[GEC] Master Edition PSX Doom for the PlayStation. Beta 4 Released [11/16/2022]

[Dark Pulse]

6 hours ago, MajorRawne said:

You said total map size + monsters is theoretically 1170KB (1,200,000 bytes), with a simple, large, square room with a square pit in the middle taking up 174kb. Therefore, the minimum size of a PLAYABLE map is going to significantly cut into the available VRAM. Power ups, items, deathmatch starts etc don't take up enough room to worry about.

More accurately, those are sprites that are "always loaded." IIRC, Erick said that includes weapons, powerups, Doomguy's sprites, etc.

 

6 hours ago, MajorRawne said:

Once you have selected monsters and drawn a map and chosen items which all fit the VRAM constraints, you can effectively place as many of each as you want, since no sane map is going to have 6,000+ things in it. However this DOES mean that you CAN potentially port Hell Revealed style maps across, but modern, post-Hell Revealed slaughtermaps are out since they rely on every monster type for "variety".

 

What would be the max limit of sprites that can actually be:

1. On-screen at one time

2. Active throughout the map at one time

My hunch is its about the same as PC Doom's vanilla limits - 128 before Things begin to flicker in and out of view; they'll remain active but only be selectively rendered.

 

Someone did a "port" of NUTS.WAD and it shows the effect pretty well.

 

 

Edited March 29, 2019 by Dark Pulse

[MajorRawne]

That's insane, the Playstation can display a huge number of monsters at once. Weird how it is so limited in some ways and so amazing in others - it's like ordering a banquet, finding some of the food has been chopped out for budget reasons but exotic new flavours have somehow been added despite the budget problems.

 

Did anyone find that any of the cut levels from PC and Xbox Doom can actually run on the PSX without modification, or with very quick and simple mods?

 

And also, do we know why specific levels were cut that could fairly easily have been ported across? I am guessing that the Williams team simply felt some maps weren't as good. I've always felt the map selections in PSX Doom 2 and FDoom are considerably stronger than the originals, as we got Refuelling Base and Vesperas, but we didn't have to swear and rage our way through Titan Manor or The Chasm.

[Dark Pulse]

25 minutes ago, MajorRawne said:

Did anyone find that any of the cut levels from PC and Xbox Doom can actually run on the PSX without modification, or with very quick and simple mods?

Well, speaking from my experience...

1. E3M8: Dis ran pretty much fine with only really minor alterations (and that was because I wanted to make the Spider Mastermind more of a fight, plus needed a new area for an end trigger due to no auto-end on death unlike PC Doom). Its worst problem is actually that the renderer has a little bit of trouble rendering the large floor space, so you occasionally see some minor breakup along the edges. Otherwise runs just fine. (You can see for yourself in the current beta - or just watch this.)
2. TNT MAP05: Hanger only needed very minor alterations - pinching some doors due to them being 96 wide (since door textures are only 64 or 128 wide, and using a 128 door was needlessly wasteful IMO, not to mention robbed extra texture space), and a little trimming of decorative elements in the outer courtyard to avoid a geometry overflow. The geometry is otherwise 98% identical. That said, I BARELY got it to run within memory limits - I had to actually pinch a decorative lamp because if I didn't, the game would run out of memory if you died and attempted to respawn!
3. TNT MAP06: Open Season needed height adjustments in the pump room area due to the renderer's height limit, but otherwise the geometry is 1:1 (minus some additions and alterations I made for better atmosphere). Monster variety definitely took a bit of a hit though, but that will be pretty common in any map that had a large amount of variety.
4. Plutonia MAP18: Neurosphere only needed one minor change to run - I had to merge some of the red skull blocking bars into bigger chunks or it'd overflow on an edgeclip. Other than doing the same for two other similar places (that did NOT overflow) for consistency reasons, and some minor sector merging, the level is, like Hanger, 98% identical in geometry. Definitely can be a bit clunky in certain spots though - lots of long views.
5. From what work I've done on it thus far, Master Levels: Bloodsea Keep will definitely need its height shrunk very slightly, but I haven't actually gotten a texturing and enemy replacement pass done yet, so I can't speak if there will be more to it than that just yet.
6. Tech Gone Bad will definitely need some chopping as it's limit-removing. This will probably be the only map I can't realistically port "straight" without a dramatically rewritten renderer and game engine. :)

25 minutes ago, MajorRawne said:

And also, do we know why specific levels were cut that could fairly easily have been ported across? I am guessing that the Williams team simply felt some maps weren't as good. I've always felt the map selections in PSX Doom 2 and FDoom are considerably stronger than the originals, as we got Refuelling Base and Vesperas, but we didn't have to swear and rage our way through Titan Manor or The Chasm.

From what Tim Heydelaar said, maps that got cut usually were either for performance reasons or them feeling that the alterations needed to make them run would essentially alter the level too radically to make it a reasonable approximation (whether for geometry, or monster variation, or whatever).

