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Th0mas

Is GzDoom a good experience to start with ?

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Hi there!

 

I have discovered this game yesterday on youtube...

I like it and brutal Doom makes it more realistic.

 

I read a tutorial to play with GzDoom, but is it good to start Doom ? Because I read that some people play with Boom Stric or other compatibility and other launcher but I don't really know the difference.

 

What launcher/compatibility do you use ?

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All you need is to place Doom2.wad from doom's folder into GZdoom's directory and it should work. If you want mods -especially brutal doom- chance is you'll want to use GZDoom over boom, that one is for people who want to play the game with mapping limits reduced\removed. You don't need compatibility options for GZDoom since it is still in active development. 

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Just now, Pegg said:

All you need is to place Doom2.wad from doom's folder into GZdoom's directory and it should work. If you want mods -especially brutal doom- chance is you'll want to use GZDoom over boom, that one is for people who want to play the game with mapping limits reduced\removed. You don't need compatibility options for GZDoom since it is still in active development. 

 

Thanks !

Yes I know I can play with GZdoom, but I don't know if some mod like "freelook" is good to start ? I read few people play in vanilla mod but I don't know why they prefer with old graphism instead of realistic.

 

ps: I tried jump, it is useless as far as I saw...

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5 minutes ago, Th0mas said:

Yes I know I can play with GZdoom, but I don't know if some mod like "freelook" is good to start ? I read few people play in vanilla mod but I don't know why they prefer with old graphism instead of realistic.

you can still have oldschool settings with higher resolutions.

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9 minutes ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

you can still have oldschool settings with higher resolutions.

Ah I see.

 

For you, do you play with default settings or vanilla settings (crouching/jumping disabled) ?

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I only use GZ when I absolutely have to in the first place. I prefer Prboom+, and run entirely on oldschool settings. Exception for me are rocket jump maps which I use ZDaemon for, but PrB+ is my go-to port. I also don't play with mods unless I have to, so there's that too.

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Oh thanks !

So you play all map with Prboom+ if I understood correctly. I am going to try it.

 

Why don't you like BrutalDoom ?

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10 minutes ago, Th0mas said:

Why don't you like BrutalDoom ?

I don't play doom for "realism". If I wanted a realistic shooter, I'd play something else entirely. I did play Brutal doom for a bit, but it got old for me fast. Also the kinds of maps I like to play are... intrinsically incompatible with it, so even if I liked the mod, I still wouldn't run it.

Edited by Nine Inch Heels

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I would recommend to play through Ultimate Doom and Doom 2 using Chocolate Doom port for first experience. Then for higher resolution i would recommend to check Eternity Engine, PrBoom+, Crispy Doom, Doom Retro. They are faithful to Doom.

I use Eternity Engine, compatibility depends on WAD i play, 640x480 resolution, capped framerate, no freelook, no jump, no crouch. Always on Ultra-Violence difficulty.

Brutal Doom, freelook, crouch, jump are faaaar away from real Doom's experience (and i don't like Brutal Doom at all). Pick what you want. :)

Edited by Rimantas

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When I play GZDoom the 2 most noticeable differences to me are that the actors aren't infinitely tall and the way the enemies react to you when using the invisibility; sometimes they just don't even react to your presence which has never happened to me on OG Doom. I know there's a lot more differences but I ain't no expert.

 

Also on Heretic for some reason the Maulotaur's tackle doesn't stun you on GZDoom, but that's kinda off topic.

 

EDIT: I should clarify that the actors thing can be enabled. I was talking about the default settings.

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If you know how to tweak stuffs properly (i.e movement controls, video settings, compatiblity), and you only wanted to play modern maps, then GZDoom is a good option. Otherwise, if you prefers framerate/simplicity to graphics, just use ZDoom, Prboom+ or Crispy/Chocolate Doom. 

Here is a basic comparison list between (G)Zdoom and other Boom-compatible ports:
https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Comparison_of_source_ports
Also, if I wanted 'realism' in Doom, I'd rather go to The Soldier Z or Hideous Destructor. They are both amazing, but the latter is 'a bit' difficult if you have never gotten yourself into tactical games before.

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It all comes down to what you are looking for and what you care about when you're playing. If all you want are gameplay mods and megawads/other kinds of modifications that require GZDoom, then it should suffice for everything.

