So What does this port have to offer that zdoom dosent

Exactly what the thread says

Exactly exactly? I guess liked poralts.

It has better dehacked support and an unencumbered license. Also, it doesn't support Brutal Doom.

i see...

-vanilla for recording demos that are compatible with vanilla doom.
And awesome rendering.

silverdeth said:

So What does this port have to offer that zdoom dosent

It can render demon flat seamless

Eternity:



ZDoom:

SoM is actually pretty proud of the highly accurate flat rendering in Cardboard ;)

The main distinctive features of Eternity which aren't perfectly replicated in ZDoom would be, of course...

• Linked portals (not entirely finished but functional enough to be used in releasable maps)
  
• Superior portals in general without spontaneous rendering glitches in the software renderer.
  
• Runtime WAD loading capability, including native support for Master Levels and NR4TL as episodes which don't interfere with the ability to play the IWAD or other mods, or require modifying your original data in any way.
  
• High compatibility, including ability to play back and record vanilla v1.9 demos, and ability to play back demos to differing degrees from Boom, MBF, PrBoom 2.02, and TASDoom. Some earlier Eternity versions are also still supported, though virtually no such demos exist anyway.
  
• Lack of changes to core game play which appear to have been done in ZDoom simply because of author preference or overly enthusiastic pursuit of theoretical correctness over needed/expected vanilla behavior (invisibility spheres acting like Shadowspheres, translucent lost souls, wall running disabled, inability to perform item bumps, tying down certain compat options only to a whitelist of maps, changes to semantics of Doom linedefs in pursuit of Hexen support which break maps developed for vanilla or BOOM compat w/o ZDoom testing [ie. allowing a tag on a Doom map's DR doors to mean anything other than Boom's dynamic lighting feature]).
  
• Somewhat better compatibility with some DeHackEd patches, but this gap has narrowed over the years as compared to the state of affairs circa ZDoom 1.22 where it was quite dramatic, so, credit to the ZDoom guys on fixing some of that stuff.
  

There have been other differences through the years but many of them have been closed by development on either side. For example, Eternity was first to have ability to freely specify all actors, but DECORATE obtained this ability a couple of months afterward. Eternity had superior polyobjects for a year or so thanks to Dynasegs, and this was evened out with addition of similar code to ZDoom (a small portion of which is thanks to my code).

Take whatever you want from all this but people who prefer my port tell me they do so because they feel it better preserves and respects the look and feel of the original game while offering needed modernities (high resolutions, support for all aspect ratios, uncapped framerate, extremely high quality audio engine, XInput support, console, Quake-style keybindings, etc.)

Quasar said:

wall running

I never liked this bug. I was hoping it will be compatibility optioned eventually.

entryway said:

It can render demon flat seamless

Now this is really good.

silverdeth said:

So What does this port have to offer that zdoom dosent

Things like this.

I've always considered Eternity to be a compromise between PrBoom+ and ZDoom.

Doom_user said:

I've always considered Eternity to be a compromise between PrBoom+ and ZDoom.

From what WAD is that from good sir.

Doom_user said:

this.

Gez said:

Thank you. Doesn't look like I'm going to be attempting something like that anytime soon after looking at that in Doom Builder. Seems like too much effort for Room over Room effects.

i mainly use zdoom due to its swiss army knife game support but over the years eternity has implemented a lot of the little quality of life things that i appreciate in zdoom and quasar is diligently maintaining its status as one of the top-tier doom ports, if not the most used. im currently using it to play the alpha accident beta, which does at least one thing in DEH that zdoom cant do, not that i am comfortable dumping wraiths private beta to the devs to figure out why. it would be cool if people made more levels for eternity but like doom64ex it is a port that is largely unrecognized by the community.

eternity would probably be my go-to port if it weren't for the menus :(

I agree with you completely, kmxexii. It seems like anything that isn't vanilla, boom, or zdoom based doesn't get much mapping attention in comparison.

jmickle66666666 said:

eternity would probably be my go-to port if it weren't for the menus :(

Any specific feedback on how to improve them would be appreciated, since I hear this all the time. Frankly they're not much different from the Boom/MBF/PrBoom menus, and have been improved a lot since the mess that they were in as of SMMU, but I do acknowledge that a lot of people have some problems with the design.

