it which I hadn't figured out before is all the lumps defining the whole Doom games, Heretic and Hexen are right there in the Pk3 so it's really easy to get perfect examples to learn all the scripting and Decorate!

GZ, as you're an advocate of Zdoom and Gzdoom, I may have to pm you if I need help with anything to do with it, if that's OK?

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Old Post 07-25-11 18:38 #
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The Ultimate DooMer
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There's also the ZDoom wiki for learning stuff.
Old Post 07-25-11 19:32 #
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RjY
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hex11 said:
Personally I don't use ZDoom because it depends on closed-source software (FMOD) that isn't available for my OS, but even if there was a binary-only version of it, I wouldn't feel too great about that. I've become accustomed to having source codes for everything. The lack of it always seems to lead to problems down the road.
Agreed, although there's a binary version of fmod for linux, apparently it doesn't support any linux sound interface besides OSS (/dev/dsp), which has been deprecated in favour of ALSA and removed from the mainline kernel for years...

So I get literally no sound output. And playing the game completely without sound is... unpleasant :-)

I tried setting snd_output=SDL and then the game crashes slightly after the first sound starts playing. I'll post a crash log if anyone's interested.

Graf Zahl said:
So, give me an alternative that

a) has a comparable feature set and
b) is as easy to use
I'd be happy with an alternative that means I can hear the monsters yelling at me and firing and so on. Everything else like support for every music format under the sun is just gravy really :-)
Old Post 07-25-11 22:03 #
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Graf Zahl
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I'd be happy with any alternative that can be made to work, so that I can GPL GZDoom.

The sad thing is that there just is no really good free sound system available. OpenAL is probably the closest but its API is just horrible for sound and goes against any established rule.
Old Post 07-25-11 23:08 #
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Csonicgo
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Graf Zahl said:
I'd be happy with any alternative that can be made to work, so that I can GPL GZDoom.

The sad thing is that there just is no really good free sound system available. OpenAL is probably the closest but its API is just horrible for sound and goes against any established rule.


I don't see this changing anytime soon, either. The only way I suppose such portability could be done is if a universal sound system for doom ports/games is written from scratch or from existing code. SDL is mediocre on every platform it runs on, OpenAL is different just for the sake of it, and no one will ever use allegro for anything serious. Ever.
Old Post 07-26-11 02:00 #
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natt
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ZDoom supports too many audio file formats. If you change code, all of that becomes functionality that you have to add back in.



I really wouldn't feel bad about it; it's a very impressive port. So what if it's not GPL? It complies with all of its licenses and looks damn fine while doing it.
Old Post 07-26-11 03:32 #
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chungy
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For curiosity, I just tried ZDoom for the first time in about three years again, on Linux. Considerably better, the game can actually run, but there's no music (sound effects are fine) and fullscreen mode is broken. Same for both ZDoom and GZDoom. (And yeah I should probably post this on the ZDoom forums or bug tracker...)

On the topic, use whichever port suits your project best. If that means ZDoom, then go for it.
Old Post 07-26-11 03:56 #
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wesleyjohnson
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I take it back ...
[ Most ZDoom features are just ignored by other ports. Just make sure the ZDoom uses are not show stoppers. ]

I tried three of the ZDoom wads on DoomLegacy and it could not ignore the ZDoom features of any of them. It would shut down.

I think slopes are tolerated.

Yea, ZDoom requires FMOD ...

If you are going to use any of the special features on just a couple characters, then you might as well open the whole tool kit (and see if there is anything else you might want to use). The wad will be rejected by other ports anyway.

Last edited by wesleyjohnson on 07-26-11 at 04:51
Old Post 07-26-11 04:26 #
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Graf Zahl
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wesleyjohnson said:

I tried three of the ZDoom wads on DoomLegacy and it could not ignore the ZDoom features of any of them. It would shut down.



Not really surprising considering that nearly all ZDoom projects use Hexen's map format. Of course ports not being able to handle it can't read it.


chungy said:
For curiosity, I just tried ZDoom for the first time in about three years again, on Linux. Considerably better, the game can actually run, but there's no music (sound effects are fine) and fullscreen mode is broken. Same for both ZDoom and GZDoom. (And yeah I should probably post this on the ZDoom forums or bug tracker...)



What graphics drivers are you using - and what graphics hardware? The fullscreen switch is done using standard SDL calls on Linux so having problems with only ZDoom is a bit odd...

Concerning music, to play MIDI you need at least a soundfont and then set the correct MIDI device. FMOD's internal MIDI player needs a DLS file but if you only got an SF2 you can switch music output to FluidSynth (if you got that compiled) or use an external Timidity++ with a GUS patch set - and if all else fails just use the OPL emulator which doesn't require any external data.
Old Post 07-26-11 08:01 #
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chungy
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Graf Zahl said:
What graphics drivers are you using - and what graphics hardware? The fullscreen switch is done using standard SDL calls on Linux so having problems with only ZDoom is a bit odd...

