Zdoom demos on Epic 2

Hey everyone, I'm a long time doom reviewer, first time poster in the forums.

I've been meaning to post a demo, and with the release of the great megawad, EPIC2, I found enough motivation to do this max run. It only works with zdoom 2.5.0 (Sorry if that's inconvenient).

I may post more demos in the future. We'll see :)

epic2-01-203.zip

Indeed, ZDoom is far from the best choice for demo recording. Only ZDoom can play ZDoom demos, and only the version they were recorded with. You can't fast-forward, quickly skip to an arbitrary point, there's no camera/chasecam; and should you miss a monster somewhere, you can't find it on the automap.

Then there's the mess of compatibility options that few ZDoom players seem to pain attention to, and yet they can make or break the demo. Take this MAP01 2:03 run, for example. No mention of compat mode in the TXT, fortunately ZDoom stores that info in the demo header so those who want to find out can, albeit it takes a hex editor. This one was recorded with compatflags 16501. I'm not going to list all the compatflags that translates into, suffice to say that many of them change the engine behavior in decidedly un-DOOM-like ways when set to NO. "Spawn item drops on the floor = NO" alone makes any ZDoom demo practically unwatchable to me.

The biggest thing about v2.5.0 is the work Graf Zahl put into rehabilitating the DOOM compat modes in ZDoom. Despite a few annoyances remaining there's no reason not to use "DOOM (strict)" on vanilla and limit-removing WADs now. However, it is best to record in a format that allows your demo to be played back on a variety of ports. That boils down to vanilla and Boom demo formats and leaves ZDoom only for ZDoom-specific releases or those that are broken in other ports due to ZDoomisms.

Don't let the above discourage you, Starfire - you got a fine time there, more than 20 seconds faster than skep (who is no newbie himself) so you're off to a promising start. Now if you manage to replicate this effort in a format that is usable, durable and comparable to others it will be pretty damn impressive. =) Read the stickies in this forum, you'll find all the information on recording demos properly there.

Hey, hey, I'll see if I can get prboom to work. Last time I tried I had a lot of issues - no music, poor resolution, etc, hence my use of zdoom.

I'm Just posting these demos for fun. I don't even know what compatflags are, I Just used the default zdoom 2.5.0 without messing with it.

So anyway, I have another zdoom max demo. If I can get prboom to work I might switch, but no promises. EDIT: I tried prboomplus, I went to full screen, res 640x480, and I have low framerates. My computer is fairly lousy I guess.

PS. Everyone's demos are amazing.

epic2-02-244.zip

Qaatar said:

I'm rather ignorant about the system requirements, but if you can run zdoom, shouldn't you be able to run pr+ easily? I thought pr+ was by far the most optimized engine?

I thought so too. Saying "Low frame rates" was an overstatement, but the screen does stutter when I move around fast. He he, I'll check out your demo after I reach lvl 13.

Try both software rendering and OpenGL. Unless your system is very old, one of them at least should work OK. And be sure to use the latest version of Prboom+ (2.5.0.8 or the 2.5.0.9 test version). Another thing that used to help was to set the screen resolution to be the same as your desktop, though that may not be an issue any more.

Anyway, try it both ways, and if it's no good, then post about it in the prboom+ thread, describing the problem and posting your cfg file.

Ok, onto level 3 from me. To those concerned, prboom stutters for me (as does 3D mode for doom builder). It's more than likely my computer.

Cheers.

epic2-03-257.zip

Starfire said:

Ok, onto level 3 from me. To those concerned, prboom stutters for me (as does 3D mode for doom builder). It's more than likely my computer.

This wad is for vanilla doom. Would you try chocolate doom? Excluding some vanilla's limits, chocolate doom is the same as complevel 2 in prboom. Maps for vanilla doom are usually not concerned with the limits, so these demos can be played back each other.

It's not my intention to annoy everybody, but chocolate doom, prboom, gzdoom don't work well for me (low frame rates). Gzdoom I regret most, since sometimes wads are released specific for that.

Now if there were some good PC games I'd buy a new computer, but as it currently stands... I'll probably stick to zdoom and my xbox.

However, from messing with prboom and chocolate boom, I realized that mouse precision is much harder, so that gives me more perspective.

If ZDoom is the only port that works on your computer, I guess you've got to use it. That doesn't "ruin" your demos or anything, they're still definitely worth watching. It's easy to see the effort that's gone into them - they're pretty slick and feature nice strategies. It's just weird that you can't get PrBoom+ to run decently on your computer, because it's more optimized than ZDoom. Are you sure you tried running both the prboom-plus and glboom-plus executables?

ZDoom can be faster than prboom+ on simple levels. For example on epic2.wad map01 at 640x480 I have 365 fps with prboom+ and 395 with zdoom. The only situation I know when zdoom will be much slower than prboom (up to 10-100x) is nuts style wads. On sunder.wad map10 I have 70 fps with prboom+ and 22 fps with zdoom (Pentium Dual-Core E5200 @ 2.5GHz on my work)

Well, I thought that chocolate doom is almost the same as vanilla, so it must be faster than zdoom. Therefore, I recommended him it. Is it wrong?

entryway said:

ZDoom can be faster than prboom+ on simple levels. For example on epic2.wad map01 at 640x480 I have 365 fps with prboom+ and 395 with zdoom. The only situation I know when zdoom will be much slower than prboom (up to 10-100x) is nuts style wads.

