My Doomsday 1.8.6 optimized fork of FreeDoom

[samboy]

One thing I love about FreeDoom is that it allows me to legally make and distribute modified versions of it. This is something I have been doing for a while; starting in 2008. To save you a click: I originally just took FreeDoom and replaced its maps with Oblige-generated ones; that version understandably did not get a good reception. 

 

Not being discouraged, I have continuing working on this project on and off for the last 12 years and have moved far beyond just replacing the levels with Oblige-generated random ones. The current version of this project now only has one random level. The focus has changed.

 

Doomsday 1.8.6

 

While newer releases of Doomsday have been made, there’s a lot to be said for Doomsday 1.8.6. It allows Doom to play like a modern First Person Shooter, with "WASD" controls and mouse look. It has—for 1990s Doom games—very attractive graphics, including glowing lava and bonuses. It has a playable frame rate, even on an Intel Core Dual from 2007 or an Intel Atom N455 netbook, and fits in a little over two megabytes of space.

 

One problem with Doomsday 1.8.6 is that it crashes with versions of FreeDoom higher than 0.7. 

 

ObHack FreeDoom

 

This is why I continue to develop and maintain my fork of FreeDoom: This is now a bugfix port of FreeDoom 0.7 for Doomsday 1.8.6. I have updated the low level sprites by using the improved zombie, shooter, and imp from newer FreeDoom releases. The FreeDoom wad has MAP01 and MAP02 from an older release of FreeDoom; since MAP03 causes Doomsday 1.8.6 to crash, I have replaced all the maps up to MAP12 with instant-exit placeholder levels. MAP12 is a random map. MAP13-MAP29 are placeholders (as are the two secret levels). MAP30 is a Deathmatch level contributed right here in this forum which I do not think ever made it in to FreeDM.

 

I have fixed a number of bugs: There were some bugs in the older version of Oblige/ObHack I use with this which I fixed [1]. A lot of the music was buggy, with long periods of silence. I have either edited the music to longer longer have a lot of silence (MAP09’s music now has a drum solo; MAP21’s music now has a drum and bass solo), replaced the music by music from FreeDoom 0.12, or, in one case, replaced the music with the music from another level.

 

Saving space

 

This is a space optimized version of FreeDoom designed for my “put as much stuff on a 50 megabyte CD-R” project. This is the main reason why most of the levels are placeholder levels: It saves space to have the main wad be as small as possible, and use an older, small version of ObHack (Oblige) to make the levels. I have even hacked ObHack to, by default, make a particular set of levels which is the “official” megawad (it’s possible to change the seed and a lot of other settings as desired; it’s only the defaults which are changed). Code to procedurally generate levels takes up less room than hand-drawn levels. [2]

 

Getting this

 

I do not think this fork of FreeDoom will have much appeal beyond my personal use. However, people are free to look at it:

 

https://github.com/samboy/ObHack

 

I spent the last two weeks falling in to the rabbit hole of fixing all the bugs in my ObHack FreeDoom fork of FreeDoom. I am (for now) done with that project.

 

[1] If Andrew Apted is looking at this, there was a bug where a block (remember: Oblige 0.97 divides levels in to cells, cells in to blocks, and sometimes blocks in to fragments) would once in a while be next to “the void” without a texture. I fixed this by looking for blocks next to the void, and having Oblige/ObHack remake the map if any blocks were 1) Next to the void 2) Did not have a “solid” texture and 3) Were not “sky border” blocks

 

[2] I agree that hand-made levels are better, which is why I have three hand-made levels in the wad, despite the extreme space constraints I am working under.

Edited March 2, 2020 by samboy : Fix wording and spelling

[Redneckerz]

 

11 hours ago, samboy said:

ObHack FreeDoom

 

This is why I continue to develop and maintain my fork of FreeDoom: This is now a bugfix port of FreeDoom 0.7 for Doomsday 1.8.6.

The title made me curious, this gave me its attention :)

 

Looking at the Github link however, you clearly state its a custom port based on Doomsday 1.8.6. What is the ports official name, and what does it do? And its also combined with ObHack??? So how does this work? Because i see that an older fork is called Obhack Freedoom

 

So i feel there are various forks discussed:

• The original Freedoom fork
• Obhack Freedoom
• Obhack Freedoomsday (For lack of a better word).

And they are also listed as such on the Slump site. Do you think the Doomsday variant could use a different name?

 

11 hours ago, samboy said:

 

Getting this

 

I do not think this fork of FreeDoom will have much appeal beyond my personal use.

You are thinking wrongly, because this does appeal to me ;) But its just not very clear what it all exactly does. What improvements are there?

 

11 hours ago, samboy said:

[2] I agree that hand-made levels are better, which is why I have three hand-made levels in the wad, despite the extreme space constraints I am working under.

I would rather release these as a seperate WAD. If the focus is on randomly generated levels being done through Freedoom assets and the Doomsday engine (in this case), it would seem strange to then find actual handcrafted levels in the package. That's just me though.

