mapping for the Multiplayer source ports.

what are the limits of each of the mp source ports for mapping how will it affect the game online if a map is complex? Thank you for reading and your time.

It literally the same as SP

It depends on your connection IIRC

what is odemex? Vanilla based, zdoom based or boom based? are there any boom based mp source ports?

Odamex is multiplayer sourceport that retains the vanilla feel Doom and enhances it.

Its most likely Zdoom based.

As for your question, im not aware of any Boom based MP sourceports.
But there are sourceports with Vanilla MP

Odamex is technically ZDoom-based, but since it's based on an old version of ZDoom, it doesn't support modern ZDoom features.

FWIW I'm 99% certain that most, if not all MP source ports support boom format maps, so if that's your preference, have at it!

scifista42 said:

Odamex is technically ZDoom-based, but since it's based on an old version of ZDoom, it doesn't support modern ZDoom features.

I'm pretty sure it's even gone out of its way to change some things from said version of ZDoom back to how they were in vanilla Doom.

I mean, it has demo compatibility, if I'm not mistaken.

Mapping "for odamex" means mapping for all 3 main ports. In-game wise for mapping, there is nothing odamex can do that is unique to itself. If you enjoy limiting yourself to basic things and making multiplayer maps for a port with 3 players who will probably never play the maps regularly, this is for you. Odamex supports zdoom - doom in hexen format as it's most advanced, but not all the functions work. ACS is extremely limited.

Mapping "for zdaemon" is similar, in that it will PROBABLY work on odamex, but might not, it will most likely work for zandronum, I think zd has 1 or 2 niche features that don't work on zandronum but I don't know what these are. ACS is a bit more supported here, DECORATE is not. There are still some lingering players and so far as I know, server hosts are likely to host your wad if asked. People may play the wad.

Mapping "for zandronum" provides the most flexibility in terms of features. Currently Zandronum is the equal of zdoom 2.5 and will soon be 2.7(1?) when 3.0 is released. Supports extensive ACS and DECORATE, pk3s and simpler wad compiling (much easier than fucking around with TEXTURE1 with the other ports), advanced features such as 3D floors and UDMF format. You can easily host servers on Zandronum thanks to services like TSPG and it is not that difficult to get a DM going.

In terms of online vs offline, they are all fairly stable. Some players prefer the feel of some ports over others but this doesn't stop the bulk of players having all 3 ports to play on. You will only notice performance issues if you flood your map with monsters, translucency, 3D floors, or have tons of sectors in view.

The more "complex" the map is, the less likely it is people will play it. Most MP players have bricks for brains and play that way too.

IIRC odamex was based on CSDoom and later drew on an older version of zdoom (1.23 or 1.22 or some shit like that) to cater to the IDL (now WDL) players. It is now basically zd 1.08 without wanting to admit it, though zd 1.08 (and now) only pretended to have unlagged. Odamex boasts demo compatibility for the virtually non-existent number of players who want to view these demos.

Often I notice when making resource heavy maps in Zandronum, they will lag online with more players, but not offline.

If your goal is to reach the broadest possible audience, Boom format and zdoom doom-in-hexen will work, provided you don't go overboard with features. Playtest your wad in all 3 ports. If your goal is audience in general with more features, considering zdaemon as your basis (but there is no real reason for this). If you wish to have an audience and do all sorts of crazy things, use Zandronum as your base. You aren't really missing that many players anyway.

id recommend mapping in boom or just go full out zandronum.

odamex failed to get past sf2012 online so beware of using 'advanced' boom features in it...

Other than ZD having more players than he alluded to, Decay is pretty much spot on. Since you're new to MP mapping, I'd start small, find your comfort zone and determine what makes for a fun deathmatch map. Once you've roughed out a few fun maps, then I'd recommend making the jump to more advanced features if you feel inclined. That's my personal recommendation, anyway!

From my limited experience, scrolling floors do not work properly in Oda.