Edited March 30, 2019 by Dark Pulse

[MajorRawne]

It seems that there were several reasons levels were cut. Complexity, as you say. In the first Doom/Doom 2 disc, space would have been tight, so some just had to go. Maybe this is also the case in FDoom since there were only 30 levels, but they were notably longer, tougher and more complicated, so presumably they took up more disc space?

 

I am also guessing that there was an issue of redundancy. Isn't Neurosphere the Inmost Dens ripoff? Still tremendous fun but I guess Williams thought there was no need to make players go through the same level twice. They may have also correctly thought that having a Hangar and Hanger would be confusing. Difficulty might be the next factor. More Plutonia maps would have destroyed the carefully balanced gameplay required when you can't save, so those maps could have been excluded on this basis. Large maps which did make it onto the PSX are either unlikely to kill you (The Citadel) or designed more to scare you (Lunar Mining Project). The only Chaingunner spam is in The Pit if you get the rocket launcher and that is pretty much guaranteed to destroy the player first time. The Pit is large and annoying, so imagine if this was multiplied by another thirty maps.

 

Do we know how FDoom could support more linedefs etc?

[Dark Pulse]

7 hours ago, MajorRawne said:

It seems that there were several reasons levels were cut. Complexity, as you say. In the first Doom/Doom 2 disc, space would have been tight, so some just had to go. Maybe this is also the case in FDoom since there were only 30 levels, but they were notably longer, tougher and more complicated, so presumably they took up more disc space?

Space wasn't really the issue. The levels themselves are practically negligible in terms of space - the WADs are literally a couple dozen KB, the Sprite files for each map varies from about 500-950 KB each, and the Texture data generally around 80-175 KB each. Every single file, combined, in the MAPDIR0-MAPDIR7 directories is 47.4 MB.

 

For what it's worth, the Ending voiceover + music track, encoded as CD Audio, is 40 MB by itself. Yes, one audio track is nearly as big as the entire game's set of level, sprite, and texture data.

 

The whole disc of Playstation Doom is using only 241 MB total. Assuming they would've followed the 650 MB standard, that's still over 400 MB free. They could've freed up a bit more if they would've stored the audio tracks as XA Audio instead of CD-DA, as well, but that was more of a late 90s Playstation trick.

 

Point being, you could easily fit all the maps in with room to spare, so it wasn't an issue of taking up too much room at all. The engine as-is seems to have a limit of 64 map slots total before it bombs out - note you can see a MAP60-64.PAD, MAPSPR60-64.PAD, and MAPTEX60-64.PAD if you open up the CD in Windows Explorer and check the contents of MAPDIR7 - but Erick's getting around the problem by having multiple EXEs for the user to select from in the game's selection menu, and in turn, each of those EXEs can have their own 64 maps to pick. (He might've found other ways around this by now, but it's true for at least up to, and including, Beta 2.)

 

Final Doom used even less space - by using one less CD-DA audio track (the mid-set intermission between the Doom and Doom II maps), and, of course, having only 30 maps total, it consumes a mere 204 MB of disc space. No obvious PAD files here, but the slots for MAP31 and MAP32 are quite obvious filler if you open them with a hex editor.

 

TL;DR: Space was hardly a factor in why maps got cut. They had room to fit pretty much every official map ever, with room to spare.

 

7 hours ago, MajorRawne said:

I am also guessing that there was an issue of redundancy. Isn't Neurosphere the Inmost Dens ripoff? Still tremendous fun but I guess Williams thought there was no need to make players go through the same level twice. They may have also correctly thought that having a Hangar and Hanger would be confusing. Difficulty might be the next factor. More Plutonia maps would have destroyed the carefully balanced gameplay required when you can't save, so those maps could have been excluded on this basis. Large maps which did make it onto the PSX are either unlikely to kill you (The Citadel) or designed more to scare you (Lunar Mining Project). The only Chaingunner spam is in The Pit if you get the rocket launcher and that is pretty much guaranteed to destroy the player first time. The Pit is large and annoying, so imagine if this was multiplied by another thirty maps.

Well, taking those point-by-point...

1. Kind of - and it's also what Tom Mustaine ripped off (at least, according to American McGee) in his MAP14 Homage (that we're also covering, since it was in a beta build of the game). That said, Final Doom did come out after the original Doom/Doom II, so I don't really think it was an issue of redundancy. Performance is probably why - there's definitely areas of that map where framerate can drop to 10-15 FPS, due to how much is in view. I think it performs fairly well for most of the level though, but perhaps that was unacceptable to them. (And those playing on emulators that allow you to overclock the Playstation CPU can just do that to get rid of the framerate problem with ease.)
2. Hangar/Hanger is confusing in and of itself. Doom Classic actually corrects that level's name to be spelled as "Hangar" but there's some debate as to if that is a mistake in and of itself (I just shot a tweet to Tom Mustaine - maybe he'd know). That said, this is again shielded by that Playstation Doom and Playstation Final Doom were two different products.
3. The massive amount of monster swapping that'd be necessary due to RAM limits is probably what got most Plutonia maps axed. That, and a lot of them were pressing up pretty hard on vanilla Doom limits. (Even Neurosphere has some visplane overflows if you get in a certain spot and look a certain direction.)
4. Chaingunners aren't actually really the problem (they don't even take up much RAM), but the framerate does make fighting a large mass of them more painful, I suppose.