Using the proprietary NVIDIA driver with a GeForce GTX 460.

Graf Zahl said:
Concerning music, to play MIDI you need at least a soundfont and then set the correct MIDI device. FMOD's internal MIDI player needs a DLS file but if you only got an SF2 you can switch music output to FluidSynth (if you got that compiled) or use an external Timidity++ with a GUS patch set - and if all else fails just use the OPL emulator which doesn't require any external data.

Ah, feel a little embarrassed now, I switched the MIDI device to Timidity++ and it works fine now, thanks.
Old Post 07-26-11 16:59 #
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hex11
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RjY said:

I'd be happy with an alternative that means I can hear the monsters yelling at me and firing and so on. Everything else like support for every music format under the sun is just gravy really :-)


That's pretty much how I feel about Doom audio. Music is entirely optional, and in fact non-existent in the port I'm using the most at this time (SDL Doom, a rudimentary port of linuxdoom).

And actually, I think it would be a cleaner design to have a separate music daemon that can be configured to invoke any existing music player on your system (for example: xmp for tracker files, timidity for midi files, mplayer for mp3/ogg, etc.) All of these players can be run as child processes of the music daemon, which itself it controlled by the Doom port via IPC so it knows to kill the current child when map changes, then extract next music lump and start playing it. Something similar (/idgames/utils/unix/musserver.tgz) was written in 1996, because Dave Taylor's linuxdoom binary didn't have music support, but it wasn't as flexible as what I'm talking about.

But really that stuff is entirely optional for me. I'm much more interested in sound FX, and I'd like to see some interesting things done with that. No I'm not talking about 5-channel audio, reverb or other fancy FX. As far as I'm concerned, the level of audio fidelity that the original DOS Doom supplied was plenty enough. What I mean is more ambient sounds that occur based on the environment you find yourself in. For example, if there's water nearby you might hear running water, if there's a waterfall you might hear dripping/splashing water, if you go outside you might hear some wind, and so forth... But rather than these be controlled by some artificial "actor" placed by the mapper, they would occur in a more natural fashion, based on the textures and layout of the map itself. This would be fairly easy to do in a quick & dirty fashion, but that would probably end up sounding cheezy. Doing it halfway convincingly is the hard part...
Old Post 07-26-11 18:19 #
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Gez
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hex11 said:
But rather than these be controlled by some artificial "actor" placed by the mapper, they would occur in a more natural fashion, based on the textures and layout of the map itself. This would be fairly easy to do in a quick & dirty fashion, but that would probably end up sounding cheezy. Doing it halfway convincingly is the hard part...


You can expect hilarious results with all those badly-textured 1994 maps. :p
Old Post 07-26-11 18:26 #
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Graf Zahl
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Not only those. Automatic sound design will sound as bad as automatic dynamic light generation will look if applied to all textures that *might* emit some light.

It's an idea that just won't fly in Doom's context.
Old Post 07-26-11 20:20 #
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hex11
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I never said it would be easy. ;) Nor would I ever expect anything like this to turn out perfect or anything close to it. A map that uses textures in senseless ways would probably break any algorithm based on them. But there isn't really much else to go by in Doom. The world is divided into sectors that have textures in them, some of which (hopefully) represent something meaningful. For example, a bunch of computer textures might emit some computer noises in that sector. Some light/lamp textures in a flickering sector might emit some bulb noises. A lot of textures probably don't do anything at all... And it would probably work best to keep things subtle and err on the side of caution than overdo any ambient sounds. There has to be some probability and randomness, it can't be 100% deterministic. Even the sounds themselves would need to be dynamic to some extent. I'm sure it would get old fast if everytime you enter any sector where there's a somputer you hear the same damn computer sound. ;)
Old Post 07-26-11 21:51 #
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Vermil
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While I have no clue as to the actual practically, it doesn't sound outlandish that an algorithm could look at a texture to look for blocks (note I did not say individual pixels, let's say blocks of 3x3 minimum) of notably brighter pixels and if the sector's light level is high enough, automatically place a dlight on the block.

I mean, doesn't Luicus Dark Forces mod auto add a glow to lights on textures. While I haven't actually used the port, the screenshots seem to show it working pretty well.

For something closer to home, Doomsday features automatic dlight placement on full bright mobj states (naturally the user can overrule this auto placement if they wish). It seems to do a pretty good job.

Last edited by Vermil on 07-26-11 at 22:09
Old Post 07-26-11 21:54 #
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Graf Zahl
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Vermil said:
For something closer to home, Doomsday features automatic dlight placement on full bright mobj states (naturally the user can overrule this auto placement if they wish). It seems to do a pretty good job.



