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Dubbag

Why does it seem that the DW community prefers Boom over Zdoom format?

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Personally I make Boom compatible maps because I'm not fluent in the new-school script heavy mapping language most modders nowadays use. And anyways, I prefer old mapsets that are boom compatible like Memento Mori 2, Scythe 2, Alien Vendetta, Plutonia, and all the classics. I could never fully get into that new-school stuff. Gameplay Mods are a different story however.

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I can't speak for the community, but I can speak for myself: I prefer using LZDoom.

GZDoom's newer versions refuse to run properly on my Intel HD Graphics 4000 with a 6 year old intel processor an ruin the experience and PrBoom+ is extremely finnicky with some features and feels a bit off to play to me (despite running flawlessly in my oldass computer).

For making maps I always tend to use the Boom format because I can make them a lot more accessible this way, but I don't have any intention of making only Boom maps for long since I like the creative freedom ZDoom's features provides. 

Edited by [Vitz!]

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13 minutes ago, Gez said:

Nobody said that.

 

1 hour ago, Gez said:

the weird barely-noticeable quirks you can get in edge cases

 

You are making a subjective value judgment about what you decide to be "barely-noticeable quirks" and deeming them to not be worth keeping around. You are ultimately deciding that Doom's gameplay is only worth preserving to the extent you think it ought to be and anything lost along the way doesn't matter because you said so.

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I only recently discovered the world of Doom source ports in the last 3-4 years, and I find it really strange how hot this topic can get. When I learned about zdoom, and boom, and chocolate, and crispy, and eternity, and this and that and the other, it seemed obvious to me that all of these options existed because – like anything in life – people have different tastes. Coming back to Doom after years and years of playing modern first-person shooters (such as Counter-Strike, which ate an awful amount of my time), I loved the way that GZDoom felt, because it felt closest to a modern FPS to me, and that became my port of choice. Yes, I soon discovered that I could cheese the shit out of things like the IoS, and one-shot Spiderdemons, but as far as I was ever concerned, it didn’t matter.

 

If I break someones map because I’m playing it in GZDoom and it was designed for prBoom+ or Chocolate Doom, that’s my fault, and it’s really only my own experience that I’m ruining. But the thing is, I’m still having a great time because it’s Doom and I love playing Doom. If the options are, 1) Play this wad in GZDoom and break the intended difficulty/design, but still have a lot of fun, or 2) Force myself to play this wad in another port just to experience the intended design, and be frustrated/disgruntled the whole time because I hate the general way it feels to play in that port – well, I just can’t imagine any author who would rather see a player not having fun in order that they “experience the wad as intended”. In fact, this seems terribly antithetical to the entire purpose of making a wad in the first place, which is, the hope that players have fun and enjoy your work (at least, that’s my aim when making maps).

 

I just don’t see the value of arguing over source ports and gameplay features. And I certainly disagree with the notion that there is, in any way, a right or wrong way to play Doom. I don’t particularly care for Brutal Doom, but I don’t consider it “NOT DOOM” just because I don’t like it – it’s just not the way I want to play Doom, and there’s a huge distinction there.

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Do I really have to clarify that my views of classic Doom are closer to Nine Inch Heel's than a critical purist?

 

1 hour ago, Graf Zahl said:

And unlike you, 99% or more of all players would never ever notice the things that are important to you.

So what's that supposed to mean, exactly? Everyone else is blind and they should be kept ignorant, or my opinion doesn't matter? How Doom was played doesn't matter? It's interesting you're the main lead dev of GZDoom and that's what you believe.

 

38 minutes ago, Gez said:

Pretty disingenuous to cut out the "more features and important gameplay changes" part. It shows your problem isn't with a honest mention of changes, it's with ZDoom daring to present itself as a Doom port. What you want is for the about page to say "ZDoom is crap, it sucks, everyone who use it is dumb, don't download, get a real Doom instead" and as long as it will not say this is these exact terms, you will not be happy.

Gez, I literally have just said that I would like to see a little list of differences from ZDoom that separates itself from most of the other source ports, but mainly from vanilla Doom in particular. When I have just acknowledged that ZDoom is a powerful engine on page 2 in this thread, you hone in and overexaggerate what I said and make assumptions about what I think, all over me asking for a list of differences between ZDoom and Vanilla Doom out of the box. I'm not unappreciative of the good that ZDoom did to bring back life in Doom. If you feel like it's that necessary to insult me and make me sound so bitchy over asking for some clarification on a source port, then I don't know what to tell you! You might be getting insecure that I don't think GZDoom is the best port for playing classic Doom, let alone advertise as the best port for playing classic Doom.

