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Equinox24

Zdoom Friendly mods, Something that is dead?

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Zdoom, A doom sourceport which is Basically GZdoom but for weaker computers. As of I and many others have weak computers. So how come there aren't as much of zdoom friendly mods as there were before?

Yeah i know zdoom has been discontinued for a while, but how come modders wont simply do this?

Is it because of time? 

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19 minutes ago, Equinox24 said:

Zdoom, A doom sourceport which is Basically GZdoom but for weaker computers.

You've got that completely backwards.

 

19 minutes ago, Equinox24 said:

Yeah i know zdoom has been discontinued for a while, but how come modders wont simply do this?

If you yourself weren't bound to a computer that can't run GZDoom, would you restrict yourself to outdated software ( which does effect modding, what with the rate that GZDoom and previously ZDoom add new modding features ) just for a minority on outdated hardware? That's pretty damn inane when most of your audience is perfectly capable of running your mods without issue, especially since it can take a lot of work and messy coding to downgrade something to something as dated as the last ZDoom version. Hell, it might not even be possible without significant sacrifices.

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8 minutes ago, Arctangent said:

You've got that completely backwards.

  

 

1

Hmm. I cant run Gzdoom on my computer, but Zdoom works like a charm

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Yes, outdated software tends to run better on outdated hardware than up-to-date software does, unless said outdated software has massive optimization issues that a latter version fixes.

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have you tried running gzdoom in software mode and seeing if that yields performance more comparable to zdoom?

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Dosen't matter for me. Both are great sourceports. -- I have noticed some wad's don't run as well on GZdoom as they do on Zdoom. All has to due with outdated software like mentioned above is what I've figured.

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Your GZDoom screenshot is running in a window (which probably makes it a bit slower). Also, the resolution appears to be a bit different, and in the GZDoom screenshot, you have sprite filtering turned on (which also reduces performance, and some would say it doesn't look so good).

 

So, set up GZDoom with the same settings as ZDoom...then check performance. They should both track very closely.

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That fixes one problem. Whenever I play Gzdoom, some of the textures are missing and they are just white walls

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2 hours ago, Equinox24 said:

Zdoom works like a charm

 

You could upgrade that ZDoom to ZDoom32: www.doomworld.com/forum/post/1766330

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My GZdoom and Doom 64 EX have never ran properly ever again since the Windows 10 Creator's update. They play with incredibly slow FPS now. If I could ever fix it some day, that would be a wonderful day. 

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20 hours ago, DeadAstronaut said:

My GZdoom and Doom 64 EX have never ran properly ever again since the Windows 10 Creator's update. They play with incredibly slow FPS now. If I could ever fix it some day, that would be a wonderful day. 

Yeah, same, back before my Hp notebook died and when the creator's update came out I noticed how slow it was. When that died I'm stuck with a much older hp notebook, I tried messing around with the GZDOOM settings for 5-10 mins and I gave up, zdoom just works so much better. 

My specs:

Intel Core Duo 2 GHz

40 GB HDD

Some crappy graphics card with Integrated graphics

2 GB ram

32 bit OS (Win 7)

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1 minute ago, Equinox24 said:

Yeah, same, back before my Hp notebook died and when the creator's update came out I noticed how slow it was. When that died I'm stuck with a much older hp notebook, I tried messing around with the GZDOOM settings for 5-10 mins and I gave up, zdoom just works so much better. 

My specs:

Intel Core Duo 2 GHz

40 GB HDD

Some crappy graphics card with Integrated graphics

2 GB ram

32 bit OS (Win 7)

 

I managed to get GZDoom to run recently with OpenGL and I don't know how I got that to work but my Doom 64 EX is still slow as Christmas with the FPS on gameplay. I lowered my resolution and stretched it and then it ran well. Was even able to do the recent PSX Doom for GZDoom. 

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Decided to mess with The GZdoom settings again, Still, nothing happened. Probably because I have such an old processor, a bad HDD and I have to run it in 32 bit.

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You should be able to run GZDoom in software mode. If you've already attempted to run it, then you should have an ini file, though you shouldn't need to do anything with it, because GZDoom will normally ask you what IWAD to run, if you have multiple IWAD's, and you can set it from that window.

