The Unity Port Thread - PS/Xbox/Switch/IOS/Android

[sponge]

We didn't do anything to lock down console mods specifically, but they might be .NET serialized files at the most, so it is probably not very proprietary. I didn't think we put the addon data in there though, I'm surprised it's not just a file named 1-15 like on the PC. It'd be silly to spend time trying to add extra protection from jailbroken consoles since they already are able to interfere with your operation at a level you can't control. I have no clue what that stuff looks like on disk though, you don't really need to interact with the filesystem directly very much.

 

RE: SIGIL, there's specific code to handle the Master Levels. There's no specific code to handle SIGIL, as the point is that we don't need to update the game in order to ship new addons.

 

As for the start menu stuff, it was just a decision made out of time. Was easier to just punt you to the Level Select screen which was already data driven, vs making a whole new menu that was un-hardcoded to read the episodes out of DMAPINFO and generate GameObjects out of them. I ended up doing this dynamically in Quake, since the game ships with multiple mods out of the box (the expansions/DOPA/DOTM are all in separate directories). There's no functional difference between level selecting the first map, and hitting new game, it's entirely visual.

[Muusi]

The Unity versions have a big problem on PS4 if you don't want to update your system. Constant nagging about updating the firmware and if you completely block Sony's services with a DNS, the nag screen is changed to a screen about not being able to contact Sony. I wonder if it's gonna be a problem once PS4 is old enough to have its services taken offline. 

[Kinsie]

 

EDIT: Interview!

Edited July 5, 2022 by Kinsie

[LarKo]

@sponge thank you for continuing to add Wads to the Unity Port. For a lot of people on console it's the only way to access new doom content so thanks very much man! 

[Faceman2000]

It's about time a @valkiriforce wad got added! Congratulations man, you earned it, and once again a massive thank you to Sponge for being an all around rock star. It's gonna be cool to hear so many classic 90s midis in the official port!

[hfc2x]

On 5/11/2022 at 8:23 PM, Metal_Slayer said:

It could have been Episode 5, since they added the Master Levels as an episode for Doom 2, but for some reason this port removes the ability of starting a New Game with addons, the only option is level selecting, this probably has something to do with the fact that achievements are disabled when there's an addon active.

Sigil being "canonically" or "officially" episode 5 is a fanmade concept, based on the fact it was made by John Romero.

 

Thing is "official" addon content for the games (Thy Flesh Consumed, Master Levels, Final Doom and No Rest for The Living) were developed by id Software themselves, or by people contracted directly by them. These addons have always been featured in commercial packages for purchase in different platforms, licensed and released by id Software, and have always come bundled with, or to be used with the intended base game (or in the case of Final Doom, as its own base game). That's why they're official content. How canon things are is debatable, due to the existence of the modern games, which disregard Final Doom but consider Doom 64 to be the sequel to Doom 2. But I digress.

 

Sigil was developed by Romero Games Ltd, and was released as its own thing for free (or paid for if you wanted the deluxe edition with the Buckethead soundtrack) before it even came to the Doom rerelases. And not just that, you still can download it for free to this day, like it's the case with fanmade content, which is what comprises the bulk of the addons offered in the rereleases. Every other piece of official Doom content, you have to pay for. Sure, you can download Final Doom for free if you have a copy of the rereleases, but you still have to pay for the base game to be able to play. You can't just go and download Final Doom on its own for free without infringing on copyright.

[Faceman2000]

Official content =/= official content. Sounds about right.

 

Arguing about what is and isn’t canon in Doom is silly anyway.

[hfc2x]

2 hours ago, Faceman2000 said:

Official content =/= official content. Sounds about right.

Not sure what you're trying to imply here. I explained why Sigil is really no different from any fanmade WAD.

 

2 hours ago, Faceman2000 said:

Arguing about what is and isn’t canon in Doom is silly anyway.

But I agree? No idea what's your point.

[Kyle07]

14 hours ago, LarKo said:

@sponge thank you for continuing to add Wads to the Unity Port. For a lot of people on console it's the only way to access new doom content so thanks very much man! 

 

Yeah, thx a lot, its awesome. :)

 

12 hours ago, Faceman2000 said:

It's about time a @valkiriforce wad got added! Congratulations man, you earned it, and once again a massive thank you to Sponge for being an all around rock star. It's gonna be cool to hear so many classic 90s midis in the official port!

 

With 90s midis you refer the Anomaly Report? Because many of the addons were from the 2010s.

 

11 hours ago, hfc2x said:

Sigil being "canonically" or "officially" episode 5 is a fanmade concept, based on the fact it was made by John Romero.

