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gggmork

'correct' prboom+ settings, lost soul limit etc?

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Mostly for demo recording I guess, whats the correct settings for a typical boom map (or I guess the settings most similar to the original doom2 exe) for prboom 2.4.8.3 beta in:
options/setup/doom compatibility?

I've been playing with:
everything set to 'no' except:
max health in DEH applies only to potions = yes
(I didn't choose these options, they just seemed to be the download default) I'd guess its wrong since normally lost souls are limited as far as I know.

Also maybe once every 4 hours of on and off play, I get a 'signal 11' error crash.

The only change I remember making was:
options/general/uncapped framerate = yes
because the game played smoother for me that way.

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uhh, -complevel? i dont know if that actually changes the options or not... my guess for like, normal boom stuff is 9 right? and 17 or 18 is the latest prboom version 2.4.8.4 (or whatever it is) and complevel 2 is doom2.exe

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I tried recording a demo with complevel 9 (with the command line). Then quit and restart prboom (by dragging a wad into it, not by the command line) and those options are all still the same in the latter case.

When I'm not making a demo, normally I just drag/drop the wad into prboom so would probably be best if I could set them correctly in that case. There's quite a few options though, maybe 25 or so.

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When you use a compatibility level, your individual options are not affected. The idea is that you can have a set of generic settings and then apply the compatibilities temporarily for when they are needed (if a demo is played, the engine does it automatically by reading the demo's version).

Boom and Doom are pretty different, so you'd still have to have separate CFGs for vanilla and Boom levels if you wanted to rely on compatibility settings instead of compatibility levels while retaining stable and intended playability.

Had port authors implemented WAD versioning things would be much better, as the compatibility level would have been as easy to set as for demos.

Personally, I prefer to use the compatibility levels only for truly compatible levels, or else demos produced will not be backward compatible with Doom and Boom, which sucks.

I have a very vanilla-like CFG for PrBoom+ (grab it here), for playing "limit removing" levels. In addition to compatibility settings, you have the monster behavior settings to adjust.

One thing I noticed is that PrBoom+ does not include the documentation for PrBoom, which means one has to download PrBoom to read what all the options mean. Pretty ridiculous. A lot of the settings are explained in README.command-line.txt, boom.txt, MBF.txt and boom.cfg.html, for example.

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See my post here.

The main point to understand is that if you use a "vanilla" or Boom complevel, this overrides the individual compatibility settings.

The purpose of each complevel is to emulate the behaviour of an old exe, so if a type of behaviour wasn't optional in that old exe, it won't be optional when that complevel is being used (and so the setting in the menu/cfg is ignored).

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As I understand, the definition of 'complevel' is basically the series of 'yes' or 'no' settings in Options/Setup/Doom Compatibility unless I'm wrong.

Looking at myk's config it appears that, for vanilla:
blazing doors make double closing sounds = no
25 middle textures do not animate = no
(every other option = yes; almost the opposite of how I had it set)

So that's vanilla' settings (complevel 2).

I think I want boom as the default complevel though, since that's the type of map I use most frequently. So what sequence of yes's and no's should I use for boom (complevel 9)?

I opened my (not myk's) prboom.cfg in notepad (I probably don't have the right hardware for glboom btw) and do indeed see a line that says:

default_compatibility_level 9

So shouldn't the sequence of yes's and no's be set to whatever is normal for complevel 9 (boom) by default, based on this line in the cfg file? If I change default_compatibility_level to '2' and save the cfg, all the yes's and no's remain the same. (lost souls are supposed to be limited to 21 in boom, correct?)

Thanks for the help and read all that stuff now (also found usage.txt in the prboomplus folder).

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As your CFG stands, you're playing with Boom behavior (because it's the default compatibility level), and most of those individual settings are being ignored, because a compatibility level will override any settings it needs to ignore to comply with the engine it is emulating. Many of those settings are not read by PrBoom+ unless you set your default compatibility to -1 (or otherwise enable PrBoom's full behavior, such as by using -complevel 17 in the command line).

In short, the individual settings in the CFG are not altered when the compatibility level is changed. The latter simply overrides them if necessary.

gggmork said:
Looking at myk's config it appears that, for vanilla:
blazing doors make double closing sounds = no
25 middle textures do not animate = no

The mid textures setting is a Doom v1.2 compatibility setting (not v1.9) and the other one is just cosmetic (a sound plays twice instead of once). Andrey made a hack to fix the sound glitch in the DOS executable.

(I probably don't have the right hardware for glboom btw)

I don't use any GL settings. My GLBoom is "PrBoom". My CFG uses purely "software mode" settings. I don't know why they keep both executables when GLBoom can do anything PrBoom can do. The only problem could be that some people may have issues opening GLBoom to make adjustments, but the software-only executable could easily be replaced by a CFG file that applies software-mode settings.

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gggmork said:

As I understand, the definition of 'complevel' is basically the series of 'yes' or 'no' settings in Options/Setup/Doom Compatibility unless I'm wrong.