If you don't get that window, in your ini file, under the section [GlobalSettings] or [GlobalSettings.Unknown] (That's where it is in mine) you should be able to find the CVAR vid_renderer. If vid_renderer = 1, then change that to 1 to 0 and restart GZDoom. It should start in the software renderer, which your computer should be able to run.

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If your laptop can run ZDoom it should be able to run GZDoom in software mode just as well. The renderers are pretty similar (excluding dpJudas' awesome true-color work).

 

To your original question though: no, I'm afraid it's unlikely anyone will make new mods for ZDoom. GZDoom in software mode is basically 'ZDoom plus', so targeting ZDoom would be akin to picking a older version of a sourceport and just targeting that.

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Try QZDoom -Zdoom is discontinued i think-. https://zdoom.org/downloads

 

Your GPU isn't strong enough for gzdoom if you get white walls (game can't load more textures into memory most likely, outdated opengl would be the second guess). Just a matter of time until maps crash the game if they use a ton of different textures.

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1 hour ago, Pegg said:

Try QZDoom

 

Given QZDoom is the advanced experimental version of GZDoom, I'm not sure there'd be necessarily benefits to using it in this situation, but could be worth a shot?

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QZDoom is, as I understand it, a full-color version of ZDoom that has since merged with GZDoom.

 

Also, check out the Zandronum forums for mods that will work in ZDoom. While you're there, even if you are not interested in stuff like DM and CTF, you might enjoy coop, survival, or invasion.

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You can use zandronum too, it runs well on older computers on open-gl mode. Heh, it was answered quickly.

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Zandronum isn't really going to run most mods zdoom can't already run -aside from zan exclusive wads-, Zdoom has way too many things zan doesn't.

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59 minutes ago, Empyre said:

QZDoom is, as I understand it, a full-color version of ZDoom that has since merged with GZDoom.

 

Replace 'is' with 'was' and you are correct. More than a year ago all of it was merged into GZDoom.

 

And in case you are interested in user share of old hardware, there's some interesting info to be found on the ZDoom news page.

It looks like this old hardware only has some minor residual market share left and it's only a matter of time until it will become so inconsequential that support for it will be dropped.

Lack of feature support aside, modern mid-range graphics cards have 100x the performance of these old integrated clunker chips and judging from what kinds of features got added to the engine over the last two years, you can expect that GZDoom will probably fully embrace these powers and shed off the low end instead.

 

So how would you expect mappers to treat such a situation, especially those which have an interest in modern features? Why should they target an engine that ceased development more than two years ago, if all they gain is maybe 1-2% of users? It's a trade-off that doesn't work out.

 

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19 hours ago, Bauul said:

The renderers are pretty similar (excluding dpJudas' awesome true-color work).

 

That's really only one of the things improved GZDoom's software renderer after ZDoom stopped. Of other things worth mentioning: fixed pixel center math (no dancing sprites, no edge artifacts, higher quality texture mapping), multi-threaded rendering, dynamic lights, 3d floor fixes, non-power-of-two flats, better voxel depth sorting, skies that fade out, 6-bit blending tables (instead of 5 in zdoom), keep aspect ratio in windowed mode if the window is resized, resolution scaling. And in nightly builds you can enable 3D models (r_models 1) which will probably land as a fully supported feature in one of the next GZDoom releases. :)

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 Yes, it's a different renderer even for 8 bit. ZDoom32 has the old renderer with ASM (da real thing) and should run faster on old hardware. Has also the old dpJudas' truecolor renderer which is also faster on old hardware and some of his later fixes. ZDoom32 could be considered dpJudas' bastard son as i mentioned somewhere. The old GL renderer should be faster as well. The last GZDoom version featuring the old software renderer is 2.3.2 i think.

That core cpu is based on P6 architecture and SSE2 could be pretty slow there but then there's multithreading in GZDoom software.

That said the new renderer is pretty fast as well (and better) so just try both, it should be fast enough there. Also you can switch renderers in GZDoom from the rendering output menu.

 ZDoom32 is an old version (the last stable ZDoom version albeit unofficial) but mod compatibility wise ZDoom32 2.8.4 > ZDoom LE 2.8.2 > Zandronum > ZDoom 2.7.1.