7 hours ago, MajorRawne said:

Do we know how FDoom could support more linedefs etc?

Engine was upgraded a bit. Support for the Playstation mouse was added, the map format changed (from WAD to ROM), etc. (That said, you don't need to worry about that last one, Erick's tools take care of converting the format.)

Edited March 30, 2019 by Dark Pulse

[mr-around]

On 3/27/2019 at 2:08 PM, DynamiteKaitorn said:

I'd happily do a custom map for the PSX engine. :D

 

I support the idea of making new stuff rather than all-seen IWAD ones and would be ready to do some =)

[Dexiaz]

Could anyone explain how this bug works?

 

It can't be possible in PC Doom, so...

[Dark Pulse]

4 minutes ago, Đeⓧiaz said:

Could anyone explain how this bug works?

 

It can't be possible in PC Doom, so...

My hunch is that the Lost Soul flies out so far it overflows some kind of memory address describing its position within the level, which in turn, begins corrupting other bits and pieces of memory where the level data gets stored, and in the end, it just causes the whole thing to bomb out.

 

Probably could be resolved by some kind of bounds checking or something like that.

[MajorRawne]

I've just got one further question and will stop bogging this thread down! Was any reason given why Williams decided to let Aubrey Hodges do a completely different soundtrack, rather than simply creating higher quality versions of the PC music? As I believe the 3DO team did. 

 

There's a Youtube vid with original PC sound effects used on a Playstation so the sound effects could have worked. It's not like the PC sound effects are even bad quality. Bad being defined as the ultimate suckage of Duke Nukem 3D's sound quality. They sound like they were made on a Commodore 64 and recorded from a different room! XD

[seed]

15 minutes ago, MajorRawne said:

I've just got one further question and will stop bogging this thread down! Was any reason given why Williams decided to let Aubrey Hodges do a completely different soundtrack, rather than simply creating higher quality versions of the PC music? As I believe the 3DO team did. 

 

Dropping into the threat out of nowhere, but my 2¢ on this:

 

I could be completely wrong, but I think they let Aubrey do this simply because both PSX Doom and PSX Final Doom have a very different atmosphere from PC Classic Doom, and the original soundtrack (which was arguably more action oriented) wouldn't have mixed well with the darker tone of the games.

[riderr3]

I made a test regarding to limits of animated textures and switches animation.

As we know, the additional frames of animated textures are not showing in VRAM viewer, you can even hit the limit of usual textures in VRAM, but animations still worked. But how they limited then?
I built a small room with all animated textures and flats (Final Doom). And all of them is properly animating, even despite the fact with all frames is virtually over the VRAM limit.




Ok, but this is just one plain room. Let's paste to this new map River Styx, with all of it's walls and flats replaced to gray wall and gray flat + removed few linedefs because of adding testing room.

Great! Now the map wouldn't launch and we have ZMALLOC error, this would usually happen because of many linedefs and many monster types. But in this case it's because many animated textures.

Ok, I removed all things except the player from this test map. Now I have messed up animated textures.

And if I move a bit, i have lots of errors like "FrontZClip: Point Overflow", "LeftEdgeClip: Point Overflow", "RightEdgeClip: Point Overflow"

Now instead of things removing, I reduce lidedefs. All those animations will work on this map if I remove 300 linedefs. That's the cost of those animations.

Moreover, by experimenting with this map, the PSXMAP.exe crashed without building an image. I will send example to GEC just in case.

Conclusion: extra animation frames probably used another table of memory. So you may want reduce some animated textures from you map (if map have too many). As example if map have 2 different flaming textures, you can remove one, and it will free some memory for linedefs. If you remember the first version of Abattoire, it have less animated flats, but in new versions I removed some optional linedefs and added original animated flats.


Regarding switches, I don't have problem with them, because they all listed in VRAM. You can even use 10+ switches in your map.

Edited March 30, 2019 by riderr3

[Gez]

On vendredi 29 mars 2019 at 4:37 PM, Dark Pulse said:

Thing is, PSX Revenants are leagues easier to tango with, and Barons can be effectively replaced by Nightmare Hell Knights, which actually use slightly less memory than the Barons.