Quick question kinda related (i don't feel like making a new thread): what ports aside from Zand support limit-removing Heretic DM?

Probably zdaemon. Maybe.

Odamex does struggle with some boom features, definitely you have to test everything before calling it a day. It's also important to test online and offline, since there are many things that work offline that don't work online in the source ports.

Unless you're doing some insane project that changes everything, my recommended course of action for a "regular" Doom map is to just map for Odamex/ZDaemon, in either doom2 or hexen format. Most features overlap between those two engines and Zandronum should have no issues with them.

If you're looking to make a big change to gameplay by modifying how the game functions, then Zandronum is the obvious answer.

In regards to the typical Decay underhanded bashing of Odamex's player base, there is a definite reason to target it for map compatibility.

As stated earlier, mapping for Odamex compatibility will basically ensure that your maps will work on all three engines. For a common coop, duel, ffa, or ctf map, this is going to be the majority of well revered maps. Even today, new maps designed for these formats can generally cater to all three engines. If you are making a plain map, you will maximize the possible audience for your wad.

It also increases the theoretical potential of it being played on some future online engine that hasn't been deployed yet, like the perpetually in progress D2K.

That's my philosophy as well - If it runs in Odamex, it runs in any MP port, either existing or upcoming. Short of something branched from Choco or whatever but I doubt that will ever (need to) happen.

Also Odamex has more players than Decay alluded to as well but he's actually not so bad in terms of "Zan players obsessed with bashing Odamex" so it doesn't really bother me anymore :)

In all seriousness, from stuff we've chatted about in the past, I think Decay just wants the MP community to use one port that has all the best features of all 3 ports rolled into one, and I understand that line of reasoning, I'm just so used to hopping between ports depending on my mood that I can hardly imagine it. I get it, though.

EDIT: Odamex can do some great things that make life much easier for server hosts that I'd love to see in other ports, mainly variable map rotations, in-game downloading, and the ability to automatically close and re-open all servers in a cluster with a single command, and clients even stay connected if you (for whatever reason) do this while people are in your server. The others may be able to do this with scripts (probably so, that would be nice) but coming as a standard feature really is nice. It also still seems to have the best netplay for high-ping users, though the last few Zan releases have improved it by leaps and bounds as well.

Doomkid said:

EDIT: Odamex can do some great things that make life much easier for server hosts that I'd love to see in other ports, mainly variable map rotations, in-game downloading, and the ability to automatically close and re-open all servers in a cluster with a single command, and clients even stay connected if you (for whatever reason) do this while people are in your server. The others may be able to do this with scripts (probably so, that would be nice) but coming as a standard feature really is nice. It also still seems to have the best netplay for high-ping users, though the last few Zan releases have improved it by leaps and bounds as well.

neither of these things have any bearing on mapping or in-game feature support.

I'm aware of that, we've already discussed the major in-game differences, although that great netcode actually does have quite the bearing on gameplay. A little side note never hurt anyone.

This is true to a degree. Mapping for zdoom or gzdoom mp (LOL) is a complete and total waste of time.

In any case, limiting yourself to a port with few players, with limited features, is part of the problem in terms of holding back mapping. 3D floors is the way of the future. Map for odamex and all you're doing to yourself is competing with wdl maps and duel maps from 1995. Not worth it. You aren't losing much of an audience by mapping for zan.

If you're mapping for Deathmatch/duel specifically you're also losing the ZD players, which are actually a big chunk. In terms of 'competitive' servers (duel, DM and CTF) ZD and Zan are actually about the same size, there's just a lot of co-op and other specialty servers like Master of Puppets and Whodunit and other stuff on Zan. If you're looking for 'pure' DM (be it OS or NS) your chances of finding players are about even on both sides.

With that said, Odamex and ZD support 'oldschool' zdoom bridges using bridge things rather than a proper dummy sector like what Zan/Legacy has - Not good for making whole rooms above one another, but still good for adding new areas and such that wouldn't be possible in vanilla or boom or whatever else, which is still a great option to have.