 

 In the next GZDoom version D3D and DDRAW support will be removed and GL 2.0 will be required even for software but now i'm working on another legacy build (> 3.3.2) and it will run even on a P2 cpu and XP but performance won't be great there.

https://github.com/drfrag666/gzdoom/commits/g3.3mgw

 

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10 hours ago, Pegg said:

 

Your GPU isn't strong enough for gzdoom if you get white walls (game can't load more textures into memory most likely, outdated opengl would be the second guess). Just a matter of time until maps crash the game if they use a ton of different textures.

2

Yeah i get white walls in GZdoom

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3 hours ago, drfrag said:

 Yes, it's a different renderer even for 8 bit. ZDoom32 has the old renderer with ASM (da real thing) and should run faster on old hardware. Has also the old dpJudas' truecolor renderer which is also faster on old hardware and some of his later fixes. ZDoom32 could be considered dpJudas' bastard son as i mentioned somewhere. The old GL renderer should be faster as well. The last GZDoom version featuring the old software renderer is 2.3.2 i think.

That core cpu is based on P6 architecture and SSE2 could be pretty slow there but then there's multithreading in GZDoom software.

That said the new renderer is pretty fast as well (and better) so just try both, it should be fast enough there. Also you can switch renderers in GZDoom from the rendering output menu.

 ZDoom32 is an old version (the last stable ZDoom version albeit unofficial) but mod compatibility wise ZDoom32 2.8.4 > ZDoom LE 2.8.2 > Zandronum > ZDoom 2.7.1.

 

 In the next GZDoom version D3D and DDRAW support will be removed and GL 2.0 will be required even for software but now i'm working on another legacy build (> 3.3.2) and it will run even on a P2 cpu and XP but performance won't be great there.

https://github.com/drfrag666/gzdoom/commits/g3.3mgw

 

How even is the d3d performance of gzdoom compared to opengl? Also I'm guessing the direct3d part is being dropped either because there's no point maintaining platform specific code when the other option works just as well OR because the developer can't be bothered updating to the newest version :D Speaking of newer versions, when do you think gzdoom will get a Vulkan renderer (if at all)

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 Well, that question should be answered by the devs but already was. Performance AFAIK won't be a problem and there was actually some initial work by dpJudas on a D3D11 backend (only the framebuffer) but it was dropped.

Graf Zahl said:

 

Quote

There's one thing that's desperately needed in the engine and that's a unification of the 2D rendering between the HWGL, SWGL and D3D backend. As things are right now, everything that gets added here needs to be done 3 times, PLUS a software fallback, which is an absolutely unacceptable situation for us developers. It virtually means that the 2D code right now is in a total state of limbo because working on it is just too excessive.
However, to streamline it, some sacrifices will have to be made. A long-term viable rewrite here is only doable if the following things get done:

1. Removal of DirectDraw backend.
2. Removal of SM14 support, including the texture atlases in the D3D and SWGL backends
3. Removal of software rendered 2D, except for the fuzzy weapon sprite.
4. Simplification of SWGL to work with lower OpenGL versions (1.4 should be possible, provided that the GL_ARB_texture_non_power_of_two and GL_EXT_shared_palette extensions are available.)

Explanations:
- DirectDraw has been the prime candidate for removal for a long time, but refactoring 2D will not be doable if this stays in.
- Ditching Shader Model 1.4 is an inevitability, because it's just for this ancient hardware that the texture atlases were implemented - but these turn out to be a huge feature blocker for the 2D code because they totally prevent any sane implementation of a flexible system - and aren't worth the effort anyway outside of fonts, but for fonts it makes more sense to create texture atlases on a higher cross-backend level anyway. SM1.4 is a relatively easy feature to remove because only one chip series (ATI R200) ever supported it and support for that ended before XP, so there's no drivers for newer Windows versions.
- software rendered 2D means a separate drawer for everything. But there's basically no hardware out there that really still needs it. If done right SWGL should cover everything remotely relevant on non-Windows and D3D already does on Windows. The only exception may be some rare old cards that cannot do NPOT textures. AFAIK among the still supported hardware that is only Geforce 5xxx series and the higher end of Radeon 9xxx series (i.e. 12+ yeah old hardware).

 

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