Favorite Source Port? (Multiple Choice Poll)

[Lippeth]

Maybe I should've said "various compatibility reasons" rather than being API related.

[Gez]

Besides something like Lilith that deliberately exploits glitches and bugs, anything that runs on ZDoom 2.8.1 should also run fine on more recent GZDoom versions.

[drfrag]

LZDoom also has fake splitscreen and other things i don't remember right now.

[seed]

6 hours ago, VGA said:

Why? Was the software renderer removed from GZDoom?

 

No, it's still there, using SoftPoly 2, which is a rasterizer for the hardware render, different from that of ZDoom.

 

Nowadays yeah, apart from old mods relying on various quirks, most notably those in the render, which GZDoom can no longer run because these exploits have been fixed, there isn't anything it offers over it, and it also lacks various gameplay and compatibility fixes. Also, no ZScript, though it would have ended in it as well had it not ceased development. Last 2.9pre devbuilds feature a form of ZScript in its infancy.

 

As for QZDoom, it has some advanced lighting if I recall correctly, for instance, which was developed by dpJudas, but he eventually dropped it after an initial implementation, and as a result, it's incomplete and it will never find its way in GZDoom. What is currently there is all that shall ever be.

Edited November 27, 2020 by seed

[OpenRift]

12 hours ago, VGA said:

 It is the user choice to alter the initial experience. If someone googles "faithful doom port" the first result is Chocolate Doom, at least for me.

  

Casual players don't want the vanilla experience, so they instead go with the most popular/modern port they find on google, which is GZDoom. Well, now there is a faithful official port too, the so-called Unity port.

Well the thing is, when new players are getting into Doom, they don't have any concept of what a faithful source port is. Most of the time, (like myself when I first started playing) they mostly look up something like, "how to play Doom in 1080p" or something naïve like that, which 9 times out of 10 is going to be a tutorial on how to install GZDoom.

[VGA]

33 minutes ago, OpenRift said:

Well the thing is, when new players are getting into Doom, they don't have any concept of what a faithful source port is. Most of the time, (like myself when I first started playing) they mostly look up something like, "how to play Doom in 1080p" or something naïve like that, which 9 times out of 10 is going to be a tutorial on how to install GZDoom.

How is that a bad thing? It's better to download GZDoom and get involved with Doom and its mod community, forums etc than install prboom+ and wonder why they can't drop down a ledge because of some invisible wall (when a couple of demons run around below). You know one time I pressed the + button on the numpad by mistake and felt really weird about the speed of the game, restarting prboom didn't help, I eventually asked in the forum and someone told me I probably changed the speed. How idiotic is that on the port's side? That was totally transparent, how would I know I changed the game's speed?

 

And what if they see some awesome gif on twitter or reddit and they see it is a mod they want to try out ... oh, guess what it doesn't work with prboom+, you need yet another port, ain' noone got time for this shit.

 

Those who have no idea about the source port choices are correctly advised to download GZDoom which can play practically all content they encounter. And it finds IWADs from Steam/GOG and such. You don't have to copy files around. And GZDoom supports other games, too.

[Valboom]

40 minutes ago, VGA said:

Come è una cosa negativa? È meglio scaricare GZDoom e partecipare a Doom e alla sua comunità di mod, forum, ecc. Piuttosto che installare prboom + e chiedersi perché non possono cadere da una sporgenza a causa di un muro invisibile (quando un paio di demoni corrono sotto). Sai una volta ho premuto il pulsante + sul tastierino numerico per errore e mi sono sentito davvero strano per la velocità del gioco, riavviare prboom non ha aiutato, alla fine ho chiesto nel forum e qualcuno mi ha detto che probabilmente ho cambiato la velocità. Quanto è idiota quello dal lato del porto? Era totalmente trasparente, come potevo sapere di aver cambiato la velocità del gioco?

 

E se vedono delle fantastiche gif su twitter o reddit e vedono che è una mod che vogliono provare ... oh, indovina cosa non funziona con prboom +, hai bisogno di un'altra porta, nessuno ha tempo per questa merda.