All things to consider when starting out on a new mp map.

While that is true, bridge things suffer from infinite actor height (at least in odamex last i checked), meaning bridge things are restricted to a purely NOS/NS function, whereas 3d floors allows people to play around with sector over sector stuff with more wiggle room (barring players passing directly above/below each other).

Well if an individual is really concerned about mapping for "the way of the future", then the Doom engines might not be for them

Ralphis said:

Well if an individual is really concerned about mapping for "the way of the future", then the Doom engines might not be for them

It's unfortunate that this is coming from a dinosaur shill trying to leak money from gullible players over ancient doom ports. Nice hustle though, but if it wasn't for the way of the "future" half of the stuff we appreciate now like mods and gamemodes wouldn't even exist and that INCLUDES CTF.

You want real vanilla go play Chocolate doom. Mapping for real ports that have features a majority of multiplayer users will utilize is convenient for everyone, not just a fringed minority.

Ralphis said:

Well if an individual is really concerned about mapping for "the way of the future", then the Doom engines might not be for them

Oh, I dunno, I'm having fun not having to adhere to limitations of wad compilation and old ports. I'm not really "concerned" for "the future" but there is no point in limiting oneself for a few players.

I personally wouldn't suggest anyone who makes MP maps should try to fit into pure vanilla - visplane overflows, texture errors, no CTF - Not worth the headache, honestly. ZD and Oda may seem basic compared to Zan, but they both support many great features from boom and zdoom that there's really no reason not to take advantage of. My only point is that you cut off about 45% of the DM community when you use Zan only features, I didn't intend any conflict.

Mobius said:

It's unfortunate that this is coming from a dinosaur shill trying to leak money from gullible players over ancient doom ports.

Please try to ease off on the salt, you're going to give us all kidney stones. There are PayPal buttons to donate on several Doom related sites, Ralphis isn't forcing anyone to donate, all going to be okay. Hell, I've been hanging with WDL for a couple years now and I didn't even know there was a donate button.

Doomkid said:

I personally wouldn't suggest anyone who makes MP maps should try to fit into pure vanilla - visplane overflows, texture errors, no CTF - Not worth the headache, honestly.

Agreed.

Doomkid said:

ZD and Oda may seem basic compared to Zan, but they both support many great features from boom and zdoom that there's really no reason not to take advantage of.

Zandronum has THAT and more. Zdoom's questionable MP capabilities is more attractive if you wanna map for both ports than those fossil fodder ports only south americans play because they can't afford new machines. It isn't the other way around: those old ports have to keep up with the standard and model of today's modding capabilities.

doomkid said:

My only point is that you cut off about 45% of the DM community when you use Zan only features, I didn't intend any conflict.

I wouldn't be so sure about that considering 45 percent of the entirety of Doom is zandronum multiplayer alone if not more Odamex doesn't even have 45 people. I doubt it justifies even 45 players and it has a 255 player limit that never has 45 players on it in 45 days let alone probably 45 years from now it'd only average 45 unique users. I mean I guess Hex or Ralphis can pay 45 dollars to a cheap advertising company for the 45 hits the website gets of them same guys downloading Odamex 45 times to uninstall it.

Also most of the people who play DM are in Zandronum. I am confident /vr/ players use zandronum for their multiplayer needs if not everyone in doom entirely. Zdaemon comes close with only 20 unique players per year where Odamex gets 1 or 2 for DM. CSDoom has been dead for years now.

Doomkid said:

Please try to ease off on the salt, you're going to give us all kidney stones. There are PayPal buttons to donate on several Doom related sites, Ralphis isn't forcing anyone to donate, all going to be okay. Hell, I've been hanging with WDL for a couple years now and I didn't even know there was a donate button.

Oh yeah help me find the Donate Button

what are the limits of each of the mp source ports for mapping how will it affect the game online if a map is complex?

