Release DoomLegacy 1.46.3

DoomLegacy 1.46.3 has been released.

This is a bug-fix release.

This may be the last version of DoomLegacy that will have CDROM music support.
It interferes with gameplay due to slow blocking IO calls.
An upgrade to SDL2 is planned, and SDL2 does not support playing CDROM music.


Features:
Added a menu control for the shadow draw.

Bug Fixes:
* Fixed the Message box positioning for video modes other than 800x600.
This was due to menu centering Setup that differs from message box setup.
Adjust connect menu position to give more room to the boxes.
Fix the menu centering for video modes that pad the video lines.
Fixes bug 629.

* Another attempt to fix drone notes in the X11 music server.
This time it uses the ioctl to reset the sequencer, which reacts much faster.
Remove most of previous fixes, which did not work well.
Mostly, the notes can be turned off, but if the mixer controls are touched too
soon the drone notes will turn back on. This requires some delays during the midi reset.

* The selected device in the sound menu (X11 port) now does not search when a
specific device is selected. The Midi, Synth, and Search selections
will search the devices. The default device is a preset of the musserver.
The default selection is SEARCH1.
For future expansion and to easily allow user modifications,
have added SEARCH2, SEARCH3, Dev6, Dev7, Dev8, Dev9.

* Fix: Video modes switches can cause a segfault if a print stmt reaches the
console output. This was occuring in the X11 linux_x xshm video when
verbose was enabled.
Changes to the video status indication are made to prevent print
statements in the video mode switch from causing a console update.
Some previous video print outputs are restored.

* CDROM music has not worked in Linux. It has problems in SDL, even in
windows. The plan was to disable it, as SDL 2 is not going to support
CDROM music anyway.

However, it showed signs of working, and after some effort, it now works.
This is likely the last version that will have CDROM music support.
Checking the CDROM status, in Linux, is a blocking IO call that stops
all action in the game for 1/4 second, which is very noticable.
Getting the estimated play time and using that for loop timing
eliminates all but one status check.
There were many other changes to fix logical mistakes.

* The shotgun and other player weapons were a pixel too high, which left
a visible scanline below them.
For Doom (but not Heretic) move the weapon down 1 pixel.
The position was checked against prboom and looks to be the same now.
Fixes bug 0455 (from 2004).

* Control variables for translucency and fuzzy mode were confused together,
and confused with smoke draw.
Separated fuzzy shadow draw from translucency. Put fuzzy shadow draw
control in effects menu.
Expanded translucency control in effects menu.
Fixed Smoke draw function assign.
Fixes bug 0631.

* The -connect command line switch was not working due to multiple
tests of the switch, and multiple enablings, triggering an error message.
Reduced setting a critical variable to one location for connect, the indirect connect command issued during init of TCP.

* Test for existance of the autoexec.cfg file before issuing an exec upon it.
This eliminates the extraneous error message about autoexec.cfg.

Awesome, keep it up! (Who needs CD music anyway in 2017?)

bzzrak said:

(Who needs CD music anyway in 2017?)

Any emulators for old systems that used CD music, like the Sega CD, Playstation 1, and DOS/Win9x.

What those things need is CD emulation, not CD playback. I'll probably remove CD playback from GZDoom as well because it has become a pointless features with an increasing number of computers not even having a CD drive.

Danfun64 said:

Any emulators for old systems that used CD music, like the Sega CD, Playstation 1, and DOS/Win9x.

But people load isos into those emulators mostly. So in that case I don't think the music is played as CD audio but digitally.

... cd audio is digital.

It used to be a nice feature when hard disks were smaller than a CD's capacity. It makes no sense when 1TB+ drives are common.

Danfun64 said:

... cd audio is digital.

Yes, but you cannot play "CD-Audio" when all you have is the image as a file on your hard drive. To play that you have to emulate the CD-drive, meaning that actual hardware-base CD-Audio is not even being used. For that you need an actual, physical CD in your drive - and since today they often do not even have an audio connection to the sound chip it's mostly pointless.