 

Well you could argue that John Romero was at id at the time of DOOM and Quake 1.

 

8 hours ago, hfc2x said:

Not sure what you're trying to imply here. I explained why Sigil is really no different from any fanmade WAD.

Well, there are a lot of examples, where official work does not necessarily mean that a work is good or canon.

 

Example "Gothic series": The developer Piranha Bytes does not accept "ArcaniA: Gothic 4" as a sequel to their Gothic 3. They also don't accept the Gothic 3 addon from India, as this was also a different developer. At the time the publisher had the rights to develop a sequel to Gothic 3 and potentially a G3 addon. But after that Piranha Bytes had the rights on the series "back".

 

Do you consider now Gothic 3: Forsaken Gods (addon) and ArcaniA as canonical or do you stay with Piranha Bytes, that what is not from them, is not canonical?

 

There was also a Gothic 3 mobile game, which they don't see as canon.

 

The same can be applied for DOOM. You can care, that Romeros work and Bethesda's inclusion of SIGIL as an addon counts somehow. Or you just don't care.

 

Who cares how official SIGIL is? It's a nice addon from an Ex developer from id. Of cource this is awsome.

Edited July 6, 2022 by Kyle07

[whatup876]

Sigil doesn't seem to add more to story besides an endgame text, so what we're talking about in terms of "officially" might as well be the levels, how the evil eye is used and maybe Jimmy's tracks or Lovell's art. (the artwork existed for years before Sigil even)

It depends if id Software themselves can directly reference and/or utilize stuff from Sigil, as if they owned it.

Because at this point "canon" isn't so much about actual story context but rather what's actually part of the brand, in a way that can be used officially.

 

It's why Doom 64 is canon: NOT because of actual context BUT because it was an official game, a later official re-release was made possible AND Eternal even has direct references to it.

At the same time, this would also make you think of more obscure stuff in the series like info from the manuals or the mobile games.

It's why game preservation and etc matters.

 

I guess a way to see this is thinking less about "what the author thinks" and more "what the work itself thinks", because we're looking directly at the products themselves as is, not the maker.

Though Doom is that kind of series with a rather "uncertain" portrayal, it's no wonder people have their own interpretations of it.

 

I think even Hugo Martin talked about stuff in the Doom lore, that isn't in any codex or in the game in any way whatsoever.

 

But Doom is also the kind of series with such a close relationship with its fanbase, that "Doomguy" was treated like an official name.

[Gez]

11 minutes ago, whatup876 said:

It depends if id Software themselves can directly reference and/or utilize stuff from Sigil, as if they owned it.

They don't own it, they can only distribute Sigil as-is, basically. For example, they couldn't update its title screen to widescreen, as they have done with other add-ons, because to do so they'd have to renegotiate with Christopher Lovell, the author of the original art.

[whatup876]

It makes me think that for Sigil to be REAL canon, id would have to buy it from Romero or something.

Maybe some would compare this to the case with Final Doom but i can also see some worries partially because of id's current state. (and stuff like Romero being unable to share Doom development related assets, though at least Gregor didn't get in trouble over remodelling his Doom designs)

 

I do wonder about references that aren't "literal" like a demon design inspired by the deer creature but is still different on its own.

[Devalaous]

While doing non-forum things and poking around Doom stuff, I decided to take a look into how the Unity port did things, since community interest was so low in the PC side of it. I was tempted to drop one of these pics in here on April 1st with no explanation and see how many people fell for it, but I felt like sponge would have gotten a huge headache.

 

 

 

As you can see, I have ported Memento Mori 2, complete with its two bonus maps, to the Unity port. Memento Mori 1 as well. Both so far work perfectly, they just needed a custom DMAPINFO written for them. I have to stress that you cannot just add a wad on top of anything, its all or nothing, one add-on only, so you will have to modify a copy of your wads via merging a DMAPINFO lump into it. It gets even more complicated, but I'll touch on that later in this post.

 

 

 

Hell Revealed and Alien Vendetta are two mods that, if legal stuff wasnt a pain in the ass, would ABSOLUTELY be must-haves on the service. These two wads are some of THE most important wads of the classic era. Good news then; both seem to work very well out of the box. I have ported both editions of Alien Vendetta, and even integrated @Cammy's midi pack into a '20th Anniversary' Alien Vendetta for the Unity port, as a 'what-if' scenario. The only problem is that I was unable to integrate Valley of Echoes as an extra map. Again, I'll explain later in the post.