 

46 minutes ago, Gez said:

The two examples you listed are things that can, actually, be changed with the compat options. But you complain that the compat options are not enough.

 

The biggest thing that can't be compat-optioned is the glitches in the original movement code allowing things like wallrunning, thingrunning, void glides, and so on. Even then there's an option to approximate wallrunning.

I already know. As a matter of fact I already have a short video demonstrating on ZDoom's inability to correctly replicate the original movement code.

 

31 minutes ago, Gez said:

Nobody's complaining that Chocolate Doom doesn't have Boom stuff or other extra modding features.

ZDoom advertises itself as the best way to play classic Doom. Does Chocolate Doom advertise itself as the best way of playing Boom levels and having extra modding features? Do you see why I'm complaining yet?

 

1 hour ago, seed said:

??????????

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To name just name a few. GZDoom is literally everywhere and most people consider it to be the best way to play Classic Doom. And you'll get crazy looks if you say that GZDoom isn't the best way to play classic Doom and for merely suggesting that ZDoom should showcase its differences and take more responsibility for the influence it has. Maybe I'm biased, I dunno, maybe it's something I said. :P

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31 minutes ago, Linguica said:

You are making a subjective value judgment about what you decide to be "barely-noticeable quirks" and deeming them to not be worth keeping around. You are ultimately deciding that Doom's gameplay is only worth preserving to the extent you think it ought to be and anything lost along the way doesn't matter because you said so.

You're the one saying that stuff not preserved in ZDoom is not preserved at all.

 

Now I'm gonna drop a hard truth bomb here, but "Doom's gameplay" has never been a single, immutable thing. Between the various versions of Doom from 0.99 to 1.10 and beyond, the many official console ports (some of which were not even ports in the technical sense, as they didn't use the Doom engine at all), and the opening of the source code to allow people to mod and experiment, there are many different versions of Doom's gameplay. We're lucky we have enough skilled developers around to help preserve not just the gameplay experience of PC Doom, but also Jaguar Doom, PlayStation Doom, and others. That stuff is great, and it's extremely interesting to have it so we can better compare the differences between them.

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49 minutes ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

Many of the changes that come with ZDoom and "higher" are definitely something even casual players can and probably will notice, for example 1-shotting a spider mastermind in E3M8 (Or Sigil's final map) with a BFG, try that with Crispy Doom. Or try punching anything, you'll notice that the hitboxes have been "corrected" in ZDoom.

 

And guess what: If you are so inclined you can switch it back to the original behavior. And should you ask any ZDoom user they'd tell you in very clear terms what they like better.

 

 

49 minutes ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

 

This isn't "fringe stuff" that happens and matters only in hyper-tuned challenge maps. Likewise, things like "free-aim" can greatly affect how the difficulty of a map is perceived, even to the point where some "gimmicks" become entirely meaningless, like for example when fighting the IOS in Doom2: You don't even need the small lift to deal damage to the IOS, you just climb the up giant stairs to where the switch is, and shoot it from there with no issues whatsoever.

 

You get that option in other ports, too. Why do you blame ZDoom and not Eternity, for example?

The IoS is also a great example for how ridiculous it is to design gameplay elements around engine limitations.

 

 

49 minutes ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

Basically, we're now in the realms of "not playing the fight as was intended by id".

 

Yawn. "As intended" is the most overused and most abused phrase to justify not improving things.

What id intended is for people to have fun with and derive enjoyment from the game, not to get worked up over technical details.

 

 

49 minutes ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

And you might be thinking that IOS fights are fringe cases, but a quick look at "modern releases" as well as classics like scythe or Alien Vendetta is sufficient to see just how impactful of a change "free-aim" can be. And don't get me started on jumping, which is yet another can of worms in its own right that constantly gets underestimated by players and mappers alike. 

 

And again, why do you single out ZDoom here? It's not the only port making such changes.

Where's your displeasure with MBF and the invasive gameplay changes it made, optional or not, like monsters trying to make informed decisions about the environment, or that godforsaken and broken torque feature, or its attempts to enhance monster AI in general and what not? Features that are all present not only in MBF but also in PrBoom and Eternity. Why is it that the features ZDoom added on top are so much worse?