 

Coloro che non hanno idea delle scelte della porta sorgente sono giustamente consigliati di scaricare GZDoom che può riprodurre praticamente tutti i contenuti che incontrano. E trova IWAD da Steam / GOG e simili. Non devi copiare file in giro. E GZDoom supporta anche altri giochi.

And then with GZDoom you can have an almost vanilla experience.

[seed]

2 hours ago, OpenRift said:

Well the thing is, when new players are getting into Doom, they don't have any concept of what a faithful source port is.

 

Pro-tip: Not even hardcore Doomers are obsessed with faithfulness and accuracy.

 

I used to be a "light" purist too, until I came to the conclusion that it's an unhealthy obsession that only narrows the horizon of the player and leads nowhere. GZDoom's "unfaithfulness" is also overblown nowadays, most gameplay-related issues have been rectified. The only notable remaining differences are the RNG - which Boom also altered, but was likely tweaked to stay closer to vanilla -, and some tricks and quirks are harder to perform in it, such as void glides. Bug fixes don't count.

 

This may have been true in the past when some major changes were made and no compatibility flags were put in place for them, such vertical thrust from explosions and I think the infamous flying physics, but this no longer holds up. If there's anything noteworthy left, it's probably a bug and needs to be reported.

[Thermal Lance]

I want to add a special mention to the Unity Port which IMO should be in there and worthy of an A-Tier score. It's quite excellent really for an official port. 

 

Eternity Engine is my personal favorite to play Doom these days. 

Crispy Doom is IMO. The best port for a first time player. 

 

Chocolate Doom because it's the best way to have a pure vanilla experience.

PrBoom+ used to be my go-to sourceport before I discovered Eternity Engine.

GZDoom is only A-Tier for me because of it's insane mods support.

 

I don't use the other ports at all these days. So I can't really rank them.

Edited November 27, 2020 by Thermal Lance

[OpenRift]

8 hours ago, seed said:

I used to be a "light" purist too, until I came to the conclusion that it's an unhealthy obsession that only narrows the horizon of the player and leads nowhere.

I have no problems with WADs that are made in Boom/PrBoom, MBF, ZDoom, or UDMF formats. I'm pretty sure I said that in my original tier list post. I love stuff like Ancient Aliens and Eviternity, they're fantastic WADs, not to mention the countless amounts of ZDaemon and Zandronum-compatible WADs I've DMed on and played in survival with USDQC. We're not judging based on the mods here, we're judging based on the source ports themselves. Or at least I am.

[seed]

4 hours ago, OpenRift said:

We're not judging based on the mods here, we're judging based on the source ports themselves. Or at least I am.

 

Yes, that's exactly what I was talking about. Seems you missed my point.

 

There was no mention or reference to any wad in my post.

[OpenRift]

6 hours ago, seed said:

 

Yes, that's exactly what I was talking about. Seems you missed my point.

 

There was no mention or reference to any wad in my post.

Well when you start talking about 'narrowing the horizon of the player', the only horizon I can really see here is that of WADs. There's not much of a horizon to expand on when it comes to playing the standard IWADs in a source port.

[Redneckerz]

• I'd have a WAD where each level highlights a specific feature of a source port, except it can be run in vanilla. (Meaning trickery is used to simulate the source-port specific effect)
• Alternatively: I'd have a WAD where each level is source port specific and highlights its strengths the best. Kind of a dick move to release such a WAD since it requires a dozen or so ports, but hey.

[LexiMax]

22 hours ago, seed said:

I used to be a "light" purist too, until I came to the conclusion that it's an unhealthy obsession that only narrows the horizon of the player and leads nowhere.

 

I am not a purist, and I used to share your current opinion.  I am not attached to the fiddly little things that go into the original game for any other reason than demo compatibility.  However, I find myself gravitating away from GZ and the forks after realizing a few things:

 

First, I just wanted to play Doom.  I didn't want to play crazy unbalanced weapon mods that sucked the joy out of the game, and although some of the total conversions were really cool looking on their own merits, they also very much weren't Doom.  Why use a port where the main priority of the developers is delivering new features to modders instead of improving the vanilla-ish experience?