The memory footprint of the barons could be reduced to exactly the same as the knights if the sprite data in the IWAD was replaced. It's due to how sprite mirroring can be used and how they used a more optimized scheme for the knight. Basically, the optimization is in the walk frames (A, B, C, D). Barons keep the mirroring in the same frame, so you have BOSSA1, BOSSA2A8, BOSSA3A7, BOSSA4A6, BOSSA5, and again the same thing for B, C, and D. Twenty sprites total for walking. Knights use the mirroring across frames, which is much more efficient because it allows to mirror also the front and back angles: BOS2A1C1, BOS2A2C8, BOS2A3C7, BOS2A4C6, BOS2A5C5, BOS2A6C4, BOS2A7C3, BOS2A8C2, and again for the B/D pair. Sixteen sprites total for walking. This means that the knight walking sprites take up a total of 53116 bytes in ROM, while the baron sprites for the equivalent animation take up a total of 66128 bytes.

 

Furthermore, the knight's walk animation at the angled view is also more accurate. Since the A frames are mirrors of the C frames and likewise for B and D frames (you can check it for yourself), the result with the knight's scheme is more consistent across all angles, while for the baron it can show it with left leg forward on angles 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, but right leg forward on angles 6, 7, 8.

 

For the attack, pain, and death animations, there's no difference between both monsters. 39 sprites totalling 137424 bytes in both cases.

[Dark Pulse]

5 hours ago, MajorRawne said:

I've just got one further question and will stop bogging this thread down! Was any reason given why Williams decided to let Aubrey Hodges do a completely different soundtrack, rather than simply creating higher quality versions of the PC music? As I believe the 3DO team did. 

 

There's a Youtube vid with original PC sound effects used on a Playstation so the sound effects could have worked. It's not like the PC sound effects are even bad quality. Bad being defined as the ultimate suckage of Duke Nukem 3D's sound quality. They sound like they were made on a Commodore 64 and recorded from a different room! XD

Pretty much for the reason others have said - the port felt different and they wanted to make use of the unique, newly powerful hardware to present a new sort of experience.

 

It certainly worked - Playstation Doom was part of Sony's "Greatest Hits" line, which meant (at the time) it had to have sold at least 150,000 copies.

 

39 minutes ago, Gez said:

The memory footprint of the barons could be reduced to exactly the same as the knights if the sprite data in the IWAD was replaced. It's due to how sprite mirroring can be used and how they used a more optimized scheme for the knight. Basically, the optimization is in the walk frames (A, B, C, D). Barons keep the mirroring in the same frame, so you have BOSSA1, BOSSA2A8, BOSSA3A7, BOSSA4A6, BOSSA5, and again the same thing for B, C, and D. Twenty sprites total for walking. Knights use the mirroring across frames, which is much more efficient because it allows to mirror also the front and back angles: BOS2A1C1, BOS2A2C8, BOS2A3C7, BOS2A4C6, BOS2A5C5, BOS2A6C4, BOS2A7C3, BOS2A8C2, and again for the B/D pair. Sixteen sprites total for walking. This means that the knight walking sprites take up a total of 53116 bytes in ROM, while the baron sprites for the equivalent animation take up a total of 66128 bytes.

 

Furthermore, the knight's walk animation at the angled view is also more accurate. Since the A frames are mirrors of the C frames and likewise for B and D frames (you can check it for yourself), the result with the knight's scheme is more consistent across all angles, while for the baron it can show it with left leg forward on angles 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, but right leg forward on angles 6, 7, 8.

 

For the attack, pain, and death animations, there's no difference between both monsters. 39 sprites totalling 137424 bytes in both cases.

Yeah, I get that, I remember your explanation for it quite well. I'm just kind of surprised they did a good method for the Hell Knight and a more inefficient one for the Baron, is all.

[MajorRawne]

Right, I'm back in the thread. I should employ you as my personal Doom tutor, DarkPulse! XD

 

Is there any comprehensive instruction on how to use the new PSX Doom Builder? I haven't had a chance to look at it since last week but now find I have an evening free, and would rather simply be told how to use it so I can focus on making levels. My problems are currently:

 

1. When trying to create a new map there is no option for "PSX Doom" format. However, if I open the PSX pk3, I suppose I could simply open an existing level, delete everything from it and start from scratch there. But will that bugger anything up?

 

2. How do you get out of the 3D view? I have to use Alt and press a key to get into the menus.

 

3. How does the coloured sector view work? It doesn't seem to do anything?

 

EDIT:

 

Quote

Yeah, I get that, I remember your explanation for it quite well. I'm just kind of surprised they did a good method for the Hell Knight and a more inefficient one for the Baron, is all.

Pretty sure that a combination of timescales and dare I say laziness were a factor. Don't fix what ain't broken, even if it actually is broken. The Hell Knight is arguably the best all round enemy in the game so it's simpler just to deploy those in a map and remove Barons. I remember Barons being heavily criticised on PC Doom for being pointless, uninspired bullet soaks. Hell Knights redress this.