Hell, the worst offender of game breaking features hails back to Boom. What am I talking about? - Being able to blast monsters off pillars with the kickback of your weapon. THAT is the single biggest thing that has broken 100% playthroughs for me over the years.

 

 

 

49 minutes ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

Don't forget that there are people out there who think that jumping and freeaim are core features of Classic Doom, because all they do is watch a YouTube tutorial about how to set up and run (G)ZDoom while not paying any attention to whatever text file or feature list belongs to the port they're about to use. Of course I don't fault a port or its features for how it's being used, but the claim that people need "a lot" of knowledge to be able to tell differences is a stretch as far as I'm concerned.

 

 

By that logic all uses of modern engines should be discouraged, right? Or at least recording gameplay footage with modern engines?

Can't you just let people have fun with the game? Why is the feature set of 1993 so sacred that these things get implicitly devalued if people use them? You can be sure that many of them wouldn't even play the game if it still had all these limitations.

 

And like I said at the top of this post, among these "critical" issues there isn't a single one that cannot be disabled. But of course you cannot force anyone to actually disable them, just like you cannot force anyone using MBF and its offspring not to use the torque feature.

 

The mistakes being made here were done 20 years ago when ports started adding new features without requiring a manifest to activate them before use, and they were mostly made due to inexperience. It's too late to change that, the users of any of these engines would riot if such a change was made today.

 

 

 

 

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3 minutes ago, UndeadRyker said:

So what's that supposed to mean, exactly? Everyone else is blind and they should be kept ignorant, or my opinion doesn't matter? How Doom was played doesn't matter? It's interesting you're the main lead dev of GZDoom and that's what you believe.

 

That means if you told these players about the issues, the best you'd get is a raised eyebrow or a look of total confusion.

Most people play games to have fun and do not care about minute technical details, even if these details are important to some.

 

 

3 minutes ago, UndeadRyker said:

You might be getting insecure that I don't think GZDoom is the best port for playing classic Doom, let alone advertise as the best port for playing classic Doom.

 

That's your opinion. Other people think that GZDoom *is* the best way to play classic Doom. And last time I checked, in the countries we live in freedom of opinion is still a paramount ideal, so surely we can advertise with whatever we consider correct. What you think is not relevant when advertising a product.

 

As another example: Apple advertises its computers as the greatest thing in the world. I think Apple's product palette is shit throughout. Will that change Apple's marketing? Surely not. Will I get worked up over it? Why should I?

 

I cannot change the rules of advertisement. It's full of subjectiveness, exaggeration and logically highlighting a products assets while downplaying its potential cons. Of course I play the game as well as I can.

 

 

3 minutes ago, UndeadRyker said:

 

I already know. As a matter of fact I already have a short video demonstrating on ZDoom's inability to correctly replicate the original movement code.

 

Where is it? I cannot refute your claim if you don't present it.

 

 

3 minutes ago, UndeadRyker said:

ZDoom advertises itself as the best way to play classic Doom. Does Chocolate Doom advertise itself as the best way of playing Boom levels and having extra modding features? Do you see why I'm complaining yet?

 

Chocolate Doom advertises itself as a port that intends to be as close to vanilla as possible, since it cannot play Boom maps the entire comparison is void.

 

 

3 minutes ago, UndeadRyker said:

 

  Reveal hidden contents

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To name just name a few. GZDoom is literally everywhere and most people consider it to be the best way to play Classic Doom. And you'll get crazy looks if you say that GZDoom isn't the best way to play classic Doom and for merely suggesting that ZDoom should showcase its differences and take more responsibility for the influence it has. Maybe I'm biased, I dunno, maybe it's something I said. :P

 

This tells me that the marketing is working. :) But no, you got it entirely wrong. It's not the responsibility of a marketing department to spoon-feed such information to its customers, it's the customers' responsibility to inform themselves, just like it is with any other product as well. Whether they do it or not is beside the point.

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5 minutes ago, UndeadRyker said:

ZDoom advertises itself as the best way to play classic Doom. Does Chocolate Doom advertise itself as the best way of playing Boom levels and having extra modding features? Do you see why I'm complaining yet?

Every source port advertises itself as the best way to play classic Doom. Chocolate Doom insists on its rigorous faithfulness to the exact gameplay of vanilla Doom. ZDoom insists on its many additional features. They're different approaches for different tastes. These ports are hobbies, which means developers work on what they want to work on, and therefore make ports that correspond to what they like.

