jDoom 1.8.5 !

Lots of changes this time:

http://www.doomsdayhq.com/changes.php

Weeee!

1.8.6 is coming next week along with the next MacOS beta too.

now that's what i call quick updates.

1.8.6 is out now with new packages for all platforms including the latest MacOS beta.

1.8.6 is very nice.

*visits JDRP site*

Dani: I still can't run it on my PC. Looks nice though, with the shiny surfaces and wat-not.... BTW is it true you and SkyJake are planning to add some ZDooM features to Doomsday?

I'm surprised you still can't get it working, what problems are you having again?

Yes I'm looking into it. In Hawthorn Doomsday will support ACS and the Hexen wad format, in the mean time I'm looking into ways to increase the amount of editing features and ease of use in general in Doomsday.

In 1.8.6 there has been some great new features as well as improvements to the PK3 system using automatic file detection and the new Lump Assembly feature. It is also easier to manage detail textures as external resources.

Expect this trend to continue in the next version.

Atm I'm still getting into the swing of things with small changes here and there and work on commonising some of the code. I'm just about finished with the automap (all games use the same enhanced code of the jDoom map) and I've added a lot more options to it. The controls for the automap can be setup in the control bindings and the colours can be customised and its now posible to have a mini map displayed any where you want eg the top right corner of the HUD during gameplay.

After that I'm going to commonise the menu code so we can start looking at ways to make the menus editable.

The first thing I will look into is support of the new features Zdoom has added to the mapinfo lump.

Honestly, I think the consolidation of ports like this will be important to Doom's future. Doom has too few players spread over too many ports; jDoom and ZDoom both have a pretty good following, but are designed with different things in mind. If they could be more consolidated, they would definitely draw in a wider array of people.

Good step, I'm looking foward to this.

That's great to hear. I'm looking forward to what Hawthorn has to offer.

Dani: Yeah I don't know why and still haven't figured out what the problem is. When Doomsday loads (be it through Kickstart or manually launching JDooM), the first little window that shows resources being loaded shows up and after a few things are loaded (look like textures but I can't tell 'cuz it loads too fast) it just quits. It doesn't actually go into the game (port) at all, it just stalls and quits when the first window "loading stuff" shows up. What's worse is that noone's been able to figure out why it's misbehaving like this. I've even talked to Jaakko and Jow about this before, but they couldn't figure out what was wrong with it either. :( Of course I tried the others as well (JHexen/JHeretic) and they wouldn't work either. I even tried Risen-3D, but still no luck.

Anyways, nice to hear about the roadmap for Doomsday.... Most of the features you mentioned sound like they're gonna attract people to JDooM a bit more so that's good. But I take it the more hefty features such as slopes won't be added for a while, right? Not that I'm complaining (too much) but it'd be great if Doomsday supported slopes and sector-over-sector in the future....

Wow, sounds like your computer is seriously borked.

Yeah the more complex stuff like sector-over-sector, the Hexen wad format and ACS will not be here for a while.

Even if JDOOM only ever had half of what ZD does, it'd be a great leap.

Relica Religia said:

Even if JDOOM only ever had half of what ZD does, it'd be a great leap.

Definitely. Even just Boom compatibility would help considerably. It's the only major source port that doesn't support it and probably the biggest reason why Boom features aren't being used more often.

Anyone know where I can get some hard n fast documentation on the implementation of the Boom line specials?

I'm not talking about stuff like Deep Water but a lot of the others should be pretty easy to add support for.

Check out the file Boomref.txt in the Boom distribution. It thoroughly explains all linedef and sector types. But I think the best way to add them is to use the Boom source and replace the functions piece by piece.
But if you should ever decide to add Boom's friction code, better use MBF's. It's much cleaner and the results are almost the same (and it's the code being used in most other Boom compatible ports.)

As for the deep water stuff, 90% of that is one function (R_FakeFlat) so that shouldn't be too hard.

Cheers Graf I'll have a read of the source and see whats going on.

About the friction code - in what way is it different to the code used in Hexen or is it pretty much the same?

DaniJ said:

About the friction code - in what way is it different to the code used in Hexen or is it pretty much the same?

The application of friction works mostly the same. Boom's code is more flexible because it allows variable friction and is not just limited to two different values (normal and icy)
But Boom chose a horrible way to get those friction values to where they are needed (they used a thinker that periodically transferred the friction to all things in the sector - yuck!) MBF changed that to store the friction values in the sector and added a function called GetFriction that was called in exactly the place where Hexen calls P_GetThingFloorType.

The strange thing about this is that the code in Doomsdays XG sector class already applys friction using a method VERY similar to MBF in that case.

It'll be interesting to see how much work is needed to add the various line/sector specials as a lot of the functions of them (judging by the quick scan of the BOOM code I've just done) can already be achieved using the logic of the XG subsystem. In fact this might be best tackled by building new classes into XG where needed. Doomsday already has a system in place to substitute any built in line special with an XG alternative...

What are the most commonly used Boom specials btw?

DaniJ said:

What are the most commonly used Boom specials btw?

Deep water, translucent walls, scrollers and silent teleporters. And the generalized linedef types. Good luck creating 24000 XG definitions! ;)

Good luck creating 24000 XG definitions! ;)

It's a good job a wouldn't need to isn't it. XG is already designed around generalized linedef types ;)

The code for some of the functions you mentioned looks pretty simple to me and could easily be implemented using minor changes to existing XG classes.

The (silent) teleporter stuff would need to be implemented as new classes though.