No 2 Player Splitscreen Allowed [Solution Found!] A tale of social Dooming gone wrong

Ahh, the way of modern FPS players. Every friend of mine who loves FPS also uses a 360 controller, and couldn't use a Mouse+Keyboard if their life depended on it. But hey, mass marketing has taken it's course and this is where we stand.

It's no secret that Zandronum [previously Skulltag] has sexcellent joystick support. I mean, I've tried everything from the old SNES-style button layout to the modern 360/PS3 settings, and I have to say, it works like a damn charm. (The triggers may not work quite right, but hey, I'm not a nitpicker.)

So those of us DooMers who have friends over at their house may already know where I'm going with this. watching your friend play through your maps using a trusty 360 controller is great and all, but wouldn't it be nice to have a splitscreen Doom-a-thon, me on the keyboard and mouse, and him on the 360 controller? Fark yeah!...

But then to my dismay, I visit the Zandronum forums and see a thread asking about potential split-screen support, and the dude asking gets told "No, it's very difficult and may not happen" but also actually gets berated by the anti-social, telling him splitscreen is pointless, only fags use splitscreen etc. [Not that exaggerated, but seriously this guy was treated like shit by half of the responders]

In the thread, a helpful Doomer reccomends Doom Legacy because it has splitscreen support, and can even handle one person on controller, and one on Mouse+Keyboard. "Fucking Amazing", I thought. I booted up legacy, started a 2 player splitscreen game, then shortly realized you can't map any new functions to your joysticks, so you have to Turn and Walk with the left joystick, and the right joystick doesn't even seem to be recognized at all.

At this point, I've already poured hours and hours of searching for a way to do this, and I finally stumble accross a thread reccomending a "Game Profiler". This allows you to map wahtever button or joystick function to an actual key on the keyboard. He reccomended Pinnacle Game Profiler. So, I install it, set up all my directories and whatnot, and of-fucking-course, it crashes on startup, telling me my version of windows is incompatable.. The program is designed for Windows 7, and thats exactly what I'm running... Uggghhh, fuck these damn errors off already!... More time hunting, restarting the computer, re-installing older and newer versions, all to no avail. >:(

Eventually I download 'NeTo Game Profiler' because Pinnacle obviously hates me. I start up the program, and.. It doesn't really make much sense. No way to select a ddevice, no response from my 360 controller whatsoever, only built in Profile being for the spanish version of Max Payne, and no way to make a new profile. Bullshit.

So, here's the end of my tale - I don't want to buy a second computer to play Doom. Wastes power, space, time, money, brain cells etc. Zandronum will never, EVER have splitscreen support [don't even think about asking!] and Doom Legacy just happens to be from the stone age. Game Profilers let me down, and this is after countless hours of slogging through the web.

What I'd like to know is - Has anyone else gone down this road? Is there any solution? [[[Is there some way me and a console-gaming-friend can comfortably play Doom 2 on the same computer?]]]

Anyone who responds to this or even just reads it, thanks for your time. If I find a solution to this, it could be helpful for thousands and thousands of doomers out there, some who don't even know they're Doomers yet. Thank you!!

ReMooD is built of Doom Legacy 1.42 and has 4-player splitscreen. Idk how good it runs, considering I haven't tried it, but if you end up having to use a game profiler again, use JoyToKey, the only good game profiler.

Tried XPadder?
http://www.xpadder.com/

I forget the details, but I'm fairly sure that should -- one way or another -- let you get on with what you want to do.

I would love to see split screen support in Odamex simply because there is a nitch audience that plays it on their hacked Xboxes. However for the same reasons Zandronum will never support it, Odamex probably never will either.

Have you tried ReMooD?

I agree - ReMood is most like the best solution atm.

3DGE supports two-player splitscreen as well, but the controls are unmappable for the second player for now. I've been meaning to get that fixed. You can in theory still play it two player, but it's funky (it's a keyboard/mouse combination, so it works fine for people who are right next to each other). The first thing I want to do is get Joystick action in for the second player, so the next version of 3DGE will definitely have it.

As a source port developer myself: please try to be understanding. It may not be obvious if you're not a programmer, but split-screen is a feature that requires a huge amount of internal refactoring to support. It's not something you can just add without a lot of effort. Plus, it's hard to see why it's necessary nowadays - computers, especially cheap netbooks, are so cheap and readily available that it's hard to see why it's worth the effort. I'm sure it's disappointing if you really want this feature but try to see it from the developers' perspective.

I got this same setup working on an older version of Legacy - 1.42 I think. Only problem was there was a restriction to vanilla or selected limit removing PWADs as voodoo dolls did not work correctly in whatever version it was. This was using WinXP as well.

Thanks a lot Baron, and everyone else for your helpful input. Xpadder works so easily and effortlessly. Doom Legacy splitscreen with Xpadder is the definitive soultion to this problem, (or any source port that has splitscreen, really) Soon enough I'll make a youtube tutorial explaining it for those who interested here and elsewhere :)

fraggle said:

I'm sure it's disappointing if you really want this feature but try to see it from the developers' perspective.

I understand, I really appreciate everything that all source port developers have done for keeping Doom ticking. It's not the developers I was upset with so much as the attitude a lot of n00bs had when the question came up. :P

Thanks again for the help!

Doomkid92 said:

But then to my dismay, I visit the Zandronum forums and see a thread asking about potential split-screen support, and the dude asking gets told "No, it's very difficult and may not happen" but also actually gets berated by the anti-social, telling him splitscreen is pointless, only fags use splitscreen etc. [Not that exaggerated, but seriously this guy was treated like shit by half of the responders]

This is unfortunately a consequence of such a feature being requested so frequently. The regulars tend to grow annoyed and lash out at the newcomers who start the same thread they've already seen a dozen times.