 

Your point seems to be that the best way to play Doom is not to have extra features or bug fixes or other such changes, that they make it an inferior way to play. The thing is, it's not. They're very different ways, basically polar opposites of each other, but that doesn't mean one is good and the other bad. In the end, it's just a game, the aim is to play, and have fun, you do that according to what appeals to you and that's that.

 

ZDoom doesn't claim to be the be-all, end-all port experience. The about page even links to a few other ports (viz. Zandronum, EDGE, and Eternity) as alternatives.

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So, I haven't tried using a GZDoom variant in ages, but did they ever find an easier way of handling compatibility than "-compflags asdf123456 -dmflags omgwtfbbqlol"?  "-complevel [2|3|9|11]" is so much easier.

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52 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

The mistakes being made here were done 20 years ago when ports started adding new features without requiring a manifest to activate them before use, and they were mostly made due to inexperience. It's too late to change that, the users of any of these engines would riot if such a change was made today.

 

In other words, it's better to keep old "mistakes" than to fix them, because it's more important that users not have the behavior they are used to change. But this rationale also doesn't apply to the original Doom code for some reason.

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1 hour ago, Graf Zahl said:

why do you single out ZDoom here? It's not the only port making such changes.

Because ZDoom is the most mainstream port and has people who worked on it that refuses to take responsibility and admit that it changes a lot and doesn't really care too much for the original codebase of Doom, while manipulating its users, telling users otherwise that it's the most modern and hip way to play classic Doom.

 

30 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

Where is it? I cannot refute your claim if you don't present it.

https://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=53498

 

30 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

This tells me that the marketing is working. :) But no, you got it entirely wrong. It's not the responsibility of a marketing department to spoon-feed such information to its customers, it's the customers' responsibility to inform themselves, just like it is with any other product as well. Whether they do it or not is beside the point.

So you're acting like ZDoom is a multibillion dollar company that needs to make a quick buck, and yet you wonder why some people threw a fit about ZDoom's telemetry and criticize ZDoom in general. But listen, if you don't want to "spoonfeed your customers" on how to properly build a map without ZDoom doing everything for you, then why should we have to constantly repeat ourselves that "Oh you actually need to do this or that", "Oh that's only possible in ZDoom", "No that doesn't work with Brutal Doom".

 

31 minutes ago, Gez said:

Your point seems to be that the best way to play Doom is not to have extra features or bug fixes or other such changes, that they make it an inferior way to play

My original point was that ZDoom changes a lot of the things about Doom that makes it misleading and inconvenient for the rest of us who use other sourceports that are actually more closely related to classic Doom than ZDoom, and Graf has no problem with misleading people that cause those same people to assume that looking up/down was a part of classic Doom, using flats as walls was a part of classic Doom, that strange changes being enabled by default such as the teleporting "FOV zoom" effect was a part of classic Doom.

 

33 minutes ago, Gez said:

ZDoom doesn't claim to be the be-all, end-all port experience. The about page even links to a few other ports (viz. Zandronum, EDGE, and Eternity) as alternatives.

Spoiler

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It doesn't need to directly state it. It's about the implication that it gives off. MODERN! NEXT-GEN! Woooah!

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26 minutes ago, Cynical said:

So, I haven't tried using a GZDoom variant in ages, but did they ever find an easier way of handling compatibility than "-compflags asdf123456 -dmflags omgwtfbbqlol"?  "-complevel [2|3|9|11]" is so much easier.

Not to mention GZDoom doesn't even emulate those precisely.

 

I don't go against people using GZDoom, but I personally play very little GZDoom only WADs. Punching things in GZDOom feels so wrong to me. That's about it, or sometimes somebody will tell me you can Chainsaw a Mancubus easily, oh come on.

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@Graf Zahl Maybe instead of defending the bushiodo honor of GZDoom, your self-proposed continuation of PrBoom+, a source port that you are aware is intent for demo compatibility, has some demo compatibility issues from your changes that you are yet to address or respond to: 

While I'd like to think you wouldn't stoop that low, I hope this isn't a worrying trend of you trying to sabotage other ports.

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The fact that ZDoom does not have a stable demo format is a huge strike against it, in my book.

 

The simple fact is, if I make a map for vanilla, limit-removing ports, Boom or MBF, I have a reasonable expectation that it will work in ports 10 years from now, because those labels actually mean something.  But I don't really have that sort of reassurance from ZDoom.  Not on purpose, of course, but just out of carelessness.  If they were nothing else, demos are amazing at regression testing.