What I don't get, pretty much ever, is any kind of quantification of what's wrong/off about them - ie., is it strictly organizational, navigational, aesthetic, or what.

One thing I do not tend to understand is how the ZDoom menu system can be considered good, when it requires scrolling through utterly huge lists of items that are offscreen. There's no means to tell what's even on a given menu page without scrolling through the entire thing. You could say the same thing about Eternity's pages, but for the fact there's a Table of Contents widget which can be brought up to fast-jump to any page in the menu by its title.

I don't know if my peeves in EE's menu are the same as anyone else's, but here you go:

- No wraparound. "Down" on the last item doesn't go back to the first item, and inversely "up" on the first doesn't jump to the last. "Right" on the last option in a list doesn't go back to the first, and "left" on the first doesn't jump to the last.
- Inconsistent behavior between binary options and list options. On binary options (e.g., "HOM detector flashes: on/off", you use enter to change the value. The left and right key have no effect. On lists, like "Favorite aspect ratio: legacy/5:4/4:3/3:2/16:10/5:3/WSVGA/16:9", it's the reverse, you move with left and right and enter has no effect.

Make the enter key behave as the left key in option lists, the left and right keys behave as enter in binary choices, add wraparound, and I'll be happy.

Gez said:

I don't know if my peeves in EE's menu are the same as anyone else's, but here you go:

- No wraparound. "Down" on the last item doesn't go back to the first item, and inversely "up" on the first doesn't jump to the last. "Right" on the last option in a list doesn't go back to the first, and "left" on the first doesn't jump to the last.
- Inconsistent behavior between binary options and list options. On binary options (e.g., "HOM detector flashes: on/off", you use enter to change the value. The left and right key have no effect. On lists, like "Favorite aspect ratio: legacy/5:4/4:3/3:2/16:10/5:3/WSVGA/16:9", it's the reverse, you move with left and right and enter has no effect.

Make the enter key behave as the left key in option lists, the left and right keys behave as enter in binary choices, add wraparound, and I'll be happy.

Actually you can wrap around, but it's not intuitive. Hold down the Ctrl key, IIRC, and you'll wrap to the top of the page rather than going to the next page. It was an attempt at a compromise at not *requiring* the pageup/down keys for page navigation but still allowing wrap. Probably requires total rethinking.

The widget input inconsistencies are inherited from SMMU. I can admit to them having bothered me in the past as well.

I'll take these suggestions to heart once I can finally get back to EE dev which I hope will be around mid-November or December, but may have to balance them against the inevitable suggestions which are going to tell me to throw the entire multi-thousand-lines-of-code menu system out and start completely fresh, which seems really like something I do not want to do :V

oh no i dislike prboom's (and similar) too. I think zdoom's does its job somewhat to a passable extent but still has some issues.

The basic problem of the UI is knowing where to go to find things, and seeing at a glance what I can access. The "pages" system of boom and eternity immediately disrupts that, because you don't know what is on each page. This could be improved instantly with Tabs across the top with descriptions of each page's content. However this feels like fixing problems of a broken system instead of building a tight system.

Ideally (as far as I can see, with only a little experience in UI design) I'd like to see each section of information on just one page, and each of those pages accessible through a tree.

For instance maybe every option in doom can be split into 5 groups:
Graphics, Audio, Controls, Compatibility, Game

and in say Controls we have:
Keyboard settings, Mouse settings

and each section continues like this until every option screen can fit on just one page.


Specific issues I have with the current menu system:

Input/Output is combining both graphic options and controls. This makes no sense from a player perspective, and I without fail ALWAYS look past this when looking to change control settings. The term Input/Output is confusing, to boot.

