Why is Eternity not so popular?

9 hours ago, Death Egg said:

1. A killer app map set that shows off Eternity Engine's features and isn't playable on anything else.

 

There's a few in development right now that I'm aware of, though nothing that would get released before 2021. Keep your eyes peeled!

Eternity needs to tidy up its option jungle and it needs better defaults for controls and mouse sensitivity.

 

But GZDoom is the flagship high-feature port and purists go for prboom or Crispy Doom so high-feature ports like Eternity, Doomsday, 3DGE and k8vavoom will have a small user base and few port-exclusive mods.

 

It would be cool if Eternity had Heretic, Hexen and even ... PSX Doom or Jaguar support :D

1 hour ago, VGA said:

Eternity needs to tidy up its option jungle and it needs better defaults for controls and mouse sensitivity. 

 

I actually think that the options could be cleaned up relatively simply  Just add a vertical scrollbar to the right hand side of the options menu, and get rid of the last vestiges of the indicators signaling paging left and right.  I bet if you did just that and nothing else, it would make browsing the options feel a lot more intuitive, even if nothing else changed about them.

 

Also, while I have my Christmas list out, I would either get rid of the background flat or make it opt-in - I think most people prefer being able to see the game behind the menu.  And while we're at it, I think having a win32 console window for initialization is a little antiquated and should either be dropped completely or output into a log file that is overwritten on fresh launch.  And of course, WASD out of the box.  But that's really about it, and for a wishlist it's a very short list.

Edited November 24, 2020 by AlexMax

7 hours ago, VGA said:

Heretic, Hexen

 

It does.

3 minutes ago, seed said:

 

It does.

But it's still WIP as of last month's release. Heretic support has progressed greatly, to the point it's not really clear from looking at the readme what's still missing; but Hexen support hasn't had much activity.

Quote

===============================================================================
* Coming Soon *

These are features planned to debut in future versions of the Eternity Engine:

- Priority -

  ** Slope physics
  ** Aeon scripting system
  ** 100% Heretic support                (Major progress made)
  Hexen Support
  Strife Support                         (In progress)
  PSX Doom support                       (In progress)
  Double flats

  ** == TOP PRIORITY

- Long-Term Goals -

  Improved network code


===============================================================================

 

 

 

(What is "double flats"?)

Eternity is a really nice port and smooth as butter, but I think what holds it back aside from its "more currently growing" user made content is it's lack of multiplayer.

If it had a good multiplayer system, it would be extremely more popular than even Gzdoom.

Hmmm?! MP is the last thing Eternity needs ...

Really, why?

8 minutes ago, Mr.Rocket said:

Really, why?

Because there's Zandronum and Odamex already, which are dedicated MP-oriented ports and are light years ahead.

I suppose we should only use those then.

/me goes back to making sure dosbox doom ipx emulation is still working as expected. 

I for one would love to use the port more often, since I think the way it renders lighting is beautiful (which is the second most important feature for any port by my metric, after how it controls). However, there are two issues standing in the way of this:

 

1. For some reason, I cannot for the life of me get the mouse sensitivity right, even though I've tuned it down to the decimal point. It is either too twitchy or too sluggish.

 

2. The UI is hella dated. Every port this side of Chocolate is easier to configure. Actually, Choco's setup executable works well enough, so Eternity is the hardest of the ports I've played to configure.

 

If not for these issues, for aesthetic reasons alone I would always play wads like Valiant, Eviternity or Ancient Aliens in EE. EMAPINFO plays a role in this too, since it allows for the removal of the 10,000-times accursed hardcoded Doom 2 text-screens. Yes, those do annoy me disproportionately. Mappers go to all the effort of creating visually cohesive and immersive episodes and then suddenly one of those fucking screens pops up, filling my screen with hideous SLIME16 and breaking the immersion. Ugh.

 

So, in essence, if these issues were resolved I for one would use Eternity a lot more, probably at least as much as GZDoom. Hell, I'd map for it if that were the case.

 

Edit: removed inaccurate information.

Edited November 24, 2020 by Omniarch

45 minutes ago, Omniarch said:

1. Eternity does not provide any means to keep track of your kills and secrets. For an (albeit casual) completionist like myself, this is a big issue.

 

It has, both for HUD as for the automap. Sounds like you toggled this off.