 

Now, that's kind of a string accusation.  Why do I think that?

 

I love multiplayer Doom, and when you play multiplayer, you can't always play what you want to play, you have to play what other people want to play.  And in the case of ZDoom (Skulltag and then Zandronum) the vast majority of the server list was taken up by stuff that didn't feel like classic Doom to me.  Some of it was momentarily amusing, but never for very long.  And there was a little bit of classic Doom happening, but after a while it dawned on me that classic Doom is always going to be a second class citizen in those ports because most of the people who play those ports want to play those sorts of mods, so that's naturally where most of the programming effort is going to cater to.  And I think you can safely extrapolate that conclusion from the multiplayer ports to the singleplayer ports like GZDoom.

 

Speaking of new features, that flows into my second point.  I think that GZDoom just has too many features from a content creation perspective.  Ancient Aliens is amazing not only because it's a great WAD, but because it is amazing in spite of the constraints of Boom.  If BTSX in its current form was a ZDoom mapset, it would be...pretty okay, but oh man why didn't you use 3D floors and portals and zscript and all this other junk that you have to do in order to actually make an impressive piece of ZDoom content.  I feel like when you work within constraints, in some ways it narrows your scope, but it also leads to level of creativity that you just don't get when you have every feature delivered to you on a silver platter.

 

There's also a third reason that is probably only relevant to multiplayer folks like me.  GZDoom 3.x and above does not have client/server multiplayer, and I doubt it ever will.  Too many years of too many assumptions that assume p2p.  Anything that I can't play online is not interesting to me, full stop.

 

Another thing that's kind of specific to me is that I really really like speedrunning.  I don't run myself, but I love watching other people do it, and I love watching stuff off of DSDA's youtube channel, as well as channels like Karl Jobst and SummoningSalt.  And GZDoom is never going to be an acceptable or stable speedrunning target.  It's not a priority for the developers, and speed-runners don't want their times invalidated due to some unexpected weirdness introduced in the gamesim between versions.  Apparently, they'll speedrun the Unity Port before they speedrun GZDoom seriously.

 

So...I suppose my point is that there are reasonable reasons to stick with the old stuff that is not just an unhealthy obsession with a tic-perfect adherence to the original gameplay.  Sometimes you just want to play Doom.

Edited November 28, 2020 by AlexMax

[VGA]

Yes, there are ports better suited to multiplayer (like Zandronum) and better suited to speedrunning (like prboom+). Everyone knows noone uses GZDoom for those.

 

But I don't understand this:

59 minutes ago, AlexMax said:

Why use a port where the main priority of the developers is delivering new features to modders instead of improving the vanilla-ish experience?

How is the vanilla experience suffering in GZDoom? It can play BTSX and Ancient Aliens more smoothly and in higher-fidelity than anything else. You can also downscale to the pixelly retro resolution you want, do that in prboom with an LCD screen.

 

No, really, here is E1M1 in 320x200 in GZDoom. Do that in prboom+ in fullscreen

 

 

 

[LexiMax]

23 minutes ago, VGA said:

How is the vanilla experience suffering in GZDoom? It can play BTSX and Ancient Aliens more smoothly and in higher-fidelity than anything else. You can also downscale to the pixelly retro resolution you want, do that in prboom with an LCD screen.

 

I didn't say the vanilla experience suffered.  It's fine.  Serviceable.  But to be honest I have often left my GZDoom at an older version because why would I ever need to update it?  Every other port I try to keep up with new releases, but considering the things I want to play, why do I need to do that with GZDoom?

Edited November 28, 2020 by AlexMax

[VGA]

Well, since you reminded me, I just updated my GZDoom, do you know what they added in the latest release? Widescreen-friendly graphics!