 

 

Finally, I have ported the official id-owned Deathmatch maps, something I always expected to be added officially, but given where they came from, I expect that id itself has largely forgotten they exist. I made two versions, one for Doom, one for Doom 2 that also adds idmap01 from American McGee. I am not 100% sure about the music for the DM levels, as the only info was partially incomplete wiki information, and I have not yet bothered to go to the hassle of using emulators to set up a DM game with myself

 

_____

 

Now for my findings, as mentioned earlier: Doom 1 seems to be the superior platform for adding custom levels, as DMAPINFO supports a surprisingly large amount of episodes and levels. I ported DTWID and added @northivanastan's Ultimate Midi Pack alongside it, since it comes with a DMAPINFO lump, and added E1M10 to the level set so Cammy's midi in that pack would be used, and it worked perfectly. I also ported 2002: A Doom Odyssey, and the so-called ZDoom only maps worked fine, albeit the Wolfenstein level had almost no enemies. Still, E5MX entries worked perfectly fine. The ONLY flaw I can think of is that unlike Doom 2's 'map07special' command, there is no related trigger documented for Ultimate Doom, so some classic maps will not work right. This also means that it is possible to port DTWID Lost Episodes up to Episode 5, but Episode 6 will not work.

 

Doom 2 is a different beast; Map 33 to Map 35 do not work whatsoever, nor does anything further than that. I can only assume this may be related to Betray's inclusion in the base files the Unity Port started on, but its a wild throwaway theory. Regardless this throws a wrench in things, as can be seen in Anomaly Report: Map 33 is missing, as there was no way to support it. As you can see above though, I have found a workaround. By naming levels 'ML1' and onwards, I can trick the port into recognising maps past the standard 32; this does seem to be very hit or miss though. I added Hexsoil to D2TWID, the two Secret Operations to MM2, and Valley of Echoes to Alien Vendetta, using the exact same lines of DMAPINFO code; the first two worked fine, while Valley of Echoes fails to appear.

 

There is another bigger problem with older wads on the Unity port: Thanks to the many wild ways people packaged their wads to shrink files and all the various exes you had to run for some wads like Cleimos 2 and Strain, a surprising amount of these classics bomb the Unity port hard. 'The Evil Unleashed', 'Eternal Doom' and 'Hell to Pay' are all unplayable whatsoever. 'Perdition's Gate' has limited success in that the earlier levels will usually run, but eventually the levels all cause problems, then after a point, they bomb the exe. These classics would need to be fully examined and rebuilt to work on the Unity port as-is. Even D2TWID has severe problems; the levels all work fine, but the DEHACKED work violently explodes once you visit the Keen levels. I had to place the vanilla DEHACKED that comes with the mod into the wad itself, replacing the internal one, to get the enemies 'working' but even then, the visuals are scrambled.

 

I must say, ive had a blast poking at the port and finding out things that work and don't work (A shame about Hell to Pay and Perdition's Gate, I was looking forward to co-opting DMAPINFO to tell the story between levels, just like the original releases!)

[Faceman2000]

2 hours ago, Devalaous said:

*Quality post*

Fascinating stuff man, thanks for looking at all that and sharing what you've found! I'm surprised DMAPINFO doesn't let you do more than 32 maps in Doom II - and, to be honest, pretty disappointed haha. The wad I'm working on had this port as the intended base port and I was planning on having 36 maps total. Hopefully the ML trick will work for my wad.

 

By the way, what are the official id DM maps you referenced? The ones from the GBA port?

[Devalaous]

Yes, the GBA maps. I added 1 player starts to all the ones that didn't have them so that ports didn't bomb out, they look quite good when freed from the GBA confines.

 

They play well enough too, I blasted my brother's ass on the full set to playtest it.

 

 

[Metal_Slayer]

Well, that was definetly a "Hire this guy" moment, you seem to understand this port as well as the developers.

[Devalaous]

Heh, while Doom modding on Doomworld HAS gotten me job offers from video game companies previously, I don't think this is all that special. I just spent a few days tinkering with DMAPINFO from its documented functions on the Doom Wiki + observations on official add-ons file structures, and tested stuff out. I still have no idea WHY Eternal Doom and co bomb the exe out, there's no crash log or message or anything. And the issue with Valley of Echoes not showing up is a mystery I cant solve.

 

Also a thing I forgot in my post above: Widescreen assets actually don't seem to work right when imported into the wads. Unlike Doomsday and co, the widescreen stuff does appear, but its all scrolled off to one side, with the right side then appearing on the left. I'm sure there's something im missing, as many of the official addons have widescreen assets working fine.

[Faceman2000]

1 hour ago, Devalaous said:

Widescreen assets actually don't seem to work right when imported into the wads. Unlike Doomsday and co, the widescreen stuff does appear, but its all scrolled off to one side, with the right side then appearing on the left.

