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Blastfrog

Freedoom is huge

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FreeDM comes in at 18.2MB, 2.3MB of that being the maps. Phase 1 comes in at 19.3MB, 8.9MB of that being the maps. Phase 2 is a whopping 29.0MB, 13.8MB of that being the maps.

29 megs is hardly acceptable for a simple Doom-style IWAD, in my opinion. Maybe for an extensive TC, but not for a simple clone of Doom's structure. I propose slimming it down, possibly with the following methods.

  • Downsample and trim sounds. Cap crisp sounds at 16khz, but use 11.025khz if it's not very crisp. Definitely cut out silence or extreme quiet toward the end of sounds.

  • Crop the excess space on first person guns. Leave 1 extra line below the supposed visible end for the ports that let it "float" by 1 screen line in hi res modes.

  • Simplify maps, especially the big and very detailed ones. Extra detail is nice but not necessary. Make dummy sectors as simple as physically possible (turn into triangles in most cases). Excess vertices should be deleted on smooth curves. Identical or extremely similar sectors should be merged. After that, continue to trim detail in a more general sense. Let no map be bigger than 400KB, and prevent the entire set from exceeding 7MB.

  • I'd argue that some of the maps should be simplified from a gameplay standpoint too, some drag on for too long and are thus unfun. Cutting entire rooms would be an improvement for some levels, let alone being an easy way to reduce file size.
No Freedoom IWAD should exceed 20MB. Does anyone agree?

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I think that an arbitrary limit like 400 kb is not really a good way to make good maps; at least not maps that were not designed originally with that limitation in mind.

I also think that the average hard disk drive in 1995 had a capacity in the hundreds of megabytes, whereas the average hard disk drive in 2015 has a capacity reaching one terabyte, an increase in capacity over a thousandfold.

I also think that Internet bandwidth in 1995 and in 2015 had a comparable evolution, going from slow and expensive phone modems to fast and cheap DSL or fiber optic connexions.

So given all these things, and given that Freedoom Phase 2 corresponds not just to Doom II but also to TNT and Plutonia as far as texture compatibility is concerned, and that the maps are made targeting Boom-compatibility with its extended features and removed limits instead of VPO-prone vanilla compatibility, a mere doubling in size is perfectly acceptable and fine. If Freedoom P2 was 145 megabytes, I'd agree with you that it's too fat, but it's not the case.

For reference:
Ultimate Doom: 12118 kb
Doom II: 14263 kb
TNT: 18218 kb
Plutonia: 17813 kb
And for further reference:
Heretic SOTSR: 13858 kb
Hexen: 19613 kb
Deathkings: 23950 kb (including size of Hexen.wad)
Strife: 54392 kb (including size of Voices.wad)

Size of map data (in bytes):
Ult. Doom: 3622871 / 36 maps (avg size: 100k)
Doom II: 3103302 / 32 (97k)
TNT: 5204839 / 32 (162k)
Plut: 4616378 / 32 (144k)
SOTSR: 6608947 / 45 (147k)
Hexen: 4892956 / 31 (158k)
Deathkings: 4105009 / 26 (158k)
Strife (counting SCRIPT* lumps): 10000558 / 34 (294k)
Strife (ignoring SCRIPT* lumps): 9397190 / 34 (276k)


I can get behind trimming down Freedoom maps to improve their gameplay. However, I think it wouldn't be a good idea to trim them down just to trim them down. Freedoom's overall size is fine. Phase 2 is barely larger than Strife's IWAD, Phase 1 + Phase 2 is smaller than Strife's IWAD + the voices pack.

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I think Freedoom would do well to focus less on meeting arbitrary technical quantifications and more on being a good game. It needs to be reworked because it's 30 megabytes? That's the reasoning? Are you kidding me?

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esselfortium said:

I think Freedoom would do well to focus less on meeting arbitrary technical quantifications and more on being a good game. It needs to be reworked because it's 30 megabytes?

Given the kind of content it is, 30 megabytes seems a bit excessive, but that's just me. While Phase 1 still has tiny placeholder maps that reduce its size, Phase 2 is disproportionately larger than the other Freedoom IWADs.

And I am concerned about its quality, moreso than its size. I've been trying to get this damn thing replaced for years:


smoke_th said:

Reaction fire from IRC was...well...burning.

Oddly hostile. No need for the sheer amount of insults even if they disagree with me.