One small question. In Legacy, all 1.46.x versions, the colour blue looks more black than blue, especially in darker areas. Many black pixels instead of blue. See the water at the beginning of MAP02 or the green armour room in MAP01. Why is that?
BTW, if I switch to windowed mode, it's all perfectly normal, like in all other ports. But the thing is, I don't want to play in a window...
Also, if I take a screenshot in Legacy of that phenomenon, the colours are normal... so no screenshots.

My OS is Win7 32-bit, if it means anything to you.

p.s. also that black-green launcher is really badly stretched.

The color blue is poorly represented in the Doom palette. If you are playing using palette draw, it must make do with the colors in the palette, so when it must find a darker blue it uses black.
Try playing with -native and some of the color effects are true 32 bit RGB processing.

The picture of the launcher looks about normal to me. It is only for users that cannot figure out how to launch using command line. Because it must run before graphics are started, it only has a simple font and bit banging draws to work with.
I hope to rework the video selection to roll more of the command line switches into menu selectable options, like being able to switch between draw modes and OpenGL from the menus.

The CDROM music, Possibilities:
1. The CDROM support, as it currently is, has enough problems that it must go.
2. Play MP3 instead?
3. Adapt the X11 music support, using a separate musserver task, to also play CDROM and MP3. Keeps the time intensive music playing from interfering with the time intensive drawing. Stalls due to blocking calls then do not affect game play at all.


Midi music, Possibilities:
1. Windows native midi support has bad guitar support, and other complaints.
2. Support selecting TiMidity
3. Support selecting Fluidsynth
4. Make it menu selection, so the user can change it dynamically.


Who is maintaining the DoomWorld Source ports list ?
It is nice that DoomLegacy is first on the Linux list, but it lists version 1.44,
which is years ago.

wesleyjohnson said:

The color blue is poorly represented in the Doom palette. If you are playing using palette draw, it must make do with the colors in the palette, so when it must find a darker blue it uses black.
Try playing with -native and some of the color effects are true 32 bit RGB processing.

Nah, -native doesn't fix it.
OK, but why does everything look perfectly normal in windowed mode and not in fullscreen?

EDIT:
Starting Legacy with -truecolor seems to work perfectly. :]

wesleyjohnson said:

The picture of the launcher looks about normal to me.

I meant that the letters were vertically stretched in a bad way, compared to 1.46.2. Functionally it's the same.

I actually quite like the text-only black-green look of it, it's just that you need some more options.

wesleyjohnson said:

The color blue is poorly represented in the Doom palette. If you are playing using palette draw, it must make do with the colors in the palette, so when it must find a darker blue it uses black.

Blue is actually the only color (other than grey) that fades perfectly in Doom, because it goes all the way to black. Tones brighter than 0 0 255 are problematic, but dark blues never have to mutate into grey.

This seems to be a bug with 8-bit rendering in SDL. I saw it in PrBoom+ and Eternity - in the former, it manifested only when setting one of the fullscreen modes during runtime (if no mode change was performed since the launch, it worked fine even in fullscreen), and in the latter it forced me to use -8in32 parameter.

I can't reproduce the problem in PrBoom+ now (SDL2 fixes it?), but Eternity still paints the darker shades of blue as grey.

I was going to say that none of the Launcher code was touched between 1.46.2 and 1.46.3. But.. the font drawing setup was fixed to get the text into the text boxes for screen sizes other than 800x600. Now, I am trying to think how much that could of affected drawing the Launcher font, because it should not have affected it all.
hmmm....


Blue colors.
If you are using Windows then it may have many differences from what I see on Linux.
Windows has an entirely different way of allocating palette colors.

For windowed and fullscreen the RGB draw ought to be identical, except for size, because it is identical inside of DoomLegacy. But the drawing system and window manager can interfere. When drawing windowed the draw system must draw using the current draw mode (probably 24-bit RGB), so it translates the DoomLegacy draw pixels to the current draw mode, and may modify colors. When DoomLegacy goes fullscreen it changes the draw mode, changes the monitor size, can have its own palette and does not need to share anything with the window manager. It really makes a difference as to what fullscreen mode you are using, it may be 8-bit. You are probably comparing it to a 24-bit RGB window. When using -native, DoomLegacy tries to query the OS as to what draw mode the window system is using, and tries to use the same mode. If it does not get a usable answer, it makes assumptions, tries to find a reasonable choice.