 

But, if you want a more retro or old school experience (or vanilla accuracy, for that matter), it isn't a very good candidate. You can tweak lots of settings to have no crouching, freelook, infinitely tall actors, and so on to bring it closer to how it was back in the day, but it ultimately changes some things you can't reverse. For instance punching works differently, it modifies the hitboxes of at least a few enemies, and movement seems to be faster. If you want to record demos and something more accurate but with quality of life improvements and more features there's Eternity and PrBoom+, while ports such as Chocolate Doom provide a basically identical experience to the original with all its bugs and limitations. Crispy, in a nutshell, is Chocolate but limit-removing and with a few other enhancements, and Doom Retro Crispy but Boom-compatible while bringing its fair share of modifications to the table. For multiplayer there's ZDaemon, Odamex, and Zandronum.

 

TL;DR GZDoom is a good start and perfect if you only want to play Doom, modifications that are made specifically for it or benefit from using it (such as including various visual effects that only work when played through it), but don't care much about other things. If you do, there's better candidates. I personally prefer Eternity and PrBoom+.

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I read a tutorial to play with GzDoom, but is it good to start Doom ? Because I read that some people play with Boom Stric or other compatibility and other launcher but I don't really know the difference.

Yes it is fine to start with gzdoom.

 

I made a document with all of the ports I like here here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SuPYtVwZS0TjTr2n_-G8TZ0oSike_M4O5XnVLG6hZQE/edit

 

What launcher/compatibility do you use ?

I like using ZDL as my launcher for everything now-a-days. You can use it for every port so if you decide to try something other than zdoom later you can go ahead and do it.

https://zdoom.org/wiki/ZDL

 

If you are playing brutal doom I would suggest just using default zdoom compatibility.

 

If you decide to play wads without mods then compatibility depends on the wad and the type of gameplay in the wad. If the wad txt file specifies something like cl9 then that will mean you need to use boom compatibility. If the wad specifies cl2 then that means doom compatibility. If the wad specifies cl11 then that means mbf. gzdoom has presets for these compatibility levels in the compatibility settings and the names match what I have specified in this paragraph.

 

If you are going to play a slaughter wad I suggest turning off infinitely tall actors entirely in gzdoom. This is because of the detailing tropes used in a lot of slaughter wads (most notably high ceilings). Flying monsters tend to end up at the ceiling a lot of the time in gzdoom and high ceilings make infinitely tall actors incredibly annoying to deal with.
 

My 2 cents.

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GZDoom is great for mods. It's not so good if you want to play the original games and have an experience that is vanilla as possible. There a lot of deliberate changes in the code that are perhaps for the better but ultimately culiminate into something that distance itself from the original feel. I like GZDoom but still prefer Chocolate Doom, Crispy Doom, PrBoom+ and Eternity Engine.

 

In last few days I have started to really like Eternity Engine as it's combining the best of the both worlds: it is faithfull to the original game and yet quite customisable for mods.

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Yes and no. Gzdoom is pretty easy place to start from but is also teaches some bad habits to a new player. It plays little bit different than more classic source ports like prboom+ or crispy. There seems to be also alot of focus on using gameplay mods aspecially those that make pretty major changes to vanilla doom gameplay. Also it can be pretty easy to get too used to pretty lights and other fancy stuff of gzdoom making it harder to enjoy playing without them.

 

Brutal Doom can be fun but starting with it or getting too used to playing with it, can make it very hard to enjoy normal doom anymore. It teaches you habits than can be very bad for your vanilla doom skills and make it almost unplayable to you because you try to play it too much like a modern first person shooter. Vanilla Doom can be extremely fun after playing alot Brutal Doom, bit like playing some Ridge Racer after long session of Gran Turismo. I am not saying that people shouldn't play Brutal Doom or other advanced gameplay mods, but I do suggest to go often back to Vanilla Doom to maintain balanced experience. That is my advice to a new Doom player.

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56 minutes ago, Paar said:

In last few days I have started to really like Eternity Engine as it's combining the best of the both worlds: it is faithfull to the original game and yet quite customisable for mods.

 

Same here. I used to like PrBoom+ more, and I still love it, but I find myself using Eternity instead more and more.

 

That, and let's just say it will also get some pretty awesome goodies in the future :D.

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if you play without jumping and crouching i think its perfectly fine for a first time personally.

i use gzdoom a lot myself with no looking up/down, software rendering on, and doom/boom (strict) compatibility. it feels close enough to vanilla.

but i wouldnt recommend brutal doom for a first experience, it changes the gameplay too much and makes it practically a whole different game.