I seem to recall reading somewhere that this port uses a different point on the screen as 0,0 than most ports and so you have to offset the image accordingly. Can’t cite my sources though so maybe I’m totally off.

[Edward850]

2 hours ago, Devalaous said:

Also a thing I forgot in my post above: Widescreen assets actually don't seem to work right when imported into the wads. Unlike Doomsday and co, the widescreen stuff does appear, but its all scrolled off to one side, with the right side then appearing on the left. I'm sure there's something im missing, as many of the official addons have widescreen assets working fine.

1 hour ago, Faceman2000 said:

I seem to recall reading somewhere that this port uses a different point on the screen as 0,0 than most ports and so you have to offset the image accordingly. Can’t cite my sources though so maybe I’m totally off.

It treats widescreen as native, rather than emulating a 4:3 sub screen. It then automatically centres graphics based on the asset resolution (so the original 4:3 graphics still end up in the same position). As such for things like statsbars your graphic offset remains at zero regardless of its resolution. However I think it may require the image to be limited to 16:9, it doesn't accept GZDoom's even wider graphics.

Edited July 6, 2022 by Edward850

[Devalaous]

Yeah, the graphics I used were the ones from the widescreen asset thread, they were all made with Ultrawide in mind, since GZDoom and Crispy Doom both smartly only render the part your monitor actually uses. I assumed the Unity port would support them too, as Scuba Steve's assets were ultrawide too, not to mention if you look on any Steam forum, you'll always see people demanding Ultrawide support (albeit usually very aggressively)

[Kyle07]

Never saw or tried the GBA DM maps out. I should definitely try them out. Hopefully they are fun in Zandronum with bots. I never knew about idmap01 from American McGee. But now I read on doom.fandom.com article about it. Should also try this out.

 

My current homework would be to try Quake II multiplayer and this out. :3

[Gez]

You shouldn't consult fandumb, the only true Doom Wiki is at DoomWiki.org!

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Id_Map01

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/MAP25:_DM1_(Game_Boy_Advance)

 

And while I'm here: @sponge, plz fix the text in Anomaly Report's description: "with it's blue-sky environments" should be "its" because it's not "it is".

[Kyle07]

I always take what Google shows me first. But anyway thx for the links. Whats wrong with the fandom wikis?

[Gez]

14 minutes ago, Kyle07 said:

Whats wrong with the fandom wikis?

Long story short because that's not the topic: like all of fandumb it's full of invasive ads and bloated by "social network" features that are useless in a documentation effort; also it's been largely abandoned by the community here.

[whatup876]

39 minutes ago, Kyle07 said:

Whats wrong with the fandom wikis?

The site tends to have an annoying layout and be full of adds and crappy features, but is more popular because of Google results, it's easy-to-use tools (explains most goofy wikis with memes made by kids) and the overall "corporate nerd" feel to it.

This post sort of explains it https://imx-doomer.tumblr.com/post/154206334518/do-you-mind-if-i-ask-why-are-there-two-doom-wikis

[Kyle07]

Thx for the explanation. I will avoid it as well now.

 

By using both wikis, whichever came first through google, I already felt the difference in quality.

[Lizardcommando]

I signed up for a Bethesda.net account just to try out Anomaly Report and No Rest for the Living on the Nintendo Switch. I forgot NRFTL did not have new music, but other than that, still fun to run around in. AR is still just as fun on the Switch as it is on PC. Nuff Said. Its inclusion into the Add-Ons tab is very well-deserved. The only way to make it perfect is if something like Smooth Doom was officially released for the Unity Port. Oh well.

 

Quick question, do any of the currently available megawads have any short, quick maps like the Scythe megawads?

Edited July 8, 2022 by Lizardcommando

[LarKo]

On 7/7/2022 at 3:14 PM, Lizardcommando said:

I signed up for a Bethesda.net account just to try out Anomaly Report and No Rest for the Living on the Nintendo Switch. I forgot NRFTL did not have new music, but other than that, still fun to run around in. AR is still just as fun on the Switch as it is on PC. Nuff Said. Its inclusion into the Add-Ons tab is very well-deserved. The only way to make it perfect is if something like Smooth Doom was officially released for the Unity Port. Oh well.

 

Quick question, do any of the currently available megawads have any short, quick maps like the Scythe megawads?

Yh AR, Doom Zero and Deathless all have short, fun maps that you can blaze through for a good time

[Faceman2000]

I’m surprised @Revenant100 hasn’t done one of his officially trademarked comparison breakdowns yet…

[Devalaous]

Map 33 is completely gone in the official version, unlike NEIS keeping the cut maps in its wad. The cwilv graphic for it is still present though.