Game Widgets doesn't help describe it's contents at all. You have to read all of the options underneath to know it's contents, which defeats the point of having a title at all.

I've gone into the options menu and it's not immediately obvious what is on the next page. This is something pervasive of Eternity and Boom's menus, the user must know where to go to find what they need, or else search the unintuitive system. This may sound petty but the entire point of a UI system is to make sure the player can get to what they want as quickly as possible.

Also, pressing Escape here takes you completely out of all menus. This isn't standard behaviour for menu systems. I see that pressing backspace will take me back a page which makes sense when you think about it, but is still not standard. Escape should go back to the main menu.

All the text is center-aligned which is terrible for readability.


The keys screen is a page that is difficult to make perfect. However, since it is going to be a clusterfuck, you can totally run with it. Try to put as many keys on screen as possible, and make it a scrolling list. Looking at what is on the second page, a little reorganization could fit all of it onto one page anyway.

Here is also a problem with using backspace to go back, usually backspace is used to clear a key in make games' key config screens. It feels dirty and wrong to use it to go back a page :P


This is probably the most frustrating settings page of all.

Mode: what does mode mean? what am I choosing when I select Choose A Mode? Why is that the only option in the entire options (probably) that is phrased with a verb, rather than just the option you are changing. Turns out it is Resolution! Why not call it resolution instead?

Directly underneath that we have... video mode. What is video mode? It's resolution again! But this time.... we get to type it? Why do we ever need to do this? can we set any specific resolution? If so: why not put a "custom" option in the choose a mode... menu? and in the custom part have 2 number fields, not one text field!!

Favorite Aspect Ratio: Why is this favourite? can the aspect ratio change? genuine question. This option also changes just by using left&right keys, instead of pressing enter before changing it, like the previous two options. This wouldn't be a problem, but it highlights in the exact same way. Put some arrows next to it or something! Also: what is Legacy exactly? Maybe see if you can fit hint text somewhere? Not sure.

Favourite Screen Mode: Is this similar to choose a mode... somehow? No! It's windowed/fullscreen! The standard for this is to have the option called Fullscreen: then yes/no or true/false. Favourite Screen Mode is a super weird phrase to use. Also: this uses Enter to change it again! Why not left and right as well? Make shit easy for the user!

Vertical Sync: The first option on the screen that hasn't been confusing. Still has the issue of using Enter to change, but that's already been covered.

Gamma Correction: Sliders! Cool! Works /exactly/ how i expect it to, and the name makes sense. I can even see the results straight away! (albeit not in-game, but that's fine)


Rendering:
No specific complaints with the name of the header, it vaguely makes sense. Reordering the page to have more distinct sections could mean you have much more descriptive headers, though.

Screen Size: Ok, another slider! these work fine right? wrong. When you change this value, the screen MELTS. It literally does this. Now this is because you need to preview the results to the player, so you show the demo (or ingame shot). That's... interesting because you are editing a slider, yet you barely even USE the slider, you edit it with a game view. I'd personally fix this by getting rid of the slider, press Enter to edit screen size, and go to the gameview with some text saying "press left/right to change screen size" and press enter when you are done. (Skipping any screen transitions it wants to do!!) I'm not sure there is any situation when you'd need to see the slider at all. It just confuses the player with the game view.

HOM Detector Flashes: This could be improved with some hint text too. I'm thinking that the bottom text should instead of saying the controls you need to use (which is unnecessary with an intuitive system) it should describe what the option/current selection does. Also uses enter to change and not left/right.

Translucency: Uses enter to change and not left/right.

Translucency Percentage: Should be a slider! The user doesn't care what the exact percentage is! And, giving them a text field just opens it up for mistakes.


