TUCQ. What's the big freaking deal?

I played through Chex Quest 3 (including the updates of the original two games), in GZDoom, and then I played the latest beta of The Ultimate Chex Quest, which has apparently been abandoned. As I played Chex Quest 3, I admired the professional work that had been done to make it the experience that it was--fun, funny, silly and even challenging at times (in the equivalent to Ultra-Violence). Nonetheless, I also spent that time paying attention for anything that made ZDoom the port of choice for the game, and I couldn't find a whole heck of a lot. OpenGL makes it look nice and pretty, that's for sure, but it does the same thing in Legacy.

I get that Legacy isn't anyone's favorite port anymore (except mine!), and I get that there aren't a heck of a lot of people working on it anymore. The thing is, playing what was an extremely incomplete version of The Ultimate Chex Quest demonstrated to me what Legacy can do that other source ports can't. It really was a beautiful work in progress. 3D sectors are not something to be scoffed at. More levels wouldn't be something to scoff at either, especially with the level of detail that was going into the project. Legacy is a beautiful port with a lot going for it. In the new version you can even select "monsters infight" right from the menu. Come on. That's cool. And I haven't seen any other port with the "predicting monsters" or "solid corpse" options either, though to be fair, solid corpses are so annoying I tend to not really use it anymore.

I guess what I'm getting at is that I really don't see why people have such an intense love for ZDoom over other ports. I mean, I guess Skulltag is climbing the ranks now, but apparently it's based on ZDoom? All I know is that I wouldn't have bothered with ZDoom at all if not for Chex Quest.

On another note, I am considering getting a hold of Doom II Reloaded and Beautiful Doom, and running them together in GZDoom. That could be fun...

Thoughts?

rabidrage said:

so annoying I tend to not really use it anymore.

I think you just answered your own question.

Pretty much everything you listed can be done in nearly any modern port today. One example: Vavoom, Doomsday (I believe), Gzdoom + derivatives, and others I probably forgot to mention also have "3d sectors" (whether you mean 3d floors or fake room-over-room.) Eternity even has pretty functional linked portals, probably the most convincing of all. These are just some of their basic features. Legacy was a good port, but unfortunately it is pretty behind now. I don't think you looked around enough.

Legacy has been dead for a long while, and even though wesleyjohnson has been arch-viling it up from its grave it remains to be seen if it will gather a large following again.

rabidrage said:

I guess what I'm getting at is that I really don't see why people have such an intense love for ZDoom over other ports.

On Doomworld threads, most of the love seems directed towards Chocolate Doom, Eternity and PrBoom+. Most projects started here tend to fall in one of these three categories: strict vanilla, limit-removing, Boom-compatible.

Gez said:

On Doomworld threads, most of the love seems directed towards Chocolate Doom, Eternity and PrBoom+. Most projects started here tend to fall in one of these three categories: strict vanilla, limit-removing, Boom-compatible.

Which is to be expected as the main Eternity forum is hosted here at Doomworld as are the main discussion threads for PrBoom+ and Chocolate Doom.

Ports like Doomsday and ZDoom have their own forums.

Gez said:

Legacy has been dead for a long while, and even though wesleyjohnson has been arch-viling it up from its grave it remains to be seen if it will gather a large following again.

While the low number of Legacy wads coming out these days basically means that I don't use it overly much, I certainly wish wesley the absolute best of luck.

I personally am fairly port-agnostic, and I'll use the port a wad was designed for.. or at least that it *says* it was designed for..

Haha, okay guys, so it turns out it really was just me and not everyone else in the world. :P I'm getting some real fun out of GZDoom, finally. Doom II Reloaded + Beautiful Doom + hires textures = one awesome freaking game. I saw the Youtube promo for Doom II Reloaded and though it was cool, but could use some more...reloaded...ness...

Now, here's a question for those who are interested in answering. Between Beautiful Doom and Dtcog (whatever it stands for), which do you prefer and why? Dtcog (or enhanced) has to be my favorite little add-on. It changes so much and adds just the right touch of realism. Beautiful Doom seems like it emulates it to a degree, but is also its own thing. Just some thoughts.

Vanilla (or close approximation) is good enough for me. I played with some of the advanced ports but then realized I don't really need them.

I should add...those spectres in ZDoom are the same as the ones from 3DO. I'm freaking sold. The 3DO had two things going for it--invisibility effect and music. :D

Giomancer said:

I personally am fairly port-agnostic,

You don't know if they excist or not, or is this simply a fancy way of saying that you don't know much or anything about them?

Last I checked Boingo was trying to start work back up on TUCQ, and was planning on porting it over to GZDoom because it had more advanced features.

On Doomworld threads, most of the love seems directed towards Chocolate Doom, Eternity and PrBoom+.

If it were anywhere near true, there'd probably be some kind of conspiracy by ZDoom users to annoy Doomworld denizens, seeing as one wad out of three posted in this forum exhibits some kind of gamebreaking ZDoomism, and many more wads have less obvious ones (infinitely tall bullshit or screwed balance assuming blockmap fix). Same goes in the editing forum with many posts being ZDoom specific and/or assuming DECORATE is the norm.

Or it could be a conspiracy the other way, Doomworlders taking screenshots with the ZDoom HUD to make it look like there's more people using ZDoom than there truly is!

I'm not big on tinfoil hats personally, so I'm going to go with the opinion that ZDoom is rather popular even on DW, and that it gets indeed much love considering how defensive certain people get before there's even an attack, or ever was in the last months/years.

It's nice to see another Chex thread on Doomworld

The last time I talked to Boingo about Doom modding (some weeks ago, a month at most), he was working on Diemwolf, not TUCQ. I was going to teach him how to use polyobjects for sliding doors, to make it more like Wolfenstein.

He said that he was very out of practice in mapping, and he needs to re-learn his skills, but after that, he's going to switch to GzDoom. However, he said that several months ago, and I haven't heard anything from him about TUCQ since. I assume he's busy with other things right now.

TUCQ contained a lot of details that are missing in Chex3.wad. For example, Chukker did not build out the walls like Boingo did. It is time consuming to make maps as detailed as Boingo does, but it looks great.

I recommend that you try my mod, Chex Skulltag Pack. It's for Skulltag, but it has many, many more features than Chex 3 (dynamic lights for all actors, including lights on the flemoid's pain and death states, a zorch state for the player, slime splats on the walls, new weapons). The GzDoom dynamic lights don't look as good as Legacy's, but the dynamic lights on the zorch pain/death states still looks very nice.

Right now, it only has deathmatch (zorchmatch) maps, but I've been working with somebody on making some single player/co-op levels.

The maps in the pack are not as detailed as Boingo's, since it's deathmatch, but the co-op maps so far are as detailed as his levels were.

You can find information about it on my zdoom topic, I also have a doomworld topic, which is probably on the second or third page right now. I'm still working on it, but my maps take a long time.

EDIT - yes, it was on the third page. I'll post my latest update here too.

Here's a link to my zdoom topic:

http://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=27666

Doomworld topic:

http://www.doomworld.com/vb/wads-mods/55709-wip-chex-skulltag-pack/