Besides Doom Legacy and ReMooD, there's also Doomsday that has some measure of splitscreen support (though I think it's not yet in a playable state).

I have a split screen Doom set up at my house. It was a little expensive to set up though, but the result is pretty sweet. It involves a wide screen TV with side-by-side Picture in Picture settings (these were popular in the early 2000s, they're tough to find these days), an adapter that converts VGA signals to S-Video, two PCs, a router, and ethernet cables. I connect the computers to two different video inputs on the TV in the S-video slots, set up the PIP mode, I turn both PCs on, connect them together with ethernet cables through a router, creating a home LAN network, run a server on one of the PCs, then run Odamex on both PCs and connect to the server through the ingame console. I've also got XPadder and two controllers for each PC. Both PCs have all vanilla compatible single player and deathmatch PWADs from the /idgames archive, plus wads from the Master Levels, and a bunch of shovelware Doom CDs.

It's kind of a nightmare to set up, it takes almost a half hour unless I make a checklist of the things I need to do in order. I also made a ton of command line aliases which speeds things up a little too. Still yet, the end result is pretty awesome. We can play coop, Nightmare coop, deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag, even connect to servers and play online with other people. The trouble is that with how much money I invested in it (close to $500), I can hardly find enough people willing to play it with me.

I feel for you though, Doomkid. It really should be as hard as it is. Its a shame how antisocial we've become, because some of my fondest memories were beating up thugs with my buddies on Streets of Rage, ripping each other's hearts out on Mortal Kombat, and stealing each other's lives on Contra. Now all multiplayer is done with internet handles with people you don't know and won't do so much as go to someones house to play a video game.

40oz, your solution sounds a bit overly complex, considering even actual vanilla could run a LAN netgame without the need for a server and if they're directly connected to eachother with today's hardware I can't forsee any issues. Hell, ZDoom isn't a multi-player oriented port and I've still had many successful LAN experiences (either from seperate rooms or 2-3 of us in one room with laptops and/or a PC) with my brothers, so with your split-screen set up that'd be even better!

Gez said:

This is unfortunately a consequence of such a feature being requested so frequently. The regulars tend to grow annoyed and lash out at the newcomers who start the same thread they've already seen a dozen times.

That's still no excuse for some of the shitty treatment of newer players I've witnessed on those forums... A very pretentious atmosphere indeed, but at least they know what they're doing.

Phobus said:

40oz, your solution sounds a bit overly complex, considering even actual vanilla could run a LAN netgame without the need for a server and if they're directly connected to eachother with today's hardware I can't forsee any issues. Hell, ZDoom isn't a multi-player oriented port and I've still had many successful LAN experiences (either from seperate rooms or 2-3 of us in one room with laptops and/or a PC) with my brothers, so with your split-screen set up that'd be even better!

Yeah but Vanilla doom doesn't have as good joystick support, it also excludes CTF, crosshairs, changing colors of the marines, changing names, and many of the DMflags that are fun to play with, such as double ammo, infinite ammo, friendly fire, etc. Also you load wads right from the console in Odamex, which saves a lot of time (and is fun to do.)

I ran an open source project for a while and the simple fact is that the features you get are going to be what the developers are interested in. It's hard enough to find the time do work on a project for free, let alone if you are trying to add things you aren't interested in. And as was said, I'm sure split screen would be a pretty major effort.

40oz, although your set up is so complex, that's really sweet. The world needs more Doomers, now that I've got splitscreen legacy set up with 2 xbox controllers with one emulating a WSDA setup, player 1 can drop the controller and pick up the keyboard+mouse at any point if they want, no fuss at all.

If someone doesn't have money to spend on a set up, I couldn't reccomend this more. It's the funnest shit having 2 players availible with ease at any time, and the best thing is Legacy is actually a pretty accurate Dos-Doom-ish experience, and the added blood is still awesome too.

I'm really glad I found a solution to this, thanks again to everyone for the input. Any people who ask for splitscreen doom with modern 360 control setup on my YT channel, I can just instantly send them here for their answer.

Gez said:

Besides Doom Legacy and ReMooD, there's also Doomsday that has some measure of splitscreen support (though I think it's not yet in a playable state).

Splitscreen in Doomsday is fully playable however there is no easy way for users to configure a game. Presently the configuration must be done manually from the console (joining players to the session, binding appropriate controls, etc...).

As others have already mentioned, implementing splitscreen support is a huge amount of effort however once present its worth it if for nothing else but SoC reasons.

DaniJ said:
Splitscreen in Doomsday is fully playable however there is no easy way for users to configure a game. Presently the configuration must be done manually from the console (joining players to the session, binding appropriate controls, etc...).

so if doomsday splitscreen mode is playable through manual configuration does anyone know how?

I'm kinda "dying" to know :)

I've been wondering if it would be easier to just make the Doom client (Zandronum, ZDoom, whatever) not pause gameplay/sound when losing focus. Then all that needs to be done is to run two instances of the game at once (with separate config files for inputs and such per 'screen') and arrange the windows accordingly.

Not super elegant, and there's also the issue of things like HUD size/the menu/whether to cut off the top and bottom or not (like Legacy does), but those are secondary issues and most machines nowadays are more than capable of running two instances at once.

From a developer's standpoint, this probably wouldn't be too tough to integrate into the game itself (Zandronum at least, since it's multiplayer oriented), as opposed to worrying about having two renders in the same game per se.

The big problem is receiving input with no focus...