23 minutes ago, Mordeth said:

 

It has, both for HUD as for the automap. Sounds like you toggled this off.

Hmm, I've searched through the options menu so many times and failed to find it. I also can't seem to toggle the HUD for some reason. Must be an issue on my end. My bad!

 

Edit: Problem solved. I was using the wrong screen size like an idiot.

Edited November 24, 2020 by Omniarch

2 hours ago, Omniarch said:

1. For some reason, I cannot for the life of me get the mouse sensitivity right, even though I've tuned it down to the decimal point. It is either too twitchy or too sluggish.

The mouse accel options make a tonne of difference. There's no "correct" mouse control really since everybody has their personal preference. Anything like that is an issue that takes somebody who has the issue in the first place to fix.

3 minutes ago, Altazimuth said:

The mouse accel options make a tonne of difference. There's no "correct" mouse control really since everybody has their personal preference. Anything like that is an issue that takes somebody who has the issue in the first place to fix.

This. After making that post, I decided to give the port another shot, and I was actually able to make the sensitivity acceptable. I'll try fiddling with the acceleration, though, maybe that'll help make it even better. Also, I appreciate you and Mordeth's advice on how to make Eternity work for my noobish self!

17 minutes ago, Omniarch said:

This. After making that post, I decided to give the port another shot, and I was actually able to make the sensitivity acceptable. I'll try fiddling with the acceleration, though, maybe that'll help make it even better. Also, I appreciate you and Mordeth's advice on how to make Eternity work for my noobish self!

 

If you use Chocolate Doom, just use the same sensitivity you use there and enable vanilla sensitivity. For me it's 16.

5 minutes ago, maxmanium said:

 

If you use Chocolate Doom, just use the same sensitivity you use there and enable vanilla sensitivity. For me it's 16.

I use Crispy, actually. I tried that anyway, with no luck. Probably something to do with the fact that I do not cap Eternity's framerate, so the sensitivity I am looking for is closer to PrBoom+ than anything else, though given how well that port controls that may be asking too much.

20 hours ago, VGA said:

 [Eternity doesn't need multiplayer] because there's Zandronum and Odamex already, which are dedicated MP-oriented ports and are light years ahead.

 

Neither mean anything in the case of multiplayer being added to Eternity; those kinds of pseudo-monopolies are irrelevant. After all, one way or the other, Eternity will still only get better with the addition of multiplayer at the end of the day.

 

Yea, with DoomLegacy, same problem.

On my machine, I have  DoomLegacy as my main port, EternityEngine, PrBoom, EDGE are playable.  I have code for ChocolateDoom.

I have abandoned ZDoom and everything from that line.

 

I do not find OpenGL that much more appealing.  My favorite setting is 24bit drawing, which has smoother visuals than 8 bit palette and much faster and smoother play than OpenGL.

I do not like the flashy eye-candy graphics.  I play for the mechanisms and engineering, the exploring.  Those have to work smoothly, not roughed up by a slow rendering engine like what happens with OpenGL.

 

The following is based on memory, as I am in a cycle of installing software after a motherboard failure.  Some of this may be remembrances of PrBoom or EDGE too, but I will try to talk around that problem.  It is not necessary for every nitpicker to pick all the nits out of it, as the points are not going to be that specific to just EternityEngine.

 

With EternityEngine, I could never quite figure out the settings.

It is not my main port so I am not going to memorize very much stuff in order to use it.  The stuff I need to setup is going to have to be more easily setup and the correct settings more easily found.

 

Settings that are 0 or 1, or On and Off, can be confusing as they require the player to understand exactly what the control is turning "ON".  It could be enabling a feature, or enabling compatibility with Vanilla, or Boom code.

It is easier to deal with settings that say  "Vanilla", "Boom", "Fast", "Slow",  etc..

It would be best if the control told the player exactly what it was doing, and not require the player to have learned and memorized exactly what the EE engine does, or what Boom did.   Most of the compatibility controls in PrBoom are just mystery settings, and I have no idea what behavior they changed.

 

Moving the player around was rough.

I am used to DoomLegacy freelook and cannot play a port that connects the mouse to running instead of looking.

As soon as any monster shows, my muscles aim on their own, and the player rockets all over the place.

Having the player controls be able to adapt to the player is necessary, you cannot expect players trying out EE to adapt themselves to it.   They will just get frustrated at the lack of control.