 

Quote

For all of Doom's fullscreen images there's now widescreen versions provided. The other games are still being worked on and will be added later when they become available. All new images were created by Nash Muhandes - this does not use any of the versions from the Unity port.

 

Oh, YES PLEASE. Just tried it out, no more 4:3 screens in the menu, the intermission sceen etc!

 

EDIT: Oh, nice, they simplified the options by hiding non-essential ones behind a "Full options" menu, that's nice.

[seed]

22 minutes ago, AlexMax said:

I didn't say the vanilla experience suffered.  It's fine.  Serviceable.  But to be honest I have often left my GZDoom at an older version because why would I ever need to update it?  Every other port I try to keep up with new releases, but considering the things I want to play, why do I need to do that with GZDoom?

 

Because of its features, and bug fixes. With a port that has its features locked in place like PrBoom, there is no point in staying as up to date as possible since there's never going to be major changes for most players. For speedrunning? It's perfect already. Vanilla, Boom, MBF wads? Already done.

 

This holds especially true for compatibility, if you stick to ZDoom 2.8.1 for instance, enjoy the bad flying physics and enemies going into space from explosions underneath beneath them, no way to reverse it. Not cool stuff.

 

I suppose it all comes down to what everyone seeks in their experience, and what I seek is playing the game smoothly, I no longer have much concern for demo compat and the likes of it, since I'm not a speedrunner, I don't give a damn about multiplayer at all, and nowadays it's faithful enough gameplay wise. I switch to other ports depending on my needs, but it covers what I need for now.

 

1 hour ago, AlexMax said:

Sometimes you just want to play Doom.

 

And it can do that just fine... at this point this is turning into a pointless debate on "what constitutes a good Doom experience", and there's never going to be an universal agreement on that.

[LexiMax]

13 minutes ago, seed said:

And it can do that just fine... at this point this is turning into a pointless debate on "what constitutes a good Doom experience",

 

I agree, it's a fruitless debate.  Which is why it wasn't what my point was.  Let me attempt to distill my rambling into the two points that are not 100% just personal preference.

 

1. In a community sense, I don't want to feel like a Doom-playing guest in the home of weapon mods and total conversions.

2. I feel like GZDoom has too many content creation features and it simultaneously raises the floor (and thus work required) of what might be considered a "good" ZDoom map while also not imposing enough constraints that require creativity to work around.

 

There.  Distilled.

[Gez]

So, "stop making mods I don't want to play" and "making mods should be more difficult".

[seed]

And "stop making ports that aren't good enough for playing vanilla Doom".

[LexiMax]

1 minute ago, Gez said:

So, "stop making mods I don't want to play" and "making mods should be more difficult".

 

And this would be an example of the hitherto-unmentioned reason #5 why I find myself drifting away from GZDoom.

 

But to actually address your rhetoric, I don't have a problem with the existence of the mods.  People clearly want to make them, and there is a clear audience for them.  That's great, I hope they have a lot of fun making and playing them.  But I don't care for them most of the time, so why would I use a port whose primary purpose seems to be to cater to that crowd?  It has a primary target audience, and that target audience does not include me.  The port is under no obligation to cater to me, but then why is it a surprise that I use the port less and less?

[VGA]

Well, your main argument was that GZDoom was mainly catered to mod authors and players and did not offer much for vanilla single-player, like it was an afterthought. I mean this argument.

 

4 hours ago, AlexMax said:

Why use a port where the main priority of the developers is delivering new features to modders instead of improving the vanilla-ish experience?

 

Well, I disagree and made my arguments in my previous posts. GZDoom offers an amazing array of features and customisability for playing *vanilla* *unmodded* Doom content, way more than any other port. Display options like multiple renderers, resolution scaling, lighting algorithm and a ton of toggleable effects/filters, sound options like soundfonts and multiple devices, control options out the wazoo, multiple config file support and I don't know wtf else.