 

if you wanna experience it more in a more classic sense, id really recommend either chocolate doom for full vanilla or cripsy doom for vanilla like but with a slighty higher resolution and a few nice extras.

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it is pretty much the go to Port for newcomers, easy to set up, has ton of mod support and Isn't as different from the classic experience as some make it out to be. You should turn jump and crouch off then you are pretty much set.

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For beginners, I would recommend a middle school port which include ports like PrBoom+ or Eternity Engine. These ports offer quality of life improvements such as high resolutions, customize controls, easy wad order loading, support for limit removing, Boom and MBF maps/wads all while still retaining vanilla physics, behaviour and feel.

 

GZdoom is a great port and has features that would enable almost any doom wad/mod to run. And having it installed alongside other middle school ports is a good idea as it serves as a backup for running wads/mods that do not work on PrBoom+/Eternity. But it does have 2 issues:

1) Physics, monster behaviour and feel are different even with settings like "Doom Strict" and "Boom Strict"

2) Much Higher system requirements and also tends to lag on slaughterfest maps(maps with extremely high monster count)

 

On the other hand, I don't recommend old school ports like chocolate doom(and even crispy doom to an extent). These are for those people who are nostalgic about the original DOS executable era. Since you are new to doom, you likely have no nostalgia associated with the original .exe. PrBoom+ and Eternity offer all of the features that Chocolate/Crispy offer. These old school ports can't even run Boom/MBF wads.

 

 

2 hours ago, seed said:

I used to like PrBoom+ more, and I still love it, but I find myself using Eternity instead more and more.

 

That, and let's just say it will also get some pretty awesome goodies in the future :D.

 

While I still use PrBoom+ more than Eternity, I really want to see Eternity surpass it. If Eternity gets the following 2 PrBoom+ features, I may even ditch PrBoom+ in favour of Eternity:

1) GL renderer

2) Proper/Easy to set Complevels.

 

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3 minutes ago, ReaperAA said:

While I still use PrBoom+ more than Eternity, I really want to see Eternity surpass it. If Eternity gets the following 2 PrBoom+ features, I may even ditch PrBoom+ in favour of Eternity:

1) GL renderer

2) Proper/Easy to set Complevels.

 

It's getting both and more, even Truecolor Software rendering.

 

No idea when, just that they're all planned to eventually be implemented, so sometime "in the future". Don't jump on the hype train yet.

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One reason I like Eternity is solid software renderer. GZDoom has two software rendereres - the classic and softpoly which renders true 3D geometry just like OpenGL renderer. My biggest issues with those are that the classic one is fundamentaly broken and it's such a mess noone from the active developers know how to fix it. It gets more and more obsolete as the newest features are often exclusive to OpenGL renderer. The softpoly renderer is impressive alternative but lacks full compatibility with GL renderer and has bugs. There are big plans for it though and should get on par with GL renderer in the future. If they will be interchangeable in the end feature wise is a big question mark though.

 

I hope that Eternity's GL renderer (didn't know there are plans for it!) will take inspiration from GlBoom+. I just don't like the look of GL renderer with flat lighting and such (as in GZDoom even though there are settings for vanilla color banding and so on). It can be quite nice looking if handled properly but setting dynamics lights in a map is pain. I like the simplicity and look of the software renderer.

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19 minutes ago, Paar said:

I hope that Eternity's GL renderer (didn't know there are plans for it!) will take inspiration from GlBoom+. I just don't like the look of GL renderer with flat lighting and such (as in GZDoom even though there are settings for vanilla color banding and so on). It can be quite nice looking if handled properly but setting dynamics lights in a map is pain. I like the simplicity and look of the software renderer.

 

Don't know how many are aware of this honestly, I just though I might bring it up :p. I've been talking to Altazimuth for the past few weeks and eventually asked him whether there's any plans for Truecolor Software rendering (+ made some personal requests) and he also mentioned that he intends to get a GL render in place. Just two of the goodies planned for the future, but probably not for a while, the reason why I would not advise getting hyped yet.

 

19 minutes ago, Paar said:

One reason I like Eternity is solid software renderer. GZDoom has two software rendereres - the classic and softpoly which renders true 3D geometry just like OpenGL renderer. My biggest issues with those are that the classic one is fundamentaly broken and it's such a mess noone from the active developers know how to fix it. It gets more and more obsolete as the newest features are often exclusive to OpenGL renderer. The softpoly renderer is impressive alternative but lacks full compatibility with GL renderer and has bugs. There are big plans for it though and should get on par with GL renderer in the future. If they will be interchangeable in the end feature wise is a big question mark though.