This means going overboard on giving the player the ability to tune the keyboard and mouse controls.

I suggest stealing some of DoomLegacy mouse control code as I have spent enough time on it in the last couple years that it must have something new that you can use.

 

When in doubt give the player a control so that they can choose, rather than have them feel stonewalled.   They will just accumulate reasons to try other ports.

 

I don't remember the EE menus being that bad.  It was difficult to remember where to find settings as it seems to be page based.

DoomLegacy also has extensive menus, but I invested some time in developing a good push down menu system that can nest menus and can pop back (dynamic not static).

This allows sub menus that can be entered from more than one place in the menu tree.

Thus we can organize menu items by function, such as visual effects in one menu and game compatibility settings in another.

The menu tree is not very deep (three pages deep) but the player can browse freely as there are links to sub-menus where needed.

Using a similar scheme might relieve some of the menu frustration.

 

Adding multiplayer is both an attraction and a curse.  I have spent half a year reworking multiplayer on DoomLegacy, where it was already well established.  Multiplayer will absorb all your time, and it will affect everything else, and interact with everything else.

There is the attraction that now two players can play coop.

 

The deathmatch attraction is already covered by many other games, and others besides Doom.

The usual deathmatch is highly dependent upon having an existing base of many players who have invested time and experience to use the same identical engine and same rules.

You would be fighting an uphill battle to establish another deathmatch community from scratch, so that is not a good place to invest your time.

Edited November 25, 2020 by wesleyjohnson

2 hours ago, wesleyjohnson said:

I do not find OpenGL that much more appealing.  My favorite setting is 24bit drawing, which has smoother visuals than 8 bit palette and much faster and smoother play than OpenGL.

I do not like the flashy eye-candy graphics.  I play for the mechanisms and engineering, the exploring.  Those have to work smoothly, not roughed up by a slow rendering engine like what happens with OpenGL.

You cannot get smoother rendering than GZDoom's OpenGL renderer. When it comes to high-res, high fps (interpolation) and *steady frame pacing*, along with compatibility with modern systems, GZDoom is the smoothest and its software renderer is the most advanced after merging QZDoom from what I understand.

 

Even after eduke32's code was slapped on the GZDoom backend the alpha tier result was smoother than eduke32 itself with all its years of development. Vsync much?

 

If you don't want to use a port from the ZDoom family, that's OK, but you can't say you prefer something "smoother". And the eye candy is toggleable. And there is a software renderer if you don't like OpenGL. Find something proper to use as an argument, like vanilla compatibility.

 

 

Whilst the points in here about GL are cogent, and it's not happened yet, I'd politely request that we don't see yet another thread with Eternity in its title veering off into an argument about GZDoom.

Nobody to blame for anything, I just want to try make sure it doesn't happen.

For the record, I really like EE and all of the team members that have been involved over the years (Quasar, SoM, Altazimuth, Printz). A lot of great work done there by very cool people.

 

Here comes the sting though. From what I've seen over the past two decades, EE often lead source ports in the proposal of certain ideas being implemented, but was then always behind the curve on delivering compared to ZDoom. Slopes were visually implemented but no physics. Quasar was one of the primary people to push UDMF and ZDoom had it implemented and functional years before EE. EE shows off some sweet in-progress portal tech? Blink your eyes and GZDoom has it shortly thereafter.

 

In my view EE's shortcoming has often been showing its hand too early. The most popular port has stolen its thunder time and again. If EE had finished portals along side a killer map set utilizing it (think Vaporware), I believe that would've driven people in at the time. Same with all the other awesome ideas that have been partially implemented in EE for years.

 

If you trace lineage, EE is likely to be considered the main successor of the Boom/MBF/SMMU track. Unfortunately, it's now stuck in the middle. Not as feature rich as ZDoom, not as "pure" as PR+. Without unique features and mappers utilizing them, it is kind of occupying this nebulous niche at the moment and is mostly visible only to players that are already in-the-know. For better or worse, building a new community around a port requires serious pageantry at times.

 

The name of the port also does it no favors, especially given Doom Eternal's release.

I would like to once to be able to discuss another port without someone invading the discussion, obsessed with touting GZDoom as their ideal.  I don't buy that hype and the constant harassment is just obnoxious.