 

For example, glboom has shit lighting in my opinion. It looks washed out, what can I do? It's not just on my part, it looks crap in Youtube videos, too, when glboom is used. It doesn't look like DOS Doom at all, it looks like glboom. Especially since I have to use my desktop's resolution (1080p) to avoid resolution changes and my desktop shortcuts getting randomly jumbled. I don't want to play Doom at washed out 1080p.

 

 

[LexiMax]

53 minutes ago, VGA said:

GZDoom offers an amazing array of features and customisability for playing *vanilla* *unmodded* Doom content, way more than any other port. Display options like multiple renderers, resolution scaling, lighting algorithm and a ton of toggleable effects/filters, sound options like soundfonts and multiple devices, control options out the wazoo, multiple config file support and I don't know wtf else. 

 

Most of that stuff either already exists in other ports or doesn't interest me.  And as for GL looking washed out, well....my solution for that is to use software mode.

[Thermal Lance]

1 hour ago, VGA said:

Well, your main argument was that GZDoom was mainly catered to mod authors and players and did not offer much for vanilla single-player, like it was an afterthought. I mean this argument.

 

 

Well, I disagree and made my arguments in my previous posts. GZDoom offers an amazing array of features and customisability for playing *vanilla* *unmodded* Doom content, way more than any other port. Display options like multiple renderers, resolution scaling, lighting algorithm and a ton of toggleable effects/filters, sound options like soundfonts and multiple devices, control options out the wazoo, multiple config file support and I don't know wtf else.

 

For example, glboom has shit lighting in my opinion. It looks washed out, what can I do? It's not just on my part, it looks crap in Youtube videos, too, when glboom is used. It doesn't look like DOS Doom at all, it looks like glboom. Especially since I have to use my desktop's resolution (1080p) to avoid resolution changes and my desktop shortcuts getting randomly jumbled. I don't want to play Doom at washed out 1080p.

 

 

Correct me if I am wrong but glboom has also a bunch of filters enabled by default. Must be why it feels washed out to you.

[LexiMax]

10 minutes ago, Thermal Lance said:

Correct me if I am wrong but glboom has also a bunch of filters enabled by default. Must be why it feels washed out to you.

 

Last I knew, glboom used old fixed-pipeline GL, and I think pretty much any GL renderer that doesn't use programmable pipeline is going to look flat and washed out to some degree, since there's no way to emulate vanilla lighting falloff.

[VGA]

Exactly, GZDoom has several lighting modes, a couple of which use shaders to emulate vanilla lighting very well. In prboom, you have to use the prboom executable which is the software renderer, instead of the glboom exe. Most people use the glboom exe because it has vastly better performance at high resolutions and it has been more actively maintained by entryway. It is not about the texture filtering.

 

[Spectre01]

GLBoom+ looks decent if you use the Shaders option under Sector Light Mode. That one closely emulates Software's diminishing light effect. It's still not great, and  dark areas where you can see enemy and texture highlights in Software appear pitch black in GLBoom+ under that mode. GZDoom is still very much ahead in OpenGL rendering, and with the palette tonemap, I have no reason to use the much slower Software renderer in it.

[LexiMax]

49 minutes ago, VGA said:

Exactly, GZDoom has several lighting modes, a couple of which use shaders to emulate vanilla lighting very well. In prboom, you have to use the prboom executable which is the software renderer, instead of the glboom exe. Most people use the glboom exe because it has vastly better performance at high resolutions and it has been more actively maintained by entryway. It is not about the texture filtering.

 

Okay!  You have a reason to use GZDoom.  Use it!  Nothing wrong with using it if you need it, or even if you prefer it.  I don't run the kinds of WAD's that cause performance issues in the software renderer.  I don't need a GL renderer.  I don't need GZ for 99% of what I do.

 

Speaking of software renderer performance, check out the cool work being done in Rum and Raisin.  Hopefully some of that work starts percolating over to the other ports, which it is actually incredibly likely to happen considering R&R is based on Chocolate.

Edited November 29, 2020 by AlexMax

[Master O]

Stupid Doom Mod Idea:

 

A Doom Sourceport Fighting Game