 

But they're also taken very seriously by players as well.  They're used for speedrunning, and that's...kind of a huge deal, considering that Doom is one of the major progenitors of the modern speedrunning scene.  If you don't map for a standard capable of being played back in a port that implements one of those targets I mentioned above, then you are basically shutting yourself out from serious consideration of speedrunners.  A YouTuber recently did a video about the history of various speedrunning records in Doom, and they were able to do that because of .lmp's recorded in the 1990's still being playable by prBoom+ today.  Meanwhile, I doubt you can even run ancient versions of ZDoom without a virtual machine, due to the deprecation of some of the API's it uses, and some maps only work right on those ancient versions.  Every couple months, I get the bright idea of trying to fix up one of those ancient versions of ZDoom as a fun project, but each time I quickly come to my senses after rediscovering some of the nightmare-inducing things contained in the source tree.

 

The thing is, me personally, I'm not too particular about the minutea about the engine, and don't really have a problem with playing ZDoom engines.  But I completely understand where people complaining about changed gameplay are coming from, and if your port can't play demos, you don't really have a leg to stand on, because you have no way of quantifying how differently the game plays, or if the changes were significant or not.  And frankly, over time, I've realized that there's very little I'm interested in these days that's ZDoom specific, so Crispy Doom and prBoom+ have taken over as my port of choice.

 

EDIT: One thing that I always thought might be an interesting exercise would be taking a port capable of playing demos and giving it an friendlier interface, something resembling ZDoom's current interface.  I do wonder if doing so might make it more palatable to players.

Edited by AlexMax

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3 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

And guess what: If you are so inclined you can switch it back to the original behavior. And should you ask any ZDoom user they'd tell you in very clear terms what they like better.

Ah, so we're finally in dissection mode I take it? So, since you've made some inquiries about the features people use when running GZDoom, how many people actually used different compatibility settings? Got any numbers on that, or was that not part of the data you pulled? 

 

You're assuming here that people make the effort to browse through these options, instead of just running with the default settings. And I'd say you're assuming a bit much in a world where some people think jumping and freeaim have always been part of classic doom. I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority of people changed at most a few keybindings after adjusting their mouse sensitivity and graphics resolution. And I will boldly assume that's where their journey into the options menu comes to an end for the most part.

 

Speaking of assumptions, you also seem to assume people use advanced ports to get authentic "oldschool" behaviour, and that's a stretch if I've ever seen one. Why do you think I use GLBoom+ instead of PrBoom+? Because I want uncapped framerates, and vibrant colours when I play the weird stuff that I happen to like. Now you're telling me people would grab (G)ZDoom even though they want none of its features? Come on, son..

 

19 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

You get that option in other ports, too. Why do you blame ZDoom and not Eternity, for example?

I'm sticking to what this thread's title says, plus ZDoom is the oldest "advanced port" from which the largest "family" of ports has emerged. It's really that simple.

 

21 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

The IoS is also a great example for how ridiculous it is to design gameplay elements around engine limitations.

Breaking the IOS fight is a great example of how parts of a game break when people change the rules and limitations. Literally every map, regardless of which port it targets, is build around some port's behaviour and limitations to some degree, so saying it's ridiculous to build fights around the behaviour that is part and parcel of the original game is nonsense. I would be very surprised if Romero et al thought at some point that somebody might develop a port which introduces freeaim to doom, and then they were like "yeah, well, whatever, let's put the IOS in even though someone's gonna break it with a feature that isn't gonna exist in the foreseeable future, and might never see the light of day".

 

30 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

Yawn. "As intended" is the most overused and most abused phrase to justify not improving things.

What id intended is for people to have fun with and derive enjoyment from the game, not to get worked up over technical details.

What's an "improvement" is as subjective as what's "fun and enjoyment". And a feature like freeaim isn't a "technical detail", it's a paradigm.

 

34 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

Why is it that the features ZDoom added on top are so much worse?

Because they are much more "on the nose" than virtually everything else. Granted, PrBoom's proclivity to get things knocked off ledges has cost me a few hours in the past when recording demos for valiant, map 24 and map 29 come to mind, so you're preaching to the choir there, but that still pales in comparison to just breaking maps with jumps, or being able to hit shoot switches that were not supposed to be reachable under "normal" circumstances.