 

From what's been said in this thread, I now believe that Williams got very lazy; Final Doom offers half of what the original game did despite a slightly improved engine, and despite the box stating "two new 32 level episodes" (I believe the PSX Doom Wiki says the box only mentions one episode). As Dark Pulse has pointed out, a number of missing levels didn't require that much work. Imagine if it was your paid employment to do this and you had a 6-month deadline. Once you'd got the basics figured out, would it really be so hard to hammer out 3 maps each per day? If these edits truly would ruin the maps - how come this project isn't ruining them? Because it isn't.

Edited April 2, 2019 by MajorRawne

[Dark Pulse]

50 minutes ago, MajorRawne said:

Right, I'm back in the thread. I should employ you as my personal Doom tutor, DarkPulse! XD

I could use the money, that's for sure. :P

 

50 minutes ago, MajorRawne said:

Is there any comprehensive instruction on how to use the new PSX Doom Builder? I haven't had a chance to look at it since last week but now find I have an evening free, and would rather simply be told how to use it so I can focus on making levels.

If you mean the very basics, you can look up tutorials on Doom Builder 2. GZDoom Builder (as well as this fork of it) is 90-95% similar to that. Obviously you won't be dealing with the advanced techniques or GZDoom specific stuff (since we're not technically mapping for that, remember), but the very basics are more than enough.

 

This should be a decent start.

 

 

50 minutes ago, MajorRawne said:

My problems are currently:

 

1. When trying to create a new map there is no option for "PSX Doom" format. However, if I open the PSX pk3, I suppose I could simply open an existing level, delete everything from it and start from scratch there. But will that bugger anything up?

 

2. How do you get out of the 3D view? I have to use Alt and press a key to get into the menus.

 

3. How does the coloured sector view work? It doesn't seem to do anything?

1) It shouldn't mess anything up if you do it that way, no. You will need to place, at a minimum, one sector, a P1 (and possibly P2) start, and (possibly) four Deathmatch starts to make a valid level for the game (like I did in my test map). That said, I don't know why you couldn't start a map in that format... I had no problem doing it.

 

2) Press the same key you used to get into the 3D mode to get out of it. You can configure what key it is. The default is Q I believe.

 

3) When you select a whole sector's properties in sector mode, there's another option inside there for light color. You pick that, then pick a color from the palette. The sector will then be colored (and show this color in 3D mode).

 

50 minutes ago, MajorRawne said:

Pretty sure that a combination of timescales and dare I say laziness were a factor. Don't fix what ain't broken, even if it actually is broken. The Hell Knight is arguably the best all round enemy in the game so it's simpler just to deploy those in a map and remove Barons. I remember Barons being heavily criticised on PC Doom for being pointless, uninspired bullet soaks. Hell Knights redress this.

Not quite what I was referring to. There's technical differences in the art frames between the Baron and Hell Knight, and they did one method of the sprites for one, and a less efficient method of storing the sprites for the other. This makes Barons more costly to use in terms of RAM (by a small amount, but it's noticeable). The Nightmare flags are what actually make Barons fairly obsolete for any map that has Hell Knights on them though, since you can simply Nightmare it and get a "ghetto" Baron for negligible RAM. Now if Hell Knights aren't on the map, fine, use the Baron, and if contrast between the types is crucial, fine, use both. But otherwise I find myself systematically removing the one or two Barons on a map and just using a Nightmare Hell Knight to save myself 110K or whatever of RAM, which might let me squeeze in another monster type or whatever.

 

50 minutes ago, MajorRawne said:

From what's been said in this thread, I now believe that Williams got very lazy; Final Doom offers half of what the original game did despite a slightly improved engine, and despite the box stating "two new 32 level episodes" (I believe the PSX Doom Wiki says the box only mentions one episode). As Dark Pulse has pointed out, a number of missing levels didn't require that much work. Imagine if it was your paid employment to do this and you had a 6-month deadline. Once you'd got the basics figured out, would it really be so hard to hammer out 3 maps each per day? If these edits truly would ruin the maps - how come this project isn't ruining them? Because it isn't.

Tim Heydelaar actually said he was the one solely responsible for the map porting for Final Doom, and said that Williams intended it as a pretty quick cash grab. This is also the time where Doom 64 development was starting, so there was definitely a case of limited manpower and time (which may play partly into why there's so few).

 

That said, it's also disingenuous to assume that just because my maps had to have relatively little cuts, that all of them can run fine. Some of the Plutonia maps most definitely had to take major chops or simplification in geometry, and in even my maps, while I kept nearly all the geometry, I damn well had to alter the monster variety. And even in two of my maps there are areas where framerate can get down to about 10 FPS, but they're relatively limited in scope. To me if I can keep framerate at or above 20 for most of the level, I'm happy. (Emulators that let you overclock the CPU, of course, can make this completely moot, but I'm trying to see how they would run on original hardware specs, partly because some people will play it on actual hardware, and others will play on Emulators that won't let you overclock the emulated CPU.)