 

I'm not sure if the team has much interest in devoting more time and resources for Software. I remember reading the results of a survey they shipped with GZDoom a while ago, and the results indicated that there's barely anyone playing in Software.

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if you like Brutal Doom you may also like Brutal Doom: Black Edition.

I like to variate from time to time, so I enjoy the vanilla style as much as I enjoy tweakin up the game's fashion from time to time.

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One thing I like about gzdoom though is that it supports all (or most) Doom engine games. I wish purist ports other than Chocolate did that.

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Hi,

 

I read all of your post. Thanks a lot guys !

 

I tried PrBoom+ but when I move up my mouse, I go to forward in-game... Then I play Doom.wad with Eternity Engine (default settings). Maybe it is close to the Vanilla.

 

What are your favourite maps or mods for eternity engine ? 

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24 minutes ago, Th0mas said:

I tried PrBoom+ but when I move up my mouse, I go to forward in-game...

disable vertical mouse sensitivity in the options menu, then you won't have that issue anymore

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8 hours ago, seed said:

I'm not sure if the team has much interest in devoting more time and resources for Software. I remember reading the results of a survey they shipped with GZDoom a while ago, and the results indicated that there's barely anyone playing in Software.

I can't speak for the other developers, but my personal interest in the software renderer is somewhat complicated. Initially I added true color support to ZDoom because I did not know that the GL renderer could be configured a lot closer to vanilla than its defaults. Eventually I fixed the outstanding issues that made me use software over GL. The dynamic light and model support I added mostly for fun/curiosity to see at what speed it would run.

 

Softpoly was my little pet project where I tried to write my own software renderer. Ever since I played Doom for the first time in 1993 I've always wanted to write my own, but realistically after about 1995-96 there was never any good argument for doing so. At the time I figured writing one fully from scratch would be (relatively) easy, as theoretically Doom is very simple and easy to render. However, what I later discovered is that Doom's original renderer is odd and buggy as hell and countless mods took advantage of all those bugs. Early port writers took that into overdrive by tweaking the bugs in various ways creating even more complications for rendering this right. As a result, softpoly has a lot of problems getting all those nasty render hacks and tweaks right.

 

As I have no personal real interest in those early days of Doom modding, I cannot fix the bugs in the original software renderer and I can't improve the softpoly renderer. Both would involve lots of time learning to understand things I don't find interesting at all. All is not lost, though. GZDoom's hardware renderer is no longer as dependent on OpenGL as it once were, which means I will probably at some point drop the frontend in softpoly and use the one provided by the hardware renderer. That should greatly reduce the rendering issues that softpoly has.

 

My advice for the original poster is to try play a little bit in Chocolate Doom. Play a few maps in it or something. This will give you a rough baseline of what original Doom looked like and thus in which ways each port alters that experience. Which port is right for you is very individual. Pick the one you like, if it is what everyone else uses then that's great, if not that's great too. You know, like you should do with all things in life. :)

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5 hours ago, Th0mas said:

 

What are your favourite maps or mods for eternity engine ? 

Since you are a beginner, check out the Cacowards and these wads. Eternity is Boom-compatible, so you'll be able to play ~94% of these wads without issues.
For gameplay mods, well, there are hardly any for purist ports. Most of awesome mods were made with (G)Zdoom in mind... Still, check these out.
Anyways, here are my recommendations for maps/TCs: (keep in mind that most of the TCs here were made for GZDoom or Zandronum. Some require you to have a decent PC.) 7 of these are compatible with Eternity, IIRC. Still, use PrBoom+ for these 7 wads for best results :P

Spoiler

1, The Golden Souls Series. (GZDoom/Zandronum)
2, Castlevania: Simon's Destiny. (GZDoom/Zandronum)
3, Dimension of The Boomed. (Boom-compatible ports)
4, Scythe Series. (Limit-removing ports)
5, The Skillsaw wad trilogy. (Boom-compatible/MBF-compatible ports)
6, Strange Aeons. ((G)ZDoom/Zandronum)
7, Blade of Agony. (GZDoom)
8, Doom The Way Id Did series. (Vanilla-compatible/you could run this with DosBox)
9, Going Down. (not recommended for beginners, but the level design is good though) (Boom-compatible ports)

10, REKKR. (Vanilla-compatible/you could run this with DosBox)

 

 

Edited by TheNoob_Gamer

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