OK I was gonna talk about the next page, and it turns out there are no less than FIVE pages. What is on these pages? I checked through and the problems are all mentioned above, but this needs some SERIOUS reorganization. If you have 5 pages of options, feel free to make 5 sub-menus and select which one you need!


Sound options:

lol why do you have an equalizer. has anyone ever used this seriously? heh, essel tells me he does.

Compatability: An option to enter the compatflags value would be nice, and presets. I never edit the values manually, I only ever wanna switch between doom (strict) and like, the most leniant option. You should always be ABLE to set individual settings, but the presets are 100% important.

Status bar > Numbers Like Doom: call this "dynamic number colouring" or something. currently this is like "Hi, do you want the normal doom numbers, or something that ISN'T the normal doom numbers" and i'm like "uh i have zero clue what the other option is, other than it isn't doom numbers"



wow sorry that was a lot of stuff. I have a BUNCH more crits but i'll stop now, I really hope this can help someway and doesn't just come off as a rant.

I use the EQ...

I agree the menus could use some major work though. I'm accustomed to them from using EE a lot, but they still have issues. I did a mockup menu design for Quasar a few years ago, but implementing it would have meant having to totally redo the menu code from scratch, so nothing came of it.

Quasar said:

Actually you can wrap around, but it's not intuitive. Hold down the Ctrl key, IIRC, and you'll wrap to the top of the page rather than going to the next page. It was an attempt at a compromise at not *requiring* the pageup/down keys for page navigation but still allowing wrap. Probably requires total rethinking.

No, going to next page is fine with me because I'd rather have that than having to switch between down arrow and page down. I meant last item from last page <--> first item from first page wraparound.

kmxexii said:

quasar is diligently maintaining its status as one of the top-tier doom ports, if not the most used.

I honestly thought(still do) that Eternity was underrated and underused.

Eternity Engine definitely needs Complevels though if it doesn't already have that.

Eternity Engine is actually my go-to port for vanilla Dooming. ZDoom is awesome and Randy and Graf have done some amazing work with it, but Eternity Engine just feels much better for some reason.

Sandstormer said:

Eternity Engine is actually my go-to port for vanilla Dooming. ZDoom is awesome and Randy and Graf have done some amazing work with it, but Eternity Engine just feels much better for some reason.

Yeah. I like Zdoom and Gzdoom, but that is mostly because of the pwads. Eternity IMO just feels really stable, solid and commercial like. The artwork, menu background, Master levels support, and sound settings, and other stuff, just make Doom brand new again. I don't know how it can be so vanilla and compatible, yet very advanced at the same time. I do think Eternity seriously needs portmidi or external command variable (doesn't need dependencies) implemented for Linux; SDL just doesn't have good midi in Linux, and not everyone uses soundfonts (but even soundfont rendering isn't right).

BTW any chance Eternity will add Saturn support? I know it's a bad port but the resources on Saturn port is higher quality than PSX. I'm not sure about exact resolution of Saturn Doom (320x240?) but it's definitely higher than PSX (256x224).

Holering said:

BTW any chance Eternity will add Saturn support? I know it's a bad port but the resources on Saturn port is higher quality than PSX. I'm not sure about exact resolution of Saturn Doom (320x240?) but it's definitely higher than PSX (256x224).

The PSX version was actually 256x240, not 256x224. Of course, given TV overscan, those top and bottom 8 lines are not visible unless your TV is set to underscan (and that's never on consumer grade units). Even though they did cover the full 240 lines, they clearly designed it with only 224 being visible in mind, hence the 8 pixel gap under the status bar.

As far as I can tell, the Saturn version is the same way as the PSX version with with 320 pixels to work with per-line instead of 256.

Right. I'm mostly interested (not because it's a bad port) because the resources aren't available in this quality, and the sounds play at wrong sample rate in game. With all the hubbub about Aubrey Hodges Arch-Vile sounds supposedly being done, I'm surprised nobody has ripped the Saturn WAD by now. Would've done it myself by now, but ripping console WADS is beyond my experience.