 

We are also developing with a pipeline that, let's be honest, they would've killed for. Remember the state-of-the-art editors around then would've been stuff like DEU, DCK, or DETH, none of which had 3D preview modes or any of the modern conveniences we have. And of course there's also the little fact you still had to burn a build using a nice, slow CD-ROM burner to test and play it, and if it bombed, you then needed to go back, tweak, re-burn...

 

In short, we're a lot luckier than @Hyde ever was back then. :P

Edited April 2, 2019 by Dark Pulse

[MajorRawne]

Thanks mate, once again a perfect explanation.

 

If you haven't written or recorded some kind of "developer diary" or whatever covering at least one of the maps you worked on, that is a sad loss to the internet. It would have been fascinating to have an insightful and thorough commentary as you converted a difficult map from scratch. Please tell me you can put something like this together!

[Dark Pulse]

17 minutes ago, MajorRawne said:

Thanks mate, once again a perfect explanation.

 

If you haven't written or recorded some kind of "developer diary" or whatever covering at least one of the maps you worked on, that is a sad loss to the internet. It would have been fascinating to have an insightful and thorough commentary as you converted a difficult map from scratch. Please tell me you can put something like this together!

I absolutely have, and I'm doing them for all my maps. I put up my changelog for E3M8: Dis shortly after Beta 2 was released around Halloween. Next beta will have the ones for TNT MAP05: Hanger, TNT MAP06: Open Season, and Plutonia MAP18: Neurosphere at a minimum. I'm trying to get Master Levels: Bloodsea Keep done in time for this upcoming beta as well.

[riderr3]

For myself, in PSX Doom Builder I created extra game configuration "Final Doom" format with inclusion of PSXFINALDOOM.pk3 to easily open/create Final Doom maps without messing with archives every time.
 

6 minutes ago, Dark Pulse said:

I'm trying to get Master Levels: Bloodsea Keep done in time for this upcoming beta as well.

Will your maps will contain at least some revenants or it will be low-tier & hell knights galore? Many times I ditched zombiemen or chaingunners, or shotgunners and receive space for mid-tiers or at least lost souls. This is to some extent an achievement, because I converted most of the maps which contain mancubi/trons/PE's. Sure it can be less complex maps but as example we have Barons and PE's on Baron's Den.

[Dark Pulse]

1 hour ago, riderr3 said:

Will your maps will contain at least some revenants or it will be low-tier & hell knights galore? Many times I ditched zombiemen or chaingunners, or shotgunners and receive space for mid-tiers or at least lost souls. This is to some extent an achievement, because I converted most of the maps which contain mancubi/trons/PE's. Sure it can be less complex maps but as example we have Barons and PE's on Baron's Den.

I definitely kept Revenants in Neurosphere.

 

What I chop mostly depends on if they're utilized a fair bit in the map, and to an extent how "memorable" the encounter is. Monsters that are only one or two times are prime targets for cutting. Zombiemen and the like I'll rarely chop, can only think of one map I did that for (TNT MAP05: Hanger to be precise), because the savings for small fry like them is negligible. Compare that to a Mancubus, which is some 300K. In the end it's simple economics, and I tend to go for variety over maintaining the big goons.

 

For Bloodsea Keep, I'm not sure yet. The Mancubus will almost certainly go because it's really only used to trip a secret, there's only one Chaingunner so he's pretty sure to be dropped, the Barons are primed to be Nightmared Hell Knights to extend RAM savings, Cacodemons may or may not get the axe, and even the Hell Knights themselves might've gotten chopped if the map didn't have five on Ultra-Violence since there's only one on every other difficulty, ditto for Pain Elementals which go 0/2/4 (but they have a leg up in that there's lots of Lost Souls, making them a relatively cheap keep). There is only one Revenant, so to me it really depends on a combo of how memorable the encounter is, and how essential it is to the "feel" of that encounter. But it may also be saved by being useful as a replacement for the Mancubus possibly.

 

I'm almost done with the retexturing (and that is taking great effort, it's very heavy on texture uses), then from there it's time for a geometry test and then I can tackle the monsters.

Edited April 2, 2019 by Dark Pulse

[riderr3]

Basically, Final Doom on PSX have fewer monster variety than Doom. As example you'll meet mancs only on Nessus and barons only on Human BBQ. But most of this are mainly sprawling TNT maps. Look how Deepest Reaches is butchered, contains low-tiers only. It still one of my favorite maps even counting PSX version.

I still not understand why so many plutonian maps are ditched, because they are not so big/detailed. I assume they planned to add more Final Doom maps, but maybe just stopped at TNT part. Looked at Central Processing, then give up and said "Screw this! The 30 maps is enough." I suppose they don't even a try most Plutonia maps. And did not even try to excuse as for example add a new secret map with Mastermind.