Oh yes, zdoom totally dies on me when I load nuts and other big maps.

Tatsurd, I was Joking about everyone being annoyed :]

Creaphis, I tried both :) Glad you liked me demos :)

tatsurd-cacocaco said:

Well, I thought that chocolate doom is almost the same as vanilla, so it must be faster than zdoom.

Chocolate-Doom is always 35 fps or lower (35 fps == low frame rate). And generally vanilla/chocolate are slower than boom/prboom/zdoom/etc. Probably Starfire has "uncapped_framerate 0" in cfg?

entryway said:

Probably Starfire has "uncapped_framerate 0" in cfg?

Are we talking about prboom, chocolate doom?

Starfire said:

Are we talking about prboom, chocolate doom?

prboom-plus.cfg

Start epic2 with the latest prboom-plus and type IDRATE cheat for fps

Ye, it's at zero. What should I change it to?

I typed in IDRATE. My frames rarely drop under 100, and usually hover between 100 and 200. The lowest I think was 75, but I still get choppy performance even at 125. That's weird, isn't it? I thought that frame rates above 60 should be perfectly smooth.

437

Is there a particular spacing involved when I write "437"? I'm not getting any performance changes. Maybe I carry bad voodoo.

Hm. Alright, try "1" instead.

No diff. Frame rates are usually around 120.
It could be my lousy GPU that's clogging up the system. My nvidia 6800 got fried and I went back to the stock GPU, a Matrox Shite. When I had the nvidia, I could run Gzdoom, doombuilder, you name it (I didn't use prboom then, except for watching demos).

entryway said:

Chocolate-Doom is always 35 fps or lower (35 fps == low frame rate). And generally vanilla/chocolate are slower than boom/prboom/zdoom/etc. Probably Starfire has "uncapped_framerate 0" in cfg?

I know vanilla is 35 fps, but it is enough playable for me. When he said "low frame rate", I just felt that it is too low to play doom. 35 fps might not be very comfortable, but it should be playable for all.

Starfire said:

My nvidia 6800 got fried and I went back to the stock GPU, a Matrox Shite.

I'm aftaid you're way off the mark here: there are no better chipsets for 2D than those from Matrox. You don't need a GPU to make software renderer run smooth.

tatsurd-cacocaco said:

Well, I thought that chocolate doom is almost the same as vanilla, so it must be faster than zdoom. Therefore, I recommended him it. Is it wrong?

I second your recommendation but you may have heard that saying about how you can drag a horse to the water but cannot make her drink? Well, it doesn't look like Starfire is thirsty ;).

This side discussion is getting a bit too long and misc for this thread and could be split off starting with this post - ZDoom demos don't belong in a thread dedicated to vanilla WAD and whose title has "-complevel 2" in it.

Never_Again said:

I second your recommendation but you may have heard that saying about how you can drag a horse to the water but cannot make her drink? Well, it doesn't look like Starfire is thirsty ;).
.

Prboom works fine on my dad's computer.

That's nice.

Computers suck. We need a way to play Doom without them.

Starfire said:

Prboom works fine on my dad's computer.

Actually I'm not even sure about that. I should have tried doom 2 on it. In doom 1 I get very little stutter on both computers - but enough to make me not want to use it, and I've had my share of lagy games thanks to Australia's rubbish internet providers.

entryway said:
And generally vanilla/chocolate are slower than boom/prboom/zdoom/etc.

Vanilla is a bit faster than PrBoom+ for me in many vanilla levels, but gets slower once levels start getting big:

timed 2001 gametics in 1007 realtics
Timed 2001 gametics in 1109 realtics = 63.2 frames per second

That's using the same rendering (8bit 320x200 in PrBoom+.) OpenGL seems to make PrBoom+ faster than Doom.

But Chocolate is not necessarily the same as vanilla, and seems to be somewhere in between for basic maps:

Error: timed 2001 gametics in 1063 realtics (65.884290 fps)

Level 4 max. I went to vdgg's thread and followed Never_Again's advice,
so I used zdoom 2.5.0 - compatflags 976976855 (more info in text).

EnJoy.

epic2-04-436.zip

Starfire said:
I thought so too. Saying "Low frame rates" was an overstatement, but the screen does stutter when I move around fast. He he, I'll check out your demo after I reach lvl 13.

I guess it's some conflict with SDL. Maybe you could try forcing DirectX on it, instead of Windib, to see if performance improves. DirectX can have some issues on newer systems, such as a glitch where the screen colors get messed up, but there are workarounds. Should be useful at least for watching demos. Another option for vanilla (and most limit removing vanilla) demos is DOSBox with vanilla itself, although it also uses SDL.

Funnily enough just now when I was trying to watch your demos I got an issue similar to the one you described. The action would get jammed for an instant every few seconds. It scared me a bit, so to say, and surprised me as I hadn't experienced that with ZDoom (even v2.5.0) before, but a reboot got rid of it. In any case, good demos!

PS: Kudos for punishing that spiderdemon at the end of level 4; it killed me during my first playthrough there, so close to the exit :/

Never_Again said:

fortunately ZDoom stores that info in the demo header so those who want to find out can, albeit it takes a hex editor.

If it's stored in the demo header, it's so that these settings can be used automatically for playing the demo. :p No need to mess around with a hex editor.