No, that is not the case.

They exist independently. These settings that you see in the menus are only applied if the complevel that is being used allows them to have any effect. If you set complevel 2, then all these settings are ignored. Changing them will have no effect at all. Choosing complevel 2 will not change them either.

The logic is that if you are asking the program to behave like Doom2.exe, then it will do so, and apply Doom2.exe behaviour in all cases. This overrides any individual settings.

If you use complevel -1 (current PrBoom+), then all settings will be acted upon.

If you use complevel 11 (MBF), then any settings that MBF offered will be acted upon. And so on.

There are two ways to set a complevel. One is via the cfg, which you can edit with Notepad or any other text editor. There is a line "default_compatibility_level" (which you have located). If you set this value to 2, then whenever you play, Doom2.exe behaviour will be applied.

You can set the complevel from the command line. Putting "-complevel 2" in the command line will force Doom2.exe emulation, whereas "-complevel 9" will force Boom behaviour. This overrides the default_compatibility_level in the cfg file and the individual compatibility settings.

Actually, there is a third thing that affects the complevel... For demo playback, the program examines the demo file format, and automatically applies the most appropriate behaviour. Thus if it is detected as a Boom demo, then Boom behaviour will be used for playback regardless of what the default_compatibility_level is. Thats why you don't need to specify a complevel for demo playback, except in those very rare cases where the autodetection fails.

For playback of MBF demos, it will apply MBF behaviour and take the relevant compatibility settings from those saved in the demo, again ignoring those saved the cfg or seen in the menus.

Note that if you only ever wish to use prboom+ to play with vanilla or Boom behaviour, or to watch demos, then you need never touch the compatibility settings in the menus, as they will never have any effect on anything.

BTW, similar logic is applied with other types of "emulation" settings. Overflow emulation will only be used together with vanilla behaviour (you'll never get a spechits overflow emulated if you are using the Boom complevel, for instance, no matter what settings you have chosen), while "compatibility with common mapping errors" will be ignored when using a vanilla complevel, and will not be used to record an incompatible demo.

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myk said:

One thing I noticed is that PrBoom+ does not include the documentation for PrBoom, which means one has to download PrBoom to read what all the options mean. Pretty ridiculous. A lot of the settings are explained in README.command-line.txt, boom.txt, MBF.txt and boom.cfg.html, for example.

prboom-plus-2.4.8.x-win32.zip\add\prboom-docs.zip

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entryway said:
prboom-plus-2.4.8.x-win32.zip\add\prboom-docs.zip

Ah, there they are, thanks! I had forgotten that. Curiously I had gone into that folder earlier as I posted. People would look at them more if they weren't down there, though, and instead in a /docs folder directly in the ZIP file. Perhaps just mentioning them in usage.txt (maybe leaving them in add as add/docs) might be enough, as from what I see, other than finding the ZIP there's no way a person that's more or less new to the engine will know of all the standard PrBoom features and options. A brief description of the other additional packages might help too.

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myk said:

Perhaps just mentioning them in usage.txt (maybe leaving them in add as add/docs) might be enough

That's a good suggestion. I could also clarify that usage.txt's primary purpose is to document the new or modified features.

One reason the regular prboom docs were put in a separate zip was that they are rather out of date (even for prboom 2.4.7 itself) and contradict one another in some ways, so someone innocently looking at the package might have got rather confused and failed to realize that usage.txt contained up-to-date information. I keep meaning to expand usage.txt to document all features, rather than just the new ones... (maybe I'll find tim during the 12 days crossing the Southern Ocean that I've got coming up soon). Though I often get the impression people don't bother looking at documentation in any case.

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In that case one thing you could do for the moment is, while mentioning the PrBoom docs, note that while mostly useful some of the information may be outdated. Besides, I guess people would benefit from being informed exactly what stuff like boom.txt and the like are, as the files from the older engines definitely contain some info that does not apply (but might be useful to users sometimes even then).

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Depending on how important it is to you I wouldn't use the -1 setting with the menu options set to yes for a vanilla Doom feel due to a small bug... bug-ish thing that (I think) only affects this non complevel setting of -1. But may affect other complevels above 11 I don't know or really care. However I believe PrBoom-Plus settings that fix mapping errors (ie walk under solid bodies, allow use to pass animated textures, zero tag) will work at any complevel unless you are recording a demo or playing a demo.

Anyway, GlBoom+ is PrBoom+ but with the extra option of hardware rendering and the options that go along with that. If you edit your glboom-plus.cfg to set "videomode" to either "8bit" "16bit" or "32bit" then glboom+ will render in software and hide or disable all hardware options and be just like PrBoom+. Knowing that and that you like to drag and drop then I would suggest setting up your prboom-plus.cfg however you like ignoring the compatibility menu and setting "default_compatibility_level 3" in the config for Ultimate Doom/Doom95 behavior and then copy all your settings to glboom-plus.cfg and set "default_compatibility_level 9" for pure Boom behavior.