Sure on Bloodsea Keep it's better to remove mancs, and it needs small redesign to access area which triggered by tag 666. If there is free space in the memory, do not hesitate to add monsters that were not originally on the map, as for example in the first half of PSX Doom. If there is at least one flying monster type on the map, it will be effective in most cases.

[seed]

25 minutes ago, riderr3 said:

I still not understand why so many plutonian maps are ditched, because they are not so big/detailed. I assume they planned to add more Final Doom maps, but maybe just stopped at TNT part. Looked at Central Processing, then give up and said "Screw this! The 30 maps is enough." I suppose they don't even a try most Plutonia maps. And did not even try to excuse as for example add a new secret map with Mastermind.

 

My speculation is that there's so few Plutonia levels simply because it didn't fit the style of PSX. Original Doom, Doom 2, and TNT are far more suitable candidates for the stylistic changes of the port, but they probably couldn't have done much with Plutonia.

[Dark Pulse]

1 hour ago, riderr3 said:

Basically, Final Doom on PSX have fewer monster variety than Doom. As example you'll meet mancs only on Nessus and barons only on Human BBQ. But most of this are mainly sprawling TNT maps. Look how Deepest Reaches is butchered, contains low-tiers only. It still one of my favorite maps even counting PSX version.

I still not understand why so many plutonian maps are ditched, because they are not so big/detailed. I assume they planned to add more Final Doom maps, but maybe just stopped at TNT part. Looked at Central Processing, then give up and said "Screw this! The 30 maps is enough." I suppose they don't even a try most Plutonia maps. And did not even try to excuse as for example add a new secret map with Mastermind.

Much of that is due to the higher map complexity, I'd imagine. Still, the major limit is monster variety, and that's precisely why I'm trying to keep variety as high as I can get away with, by chopping the less-used monsters if the encounter isn't really memorable or key, and replacing a lot of fights with the best equivalent Nightmare variants I can think of. I try to factor in enemy hit points, combat difficulty, and encounter type while doing a replacement. Often I need to do several of these, so a few encounters may be slightly easier than their original one, then I'll make another slightly harder to compensate and balance out the HP as best as I can.

 

Neurosphere, for example, has a multiplayer-only Cyberdemon that would naturally kill the map on memory. I can either chop almost all of the small fry to try to eke it in, or I can chop the single Cyberdemon. Chopping the small fry would actually remove a lot of this map's difficulty (Chaingunners, Imps, Shotgun Guys) too radically, so it's almost always better to chop the bigs, and not only that, this is a Multiplayer-only enemy - in a pack of levels where I expect 99% of people will be playing them in Singleplayer mode. In this case, I replaced that Cyberdemon with a group of Nightmare Hell Knights (also flagged to only appear in MP, of course). It's a slightly harder fight at first due to the increased amount of projectiles, but it's also mitigated by the fact that 1) it's Multiplayer, so you got a second player, and 2) you can thin them out faster than a solo Cyberdemon.

 

That said, a lot of Plutonia maps are actually more detailed than you think. Four maps they did for TNT were rejected due to size (so they definitely hit vanilla limits aplenty), and Dario Casali went on record as saying that he was "ready to throw his computer out the window at the time" once Plutonia was submitted if more needed to be done to it.

[Dark Pulse]

Friendly tip for anyone who's doing level design and wants a quick way to sack all the monsters so you can test your geometry in peace:

1. Configure a Thing Filter to apply only to monsters. You can do this either via the View Menu > Configure Things Filters... or via clicking the icon for it along the top menu bar (the one next to the dropdown box that defaults to (show all): 
   
   • For the flags, make sure that all the boxes are a solid box - not an empty box, nor a checkmark. This way you're telling it "Select it if any of these apply" as opposed to if they don't apply (empty) or if they exactly match (checkmark). Making them all checkmarks, for example, would only select monsters that appear in all difficulties, plus multiplayer-only, plus deaf, plus all BlendMask options enabled - i.e; almost no monster. The solid boxes will solve that problem by basically being a wildcard - "If it has this flag, it applies to the filter." This will let the filter be active for every single monster.
2. Activate the filter in the top of PSXDoom Builder. This will only let you select the monsters.
   