Odamex Pros - Yay vanilla (sorta)
Odamex Cons - Lack of essentially every modern feature in all doom ports, thus prepare to have headaches making maps. Also server activity is most of the time, dead. Shills on this thread will go and say "oh but its easy to start a game, just go on irc!!!" - if you don't feel like doing this every time you want people to play your maps, avoid Odamex.

Zdaemon Pros - Its dated, but achieves limited modern features in hacky ways. While low, it has a consistent player base, gets about 30-50 players during peak US hours along with lots of community events, also more gamemodes.
Zdaemon Cons - Lack of modern features. Engine wise Zdaemon is not bad and can handle a crap-ton of players without noticeable lag on complex maps.

Zandronum Pros - The holy grail of doom multiplayer. You will find a little of everything here, from vanilla coop/dm to entirely custom mods. Has every advanced feature up to Zdoom 2.5, and will contain features from 2.7.1 once the next version is released. Don't get scared if you see a lack of vanilla servers, there's a dedicated crowd to basically every aspect of doom there. Both vanilla and modern maps can be played on this port.
Zandronum Cons - Maps can lag depending on how complex it is. But as long as you arent spamming 3D floors everywhere, you should be fine. People have played multiplayer survival with 30,000 monsters in one map before without lagging out. You may start seeing performance issues once you get around 50+ players in a server.


Overall I recommend Zandronum as your primary choice with Zdaemon being a backup. With Zandro you'll get access to a lot of wonderful features like the UDMF mapping format, pk3 support, free server hosting, and a wide audience (110+ players during peak US hours for the past 6 years).

Quick question kinda related (i don't feel like making a new thread): what ports aside from Zand support limit-removing Heretic DM?

Depends on what you mean by limit-removing. Zdaemon has some basic stuff IIRC, but Zandro is superior in that regard.

Catastrophe said:

Odamex Pros - Yay vanilla (sorta)

I wanna be devil's advocate and say that there's more to Odamex than that, but not a whole lot to make the port even feasible let alone remotely playable.

Odamex has one of the best demo compatibility I've seen yet. It is bar none the best multiplayer demo feature currently available and I believe the fast-forward and rewinde functions, how it's handled, and what it does will make Zandronum 100 percent ready for competition let alone movie making. Shit even Megaman players wish demo support was a lot more expansive and comprehensive. Demo_skipsucksdick is by far the shittiest thing anyone has to do to get a demo moving and missing a crucial second in a demo requires you to PLAY THE WHOLE THING BACK AGAIN. In ODamex you can just slide a bar back and forth real easy. I think Zdaemon may have this too.

The next feature is wad switching online. A server can switch between wads while people are in the server. I can see this being utilize to its absolute potential and limitations on an active port. I don't know if Zandronum can ever feature something like that because of how complex its architecture is to catch-up with Zdoom and be online at the same time but shit if it can be done in a not hacky way (like demo_skip) then I can imagine how awesome it would be to no longer crash maplist together in strange configs to just get a mesh of different maps together for wads with conflicting map names. My imagination is limited to what you can do with this.

The next one is netcode.. which Zandronum has: Ping and Tic based are both unlag options a player can select that feels right with them but I heard the former may be phased out entirely.

It's a sad truth demo support of that caliber is wasted on a port like this, and that Zandronum misses out on a would be true competitive league like WDL because of dinosaurs not willingly to nut up and admit that Kilgore won years ago.

Why the hell are you guys being so rude? Jesus Christ you'd think you'd have some better manners then that. I understand where yall are comming from but considering the port maker is here in this thread being nothing but kind and yall wanna get agressive and shitty about it boggles me. You could have a little respect, state your facts without being offensive about it like adults.

lol people get insanely rude about this shit MrGlide, it's nothing new. There's actually a weekly event on Zan that seems to be dedicated to bashing Odamex which is kinda funny and kinda sad at the same time.