Not in The Absolution. There it created a complete mess and had to be disabled. Like everything automatic, sometimes it works but often it doesn't.
Old Post 07-26-11 22:17 #
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lucius
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Vermil said:
I mean, doesn't Luicus Dark Forces mod auto add a glow to lights on textures. While I haven't actually used the port, the screenshots seem to show it working pretty well.
This works because of the way the original textures were authored and the palette setup. The Jedi engine (the original engine for Dark Forces and Outlaws) has a set of indices in the palette that are full bright. These colors are always fully lit regardless of the sector brightness. DarkXL encodes an "emissive" value in the alpha channel of the texture which is used to achieve the same effect on hardware and also as a mask for the bloom filter. To put it another way, it's a natural extension of the existing data and this sort of thing is much harder to achieve when the relevant data doesn't exist.
Old Post 07-26-11 22:39 #
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Gez
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Such an effect is created in Strife with the COLORMAP lump making the last 32 colors constant for all light levels. (Harmony uses the same trick.) So the DarkXL approach could be used there too, by analyzing the COLORMAP lump to detect if there is such a hack for some color ranges.
Old Post 07-26-11 23:00 #
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RjY
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chungy said:
For curiosity, I just tried ZDoom for the first time in about three years again, on Linux. Considerably better, the game can actually run, but there's no music (sound effects are fine) and fullscreen mode is broken.
Hmm, I guess I need to steal your config. Which versions of zdoom/fmod were you using? What about your kernel version? Did you have to modprobe osscompat or anything like that?
Old Post 07-27-11 00:17 #
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The Ultimate DooMer
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hex11 said:
What I mean is more ambient sounds that occur based on the environment you find yourself in. For example, if there's water nearby you might hear running water, if there's a waterfall you might hear dripping/splashing water, if you go outside you might hear some wind, and so forth... But rather than these be controlled by some artificial "actor" placed by the mapper, they would occur in a more natural fashion, based on the textures and layout of the map itself.


It is possible to do this with things (I did this for crackling torches/fires in Serpent) using decorate, but textures would probably fail as has already been said.
Old Post 07-27-11 01:17 #
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chungy
Doomworld is so about bullshit excuses


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RjY said:
Hmm, I guess I need to steal your config. Which versions of zdoom/fmod were you using? What about your kernel version? Did you have to modprobe osscompat or anything like that?

ZDoom 2.5.0 and GZDoom 1.5.06 for both. I used fmodapi42816linux.tar.gz
kernel 2.6.39.3, and nope, didn't have to modprobe osscompat, but I use PulseAudio as well which has its own wrap-around to support OSS applications.
Old Post 07-27-11 01:36 #
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Vermil
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Graf Zahl said:



Not in The Absolution. There it created a complete mess and had to be disabled. Like everything automatic, sometimes it works but often it doesn't.


The system has been improved allot since that version of Doomsday (1.7.14 IIRC). You can see a difference between 1.8.6 and beta 6.9 for instance.

Obviously yes, an automatic algorithm will never be perfect, hence why Doomsday allows you to overrule the automatic placement if you wish to.


The Ultimate DooMer said:


It is possible to do this with things (I did this for crackling torches/fires in Serpent) using decorate, but textures would probably fail as has already been said.


One issue is the number of sound channels available. You could overrun them with sounds attached to every scenery mobj, leading to other more important sounds not playing.

Doom also has no way to control the distance a sound is heard from meaning you would hear a torch flame burning from the same distance you would hear heavy machinery. Walls don't block sounds in Doom either.

Both features that would be cool to have (i.e a field attached to a sound def that controls how far away it is heard from), but as is my understanding prohibitivly difficult to add to Doom.

Last edited by Vermil on 07-27-11 at 08:29
Old Post 07-27-11 08:03 #
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The Ultimate DooMer
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True, but the number of channels can be raised in ZDoom to prevent the issue (I use 255 after running into that very problem). The volume and audible distance can also be controlled using the decorate method I used.
Old Post 07-27-11 12:16 #
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Vermil
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I guess that you have the scenery mobj "attack" the player when they get within a certain range. The attack states then make the sound.
Old Post 07-27-11 12:25 #
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DaniJ
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Graf Zahl said:

Not in The Absolution. There it created a complete mess and had to be disabled. Like everything automatic, sometimes it works but often it doesn't.

The reason it was disabled was because the Absolution team wanted to draw all objects full-bright (even medikits and shotguns). Earlier versions of Doomsday were designed around the idea that a full-bright object emits light and the automatic dynlight algorithm kicked in on everything.

Considering the Absolution team ended up rolling their own version of the engine, I would have personally just changed the logic but instead the feature was disabled entirely.
Old Post 07-29-11 17:12 #
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