3. Left-click and drag across the entire playable area of your map to highlight the entire map's playable area. This will select each and every monster, and ONLY the monsters.
   • Optional: Edit Menu > Add Selection to Group, then assign it a group, and anytime you want to re-select all the monsters, Edit Menu > Select Group > Select the group you assigned them to.
4. If you haven't already done so, SAVE YOUR MAP.
   • The next step isn't easy to reverse.
5. Right click any monster (while ensuring they are all selected) and REMOVE the Easy, Medium, and Hard flags.
   • This will effectively remove all monsters from the map on all difficulties. All other Things (weapons, ammo, health, teleports, keys, etc.) will remain and be fully functional.
6. SAVE THE MAP AS A NEW WAD FILE, IN A NEW DIRECTORY.
   • DO NOT SAVE OVER YOUR OLD ONE. YOU WILL NOT REMEMBER WHAT THINGS HAD WHAT DIFFICULTY FLAGS.
   • Due to how the GEC tools work, you will still want to name it map01.wad like normal. This is why you want it in a new, different directory. I tend to have mine be in a subdirectory under the main WIP map directory for that map, in a folder labeled "GEOMETRY TEST." Use whatever organization works for you however.
     
7. Use that version of the map to build a new test CD and test your level, monster-free.
   • This way you can 100% focus on geometry, fixing up your framerate issues, resolving crashes, whatever you need to do.
8. REMEMBER TO RELOAD THE ORIGINAL VERSION OF THE WAD THAT HAD MONSTERS ACTIVE BEFORE YOU DO FURTHER WORK ON THE LEVEL.
   • You will be very, very sad if you forget to reload the version of the map that had monsters active and accidentally save over your good, monster-functional copies of the map!
9. Anytime you feel you want to do another geometry test, simply repeat steps 2-6.
   • Alternatively, if you assigned a group to the monsters, just activate the group (as detailed in the footnote for Step 3) and do steps 4-6.

This should help if Erick can't make a batchfile that strips the monster flags. Actually, it kind of obsoletes it, but it is a slight bit of work to set up. Not terrible, though!

[Erick194]

Hi guys, I'm working on updating the tools, the PSXMAP has the new action proposed by @Dark Pulse, -nomosters, this function does not generate the enemy on the map, to test the geometry, it also does not generate the graphics and sounds within the MAPSPR %%. IMG and MAP %%. LCD.

Also in the PSXHAKING, you can now check the sound limits and you can select the music you want.

In the next days I will upload them. =)

 

[Dark Pulse]

11 hours ago, Erick194 said:

Hi guys, I'm working on updating the tools, the PSXMAP has the new action proposed by @Dark Pulse, -nomosters, this function does not generate the enemy on the map, to test the geometry, it also does not generate the graphics and sounds within the MAPSPR %%. IMG and MAP %%. LCD.

Also in the PSXHAKING, you can now check the sound limits and you can select the music you want.

In the next days I will upload them. =)

 

Excellent, now I won't have to ask you to specify a music track anymore. (Though it does bring up a good question of what to do if we get people making custom music.) 

 

Also, since you say it's not loading other sprites and stuff, are the size of those sprites and whatnot still reflected in the memory profile? Testing the geometry is good and all, but it does leave a gap of where a level can run fine on geometry, but overflow on memory allocation for the sprites.

 

To be fair, usually if you're at that level of problems, it generally just means you need to chop some monsters or decorations, but still.

 

The ideal long-term solution would probably be some kind of mode in the builder (or a map analyzer tool) that will be able to predict if we will have a memory overflow. Since the amount of allocated RAM is known and static, it should be fairly simple to have a map analyzer that can add up all the necessary sprites and such, along with the level's data, and tell us if we're overflowing on something.

[riderr3]

I know the fact about reverbs, the different maps have different type of reverberation. I wonder did it possible to change not only music, but also type of reverb to fit the map, or it's just hardcoded to music track or something.

[Dark Pulse]

2 hours ago, riderr3 said:

I know the fact about reverbs, the different maps have different type of reverberation. I wonder did it possible to change not only music, but also type of reverb to fit the map, or it's just hardcoded to music track or something.

SFX reverb is fixed I think. The music tracks might have different reverbs for their different sounds.

 

But I could totally be wrong! 

[Erick194]

The list of music that you see in the image is in order as in the code of PSXDOOM, in PSXFINALDOOM it varies a bit, the reverb is global, both for music and sounds, also if you watch well the music: Retribution Dawns, The Broken Ones, Lamentacion, Mind Massacre, In The Grip of Madness, Digitized Pain, Lurkers and Steadfast Experiment, are repeated more than once, but with different reverb, which it is possible to change the reverb.

[Dark Pulse]

33 minutes ago, Erick194 said:

The list of music that you see in the image is in order as in the code of PSXDOOM, in PSXFINALDOOM it varies a bit, the reverb is global, both for music and sounds, also if you watch well the music: Retribution Dawns, The Broken Ones, Lamentacion, Mind Massacre, In The Grip of Madness, Digitized Pain, Lurkers and Steadfast Experiment, are repeated more than once, but with different reverb, which it is possible to change the reverb.

Huh. Wonder why they had different versions of the tracks with different reverb values.

 

@Hyde? Any idea?

[riderr3]

Just wait until tools will be released, and we see much more I think.