-

Dude, Möbius, you can't deny that ZD gets a lot of deahtmatch/duel players. There are countless times I refresh the list and don't see a single FFA on Zandronum, and yet there's an active one with like 8 players on ZD. I didn't say anything about Odamex being 45%, I meant both ZD and Oda combined make up about that much. That's only for DM/duel anyway, that was my entire point. Zan has exponentially more players all around, but when it comes to what I consider "the good stuff", duel and DM, the numbers are suddenly much closer. I'm not going to disagree with anything else you guys said as most of your points are sound, but this point needs to be made clear to anyone looking at this from a mapping perspective.

MrGlide said:

Why the hell are you guys being so rude? Jesus Christ you'd think you'd have some better manners then that. I understand where yall are comming from but considering the port maker is here in this thread being nothing but kind and yall wanna get agressive and shitty about it boggles me. You could have a little respect, state your facts without being offensive about it like adults.

I don't see any port developers in this thread :(

There is no need to be upset.

MrGlide said:

Why the hell are you guys being so rude? Jesus Christ you'd think you'd have some better manners then that. I understand where yall

If you understood then you wouldn't be protesting about our attitudes which is much tamer than what is usually said about odamex.

MrGlide said:

are comming from but considering the port maker is here

Who is that? Sean? No. Fonze? Nope. Dragonfly? Voros? Irrelevant either way. The criticism of Odamex will be no different.

MrGlide said:

state your facts without being offensive about it like adults.

Facts have been stated. Stop sucking dick.

Doomkid said:

There's actually a weekly event on Zan that seems to be dedicated to bashing Odamex which is kinda funny and kinda sad at the same time.

You mean Saturday Night Survival running that shitty meme Odamex simulator wad a lot of people don't really care for or like? You do know there are other weeks in SNS that are more successful in terms of turn out that isn't running that troll wad, but you did fall for it so I suppose its creator got exactly what he wanted.

Doomkid said:

Dude, Möbius, you can't deny that ZD gets a lot of deahtmatch/duel players. There are countless times I refresh the list and don't see a single FFA on Zandronum, and yet there's an active one with like 8 players on ZD.

I don't deny that at all, but frankly the success of DBAB is NOT Zdaemon or Odamex but Zandronum itself. Zdaemon players play FFA for exp grinding moreso than to enjoy doom.

Doomkid said:

I didn't say anything about Odamex being 45%, I meant both ZD and Oda combined make up about that much.

Zdaemon hardly makes up that much. Why would you be disingenuous about Odamex having a player base?

UniDoomkid said:

but when it comes to what I consider "the good stuff", duel and DM, the numbers are suddenly much closer.

UniDoom circle jerk time?

Doomkid said:

but this point needs to be made clear to anyone looking at this from a mapping perspective.

You have an incorrect view point considering you were taking pointer from Decay on how to actually map for DM. You know, from a guy that makes maps for a port actual players play with good mapping techniques that actually help deathmatch flow. Scratch that.

Zandronum players make up a majority of CTF players by large. All the clans are there. All the duels are there. All the activity in Deathmatch is there. When was the last time Odamex Nitro had a turn over of 32 players for deathmatch? DBAB alone has done that and that's a deathmatch wad, shit even not hosted on FNF it has averaged at last 15+ without mass highlighting on irc. Wanna know the standard for deathmatch? Good luck, because there's no committee that decides on who they should listen to for deathmatch material and I'm pretty sure listening to players on a port no one plays is tantamount to suicide (no one playing your wad). It's why Velocity CTF sucks dick compared to Ragectf. Guess which one had Odamex in mind? Here's a hint: not Ragectf. Velocity got a huge amount because of Zdaemon, but that's it.

Also Odamex outsources its activity from a majority of Zdaemon veterans and Zandronum. It has no native players. No one loses out on mapping for Zandronum multiplayer Deathmatch. I am confident Zdoom players lose nothing for making maps with all the nifty features Odamex/Zdaemon can't run if they decided to drop Boom. Odamex/Zdaemon can't even run Boom 100 percent.

Deathmatch aside! Let's talk about coop. Odamex doesn't have survival.