 

Please discuss EternityEngine here, and the features of it that could be worked on and features it probably would want to avoid. 

 

I would prefer EternityEngine as it is, over any OpenGL only port.   OpenGL results vary, and the player is at the mercy of the implementation, while software draw is more consistent across machines.  Need to keep software draw around, at least as a fall back, even if you did prefer OpenGL glossiness.

OpenGL has often looked as if someone plasticized the game, and I don't care for the plastic look.

I regard the software draw appearance as the ideal, and the differences in the OpenGL draw, and that glossiness, as bugs that need to be fixed.

So, I would not advise going OpenGL preferred with Eternity, as I regard the accomplished software draw features as its better assets.

 

Adapting to the player preferences, including odd ones that you may not have use for, is why I emphasized having good options menus.

The player needs to adapt the game to their preferences.   Many players have no wish to be coerced into abiding by the preferences and ideals of others, no matter who has predetermined what they should like and what they should see as an ideal.

 

There is no need to change the name, it is fine.  I cannot imagine calling it by any other name.

10 minutes ago, wesleyjohnson said:

OpenGL glossiness

Glossiness and plastic look, huh? Bro, it is 2020, in GZDoom you can set the texture filtering to Off, you can set the sector light mode you want, you can enable light banding, it has tonemap options, you can downscale to 320x200 ...

 

Don't make bad arguments if you don't want to be corrected.

The EternityEngine map that I played had some portals.  That is what I remember as being the big feature.

However, the portals were not finished.  There was some implication that the portal code needed some work, and I never heard that it was finished.

 

Some thoughts about portals:

Random connections using portals are not much different than those teleport lines, or teleports, except that you can see through them too.

But randomly connecting parts of the map is just confusing.  Random connections adds confusion, and I really prefer that my natural sense of orientation not be sent into disarray by a portal maze.

An Esher map is fun about once or twice.

 

What is more interesting about portals is what can be accomplished with them to design a good map, that looks normal.

What map features can we create with this tool ?

What can real-world structures can we build with this, that we could not before ?

It would help the mappers  to create a mechanics guide to building stuff using portals.

 

 

EE is my favorite engine these days. 

 

I used to use PrBoom+ but I wanted a sourceport that is similar in functions. EE is also actively developed so it is a plus for me. For my personal usage, it is near perfect.

 

30 minutes ago, wesleyjohnson said:

There was some implication that the portal code needed some work, and I never heard that it was finished. 

 

Portals are finished and fully functional. Occasionally some improvement or new portal feature is implemented, the latest being all type of portals enabled to attach to moving polyobjects.

18 minutes ago, Mordeth said:

the latest being all type of portals enabled to attach to moving polyobjects

Will there be support for rotating ones?

48 minutes ago, wesleyjohnson said:

What map features can we create with this tool ?

What can real-world structures can we build with this, that we could not before ?

Besides non-Euclidean space with 720° circles and buildings that, like the TARDIS, are larger on the inside; the main use of portals is to work around the limitations of the Doom engine. Notably, it allows to have seamless transitions between two disconnected areas, which are an essential part of creating room-over-room effects without sacrificing the entire BSP system.

 

Now, you may say it's possible to create ROR with other methods, such as 3D floors. And yes, it is possible; however 3D floors have two drawbacks when it comes to having a room be above another room:

1. It complicates detailed mapping. The map itself is still a 2D representation, so all the floor and ceiling details of both the lower room and the upper room end up squashed together.
2. Certain parts of the game mechanics remain purely 2D, even in an engine that has been made 3D-aware. For example, sound propagation -- not actual audio, but monster alerts -- goes from sector to sector by crossing lines. So with 3D floor, if monsters are alerted in the lower room, they are also alerted in the upper room, even if it may not be a desired behavior. Other examples of 2D mechanics that can have unwanted effects with 3D floors if not specifically accounted for include the arch-vile's resurrection ability, or Heretic's powered-up Hellstaff raining projectiles from the ceiling. Or even something as basic as a monster's pathing function, as it may reject walking on a 3D floor due to the height difference between the floor it's on currently and the actual floor below the 3D floor...

You don't have these issues with portals, as the rooms can get to be actually separate areas.

51 minutes ago, SilverMiner said:

Will there be support for rotating ones?

 

Already does. Caveat: only for anchored portals.