Da Werecat said:

I can understand being anal about arbitrary details

A friend once told me that I'm "German as fuck, dude". :P

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I made a freedoom-lite. It is probably lost, and not very good. It was extremely small and needed a pwad for maps. I would not mind if someone made a lite fork. Remember Freedoom also contains final doom resources. It is 4 games in one. Lite fork could focus only on vanilla doom2 support, without final doom stuff.

Would be another reason to kickstart vanilla-freedoom.

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Sodaholic said:

Freedoom is huge

something something HUGE GUTS!

Seriously though, people mock Freedoom because of its poor asset quality. Crippling serious effort to improve it with arbitrary size limitations is a good way to reduce it to irrelevance again. Not to mention you'd have to parcel the contributions and set limits for every type of asset, otherwise people would "steal capacity" from each other. My sprite is cool and large and it was here first, so you need to make yours look good with a ridiculously harsh size limit!

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This mean i should redit my maps to trim them out so it can fit the size of doom wads? so i can start working on it to check how i can lower the size of my maps before working on my projects.

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Z0k said:

This mean i should redit my maps to trim them out so it can fit the size of doom wads? so i can start working on it to check how i can lower the size of my maps before working on my projects.

Don't be too concerned with that. I was more complaining about the excess detail and tedious gameplay in the existing maps, as well as the overall size of the Phase 2 IWAD.

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I dunno about file size, but I'm all for a vanilla version or spinoff of Freedoom, and I don't mean just the FreeDM wad. Chocolate Doom and other related vanilla ports don't seem to have a problem with the resources (besides the HOM and VPO due to map designed for Boom).

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i dont agrre whit it the good point of freedoom 2 is the maps if you reduce the quality less players will like it, but i may say to let this dicussion to happen later maybe on future we cn think it better.

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dew said:

something something HUGE GUTS!

I knew I'd find a Doom Comic reference somewhere in this thread.

Apart from whatever obvious bloat there may be I don't think there's any need to fuss about filesize until Freedoom's inched close to a 1.0 release.

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GreyGhost said:

Apart from whatever obvious bloat there may be I don't think there's any need to fuss about filesize until Freedoom's inched close to a 1.0 release.

Yeah, I made this thread to bring the matter up for discussion, never too early to have these kinds of discussions, IMO. It's hardly a big deal by today's standards of internet speed and storage capacity, but it seems a bit unoptimized given that it's supposed to be a stand-in for the standard content that never exceeded 15MB, I thought that it's a tad unoptimized.

People take me too seriously, thinking that I'm bitching when really I'm just trying to have a constructive discussion about something I thought was kinda off.

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Sodaholic said:

the standard content that never exceeded 15MB

Look at Final Doom again...

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Sodaholic said:

29 megs is hardly acceptable for a simple Doom-style IWAD, in my opinion.

I disagree entirely. 29 megs is not particularly big these days and while it may be big compared to the original IWAD, so what? That kind of size shouldn't be causing anyone a problem these days and deliberately creating unnecessary limits that would force contributors to compromise what they are trying to do (and goodness knows, people contributing are few and far between these days anyway) seems like a major mistake to me.

I'm not saying that size should be ignored entirely. An effort should be made to be efficient but I think that artificially restricting things just to get the game below some arbitrary limit is a bad idea.

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The size of freedom is not the biggest problem, if one could call it a problem.
I agree, it is big compared to the original doom and the reasons why, are simply not obvious.

It is a great project with a nice goal made by people when they have the time for it, so
realize the fact that i know and understand. So i will sum up what i think the problems are ;

1) The title screen immediately yells ; weird ms-paint, and not epic hobby project.
2) The maps are tedious, long, unclear around whats what, and not even an emulation of doom.
3) i always feel the colors (maybe the pallete ?) are off.

And i stress point 2, a good game emulating doom does not equal gigantic or big maze maps with
no clue, reason, or logic. :/

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Sodaholic said:

No Freedoom IWAD should exceed 20MB. Does anyone agree?

Nope.

It's 2015, we all have terabyte hard drives and fast Internet connections that can download at megabytes per second. This is no big deal at all.

I know it seems weird and hard to accept - I think that sometimes too, when I think about how my computer has gigabytes of memory inside it while my first PC in 1993 only had 8 meg. But times have changed. The concerns you're expressing aren't important any more.

Why expend time and effort making the maps look worse, decreasing the quality of sound effects, etc.? Waste of time, and doesn't make any sense.

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