 

44 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

By that logic all uses of modern engines should be discouraged, right? Or at least recording gameplay footage with modern engines?

Your attempts at strawmanning have been better in the past. I don't care what people use for their casual needs and purposes, and I also don't care if they record footage or not. The point was that it doesn't take "deep knowledge" to be able to tell there are differences between ports when comparing overall behaviour "side by side", and that point still stands, regardless of compatibility options.

 

49 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

Can't you just let people have fun with the game? Why is the feature set of 1993 so sacred that these things get implicitly devalued if people use them?

Ah, we're back to framing somebody else's opinions as "evil" while trying to put on a shiny armour ourselves I see. Again, I don't care what people use for their casual fun, I'm not devaluing the features of ports, I'm saying there are differences, and it's not necessary to be a "top tier classic doom nerd" to spot some of them. And I'm deliberately using the word "casual" here, because the approach in the realms of competitive speedrunning has to be a different one in order to keep the playing field on a stable basis.

 

56 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

And like I said at the top of this post, among these "critical" issues there isn't a single one that cannot be disabled.

I'm not saying they can't be disabled, I'm saying there has been sufficient evidence in the past that people don't take advantage of these options and instead assume that the port's default behaviour is the same as the original game's behaviour back in the early 90s. Huge difference.

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@Nine Inch Heels To be fair, GL/PRBoom+ requires the player to also fiddle with the menu to get the correct compatibility for whatever they are playing. I've seen streamers who didn't want to mess with those settings and ended up playing everything with "Latest PRBoom+", which has very awkward infighting unless "Monsters pursue/remember target" is changed to ON. Or BigMacDavis pushing Cyberdemons off in his map26 of Scythe video with what I assume was out of the box GLBoom+.

 

So every port requires some degree of messing with the options for the authentic (or close enough) experience.

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Actually, a more interesting, though tedious, exercise I thought of would be to catalog all of the maps that are broken by ZDoom's default, non-cheating settings.  Going into the keyboard, mouse, and display settings is something one might naturally expect a player to do, so those would be in-bounds, but without changing any gameplay or compatibility settings.

 

Some obvious ones:

- MAP07 can be exited trivially by jumping

- MAP29 is broken in many places by jumping, allowing skipping whole sections of the map.

- MAP30 can be cheesed with freelook, instead of going up the intended elevator.

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1 hour ago, RonnieJamesDiner said:

I just don’t see the value of arguing over source ports and gameplay features. And I certainly disagree with the notion that there is, in any way, a right or wrong way to play Doom. I don’t particularly care for Brutal Doom, but I don’t consider it “NOT DOOM” just because I don’t like it – it’s just not the way I want to play Doom, and there’s a huge distinction there.

 

Yeah, same here.

 

In fact I find it impressive and slightly disturbing how a good portion of the people who have posted on this page are ready to get up in arms against GZDoom and its philosophy. It makes it blatantly obvious that it is not, and never will be, a purist/vanilla accurate port that is aimed at features first and foremost. If you absolutely MUST use these features, then there are better alternatives out there to choose from. Also the "but the defaults..." argument can fuck right off too - neither PrBoom nor Eternity, for reference, have the right settings by default, and PrBoom's default is Boom, not Doom.

 

But at the same time, I will admit my own hypocrisy. The real reason why I am not bothered by the lack of these features in GZDoom is because I have alternatives. Want more vanilla essence? Off I go to PrBoom, Eternity, and so on. I would probably be a little upset if there was no alternative and GZDoom did not offer what I was looking for too.

 

I'm also surprised Graf has managed to keep his cool thus far. Let's just say that I am glad I'm not a source port developer because some of the entitled behavior I have seen would sure as fucking hell make me not want to have anything to do with this job anymore, and I would've burst in flames and made some serious asshole moves as a result.

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1 hour ago, Graf Zahl said:

The IoS is also a great example for how ridiculous it is to design gameplay elements around engine limitations.

I just want to quote this masterpiece of a comment. Someone needs to make a golden plaque for it. Words cannot describe its greatness, they should have sent a poet.

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8 minutes ago, seed said:

 Let's just say that I am glad I'm not a source port developer because some of the entitled behavior I have seen would sure as fucking hell make me not want to have anything to do with this job anymore, and I'd make some serious asshole moves as a result.

 

What an odd thing to say. Between comments like this and Graf's comments that the existence of "marketing" requires that he play word games with visitors in order to encourage them to download his "product", it makes me wonder what some people think a Doom hobby is supposed to be about.