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I made this topic because I noticed that pain elemental's lost souls weren't limited in a map I was playing so I wondered if it was an uneven playing field where other players dealt with fewer lost souls than me. But now I'm pretty sure I understand after reading these replies and finding/reading most of the prboom-plus-2.4.8.x-win32.zip\add\prboom-docs.zip stuff (and as a sidenote found a boom 'tntem' cheat I didn't know about).

To sum up, the cfg file's 'default_compatibility_level' trumps the in-game menu settings (unless you put it at -1 or just comment out that line with a #). And, when recording a demo, the cfg default can, in turn, be trumped by the -complevel parameter in the command line.

For example, for a test map with lots of pain elementals, I put my in-game menu to 'limit lost souls to 21?: yes'. However, given that my cfg had 'default compatibility_level 9', the menu option was trumped and lost souls were not limited regardless of the in game menu setting.

Since the in-game menu is obvious in your face, and the cfg is hidden in a cryptic text file, it might be more intuitive if 'default compatibility level' was one of the options to set on the in-game menu that would trump the rest of the options.

I was surprised that complevel 9 (boom) means that lost souls AREN'T limited though. I figured they would be for boom. If 2 people play a map with lots of pain elementals and one somehow sets lost souls to limited and the other doesn't that'd obviously be a big gameplay handicap.

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i never play with limited lost souls a pain elemental puts out. id always thought that the designers of doom intended that they would constantly spit out skulls without stopping, but for some reason could not overcome some little glitch (or didn't notice it or something) that the lost souls were capped... maybe im wrong and they intended it for fairness.

i think the reason the boom complevel doesnt limit lost souls is because boom is technically a limit removing source port...

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HackNeyed said:
Depending on how important it is to you I wouldn't use the -1 setting with the menu options set to yes for a vanilla Doom feel due to a small bug... bug-ish thing that (I think) only affects this non complevel setting of -1.

Hmm, oh yeah, that really smells. It's one of the reasons I dislike Boom compatibility, that "fix". This should be corrected as soon as possible, as far as I'm concerned. (PrBoom v2.5, where are you? Hello?)

gggmork said:
Since the in-game menu is obvious in your face, and the cfg is hidden in a cryptic text file, it might be more intuitive if 'default compatibility level' was one of the options to set on the in-game menu that would trump the rest of the options.

I agree completely. Compatibility levels should appear in the menus like all the other options do, in their own menu. It would also be cool if when a compatibility level were set all the individual settings that do not apply to it were disabled or not shown. Temporarily, that is, as long as that level is used.

I was surprised that complevel 9 (boom) means that lost souls AREN'T limited though. I figured they would be for boom.

You can use compatibility level 7 (Boom's Doom-like behavior) for that. Some Boom levels may break with the Doom-like settings, though. Otherwise use -1, choosing individual Boom-like compatibility options in all respects except the lost soul limit.

Butts said:
id always thought that the designers of doom intended that they would constantly spit out skulls without stopping, but for some reason could not overcome some little glitch (or didn't notice it or something) that the lost souls were capped... maybe im wrong and they intended it for fairness.

You are indeed incorrect. It's not a glitch, but a hard-coded limit. They limited them particularly because an unlimited number of lost souls would seriously slow the game down (intended to be played on a 486), and besides make it rather hard, comparatively. Level 9, for example, becomes pretty tough in Ultra-Violence without the limit, because you get various pain elementals early on and throughout the level.

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gggmork said:

and as a sidenote found a boom 'tntem' cheat I didn't know about

I hate all doom ports which have no support for this Boom cheat :)

'kill monsters' or something is 'hard'

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entryway said:

I hate all doom ports which have no support for this Boom cheat :)

'kill monsters' or something is 'hard'

Oh, nice. I had not known of that one. I remember Doom95 Having a cheat like that, and one called 'idshh' for enabling notarget.

Personally guys, I just use batch files for playing PrBoom+. Check it out.

http://img266.imageshack.us/my.php?image=clipboard01iy4.jpg

All of the boom/vanilla compatible wads have the -complevel parameter set appropriately.

Alien vendetta, for example, uses:
start .\engines\PrBoom+\batch\glboom-plus.exe -iwad .\engines\vanilla\doom2\doom2.wad -file .\pwads\av.wad -deh .\pwads\av.deh -complevel 2

Whereas Scythe II uses..
start .\engines\PrBoom+\batch\glboom-plus.exe -iwad .\engines\vanilla\doom2\doom2.wad -file .\pwads\Scythe2.wad -complevel 9

I love having all of these wads setup in a fashion where I can just double click and be able to play. I have a shortcut to that folder on my quick launch.

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kristus said:

I just use windows shortcuts.

That works as well, but you see the problem with that is, it's not portable. My Doom directory could be burned to a dvd, copied to another pc (anywhere on the hard drive, mind you) and those batches would work.

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