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2 minutes ago, Linguica said:

requires that he play word games

 

Well, please elaborate on this part then, because I do not sense any word game anywhere.

 

You shouldn't read too much into that part, we're probably thinking of different things anyway.

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7 minutes ago, Spectre01 said:

To be fair, GL/PRBoom+ requires the player to also fiddle with the menu to get the correct compatibility for whatever they are playing. I've seen streamers who didn't want to mess with those settings and ended up playing everything with "Latest PRBoom+"

I never said PrBoom+ doesn't require setting up proper to get the intended behaviour, but this just goes to show that people don't look particularly close at options, and instead assume that the default is "just fine".

 

Basically this merely proves the point I made when graf argued that "options exist"; People don't really pay attention, and instead roll with the defaults for one reason or another, and man do you get a range of behaviours when you look at what's the default for any given port out there.

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3 minutes ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

People don't really pay attention, and instead roll with the defaults for one reason or another, and man do you get a range of behaviours when you look at what's the default for any given port out there.

To be fair though, for players who are not really into the details of the game, they are likely to think these are over complicated just to play a game.

 

Of course, as we speedrun, we definitely know -cl4 for final doom WADs, and -cl11 for MBF WADs etc., but for normal players, they probably don't have any idea what the hell are these... Probably if you ask somebody do you know there is a limitation for number of Lost Souls on vanilla compatibility, they don't know about this.

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37 minutes ago, seed said:

Also the "but the defaults..." argument can fuck right off too - neither PrBoom nor Eternity, for reference, have the right settings by default, and PrBoom's default is Boom, not Doom. 

 

Honestly if anything, that's a strike against Eternity not a vindication of ZDoom.  I double-checked PrBoom+ and binding jump doesn't turn it on implicitly (to be honest I don't know how you turn it on), and the "freelook" you can enable seems to be visual-only, which is a swell compromise.

 

Unintentionally cheesing a level should not be as easy as binding a key or flipping a setting next to mouse sensitivity.

Edited by AlexMax

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39 minutes ago, Spectre01 said:

@Nine Inch Heels To be fair, GL/PRBoom+ requires the player to also fiddle with the menu to get the correct compatibility for whatever they are playing. I've seen streamers who didn't want to mess with those settings and ended up playing everything with "Latest PRBoom+", which has very awkward infighting unless "Monsters pursue/remember target" is changed to ON. Or BigMacDavis pushing Cyberdemons off in his map26 of Scythe video with what I assume was out of the box GLBoom+.

 

So every port requires some degree of messing with the options for the authentic (or close enough) experience.

People use the menu?!?!

 

Make batch files to run your wads, and just use the -complevel command line argument!  So much easier that dealing with the menus!  It's one of prboom+'s biggest advantages over GZDoom!

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Reading how niche players want to bait this thread to attack directly GZDOOM be like.

image.png.7f13a17006cf07d2ef8c7daebb20e6fe.png

I like ZDOOM family because it's the one that give me countless hours of gameplay and fun on my kid and teen times. 

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Okay okay, I apologize to my fellow ZDoomers. ZDoom™ is the best product to play Classic Doom the way I want to play! It has sleek, modern, superior technology that transforms Doom from this insignificant, irrelevant, horribly designed limitations like the Icon of Sin, to ANYTHING I want it to be! I may not know how to work every single option or know exactly how ZDoom™ works as evident by its unmatched tech, but as a loyal ZDoom™ customer, I should not be spoonfed because it's my fault for not knowing something even if ZDoom is the most mainstream source port out there responsible for thousands of people getting back into Doom! It is impeccable, unrivaled by other source ports. Why did these other source ports take away Classic Doom features such as FREELOOK, items that FLY in the air, the ZOOMING FOV effect, the flawless TEXTURE FILTERING that's enabled by default, my semi-transparent Lost Souls, my TELEMETRY because I'm too stupid to find out my specs, and most importantly, the invisibility powerup that lets enemies NOT see you? Well, that doesn't matter, because the majority of people use the latest bleeding edge software to play Doom, which is ZDoom™! People should be used to those things by now! If anyone even suggests that ZDoom™ should list a few things that it does differently from Vanilla Doom to clear up some issues, they're a dumb caveman purist! I'm so sorry for being a dumb customer that took everything at face value from the ZDoom™ website, please forgive me I'm just entitled!

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