[samboy]

1 hour ago, Redneckerz said:

 

The title made me curious, this gave me its attention :)

 

Looking at the Github link however, you clearly state its a custom port based on Doomsday 1.8.6. What is the ports official name, and what does it do? And its also combined with ObHack??? So how does this work? Because i see that an older fork is called Obhack Freedoom

 

There are several things in the GitHub package:

• ObHack, a fork of Oblige 2
• Doomsday 1.8.6, whose source code I host in order to maintain GPL compliance
• midi3mus, a package which converts MIDI files in to MUS files. I used this to fix some problems Doomsday 1.8.6 had with FreeDoom’s newer MIDI files; the MIDIs would not always start until I converted them in to MUS files.
• A fork of wad2pdf which is there so I can make PDFs of the files, only showing items which show up when playing single player maps at Ultra Violence difficulty.
• FLTK, GlBSP, and Zlib, which are needed to compile the ObHack GUI
• ObHack itself, which has both the C++ source code and the LUA scripts to randomly make levels
• “tests” which I run to ensure ObHack is correctly making levels and correctly generating pseudo-random numbers
• Win32-binary, which has a special debug version of ObHack
• FreeDoom, which has “ObHack FreeDoom”, my fork of FreeDoom

I have extensively documented the changes to FreeDoom here:

 

https://github.com/samboy/ObHack/blob/master/FreeDoom/README.md

 

Quote

So i feel there are various forks discussed:

• The original Freedoom fork
• Obhack Freedoom
• Obhack Freedoomsday (For lack of a better word).

And they are also listed as such on the Slump site. Do you think the Doomsday variant could use a different name?

 

I have made no changes to Doomsday. I used the original mid-2000s binary of Doomsday 1.8.6, which works just fine in Windows 10 (there’s an issue that the “Play now” button is now hard to find, but everything still works).

 

ObHack FreeDoom is a direct update to my changes to FreeDoom, starting in 2008. There is only one branch for my changes to FreeDoom, which is ObHack FreeDoom. It includes a forked version of ObHack since 2009; this year, I have made that fork of ObHack the only maintained fork.

 

There are two forks of Oblige which I host: ObHack 008, which has a lot of improvements Fritz and myself did in the 2010s to ObHack, and ObHack FreeDoom, which is a bugfix-only update to a 2009 version of ObHack.  Most people will probably want the ObHack-008 branch (monster traps, more prefabs, boss arenas, and other features not in ObHack FreeDoom) if making random maps.

 

Slump is an update to the old random map generator Slige which I have not updated since 2006 or 2007.

 

Quote

You are thinking wrongly, because this does appeal to me ;) But its just not very clear what it all exactly does. What improvements are there?

 

It’s an update to FreeDoom which runs on Doomsday 1.8.6. It has, compared to FreeDoom 0.7 (the last version not to crash deng-1.8.6), updated sprites, updated music, and only has levels which do not crash Doomsday 1.8.6.

 

The included version of ObHack has two bugfixes (bad textures in the sky bug fixed; also, I fixed one prefab was being put in rooms which could not fit it without cutting off the heads of monsters) and a few minor improvements (lots of weapons and ammo in deathmatch mode when making single player non-coop maps; a “carnage” mode with less health, more ammo, and more monsters) and removals (no more CTF mode, which was broken in this ObHack branch; no more Doom1 or Heretic support, which I can not test and which take up space I would like to save).

 

Quote

 

I would rather release these as a seperate WAD. If the focus is on randomly generated levels being done through Freedoom assets and the Doomsday engine (in this case), it would seem strange to then find actual handcrafted levels in the package. That's just me though.

 

The reason why I have a couple of hand crafted levels is so I can either use random levels or play a couple hand made levels while using the same compact package.

Edited March 2, 2020 by samboy : Link to ObHack 008

[Redneckerz]

19 hours ago, samboy said:

 

There are several things in the GitHub package:

• ObHack, a fork of Oblige 2
• Doomsday 1.8.6, whose source code I host in order to maintain GPL compliance
• midi3mus, a package which converts MIDI files in to MUS files. I used this to fix some problems Doomsday 1.8.6 had with FreeDoom’s newer MIDI files; the MIDIs would not always start until I converted them in to MUS files.
• A fork of wad2pdf which is there so I can make PDFs of the files, only showing items which show up when playing single player maps at Ultra Violence difficulty.
• FLTK, GlBSP, and Zlib, which are needed to compile the ObHack GUI
• ObHack itself, which has both the C++ source code and the LUA scripts to randomly make levels
• “tests” which I run to ensure ObHack is correctly making levels and correctly generating pseudo-random numbers
• Win32-binary, which has a special debug version of ObHack
• FreeDoom, which has “ObHack FreeDoom”, my fork of FreeDoom

• I saw your package and its definitely a package ''made for personal use''.  Is there also a package of just the Obhack Freedoom port available?
• Lastly, the Freedoom engine, is Obhack implemented as a module within the source code?

Please note that although i am not responding to the majority of your post, i appreciate that you laid everything out, regardless :)

 

[samboy]

On 3/3/2020 at 5:38 AM, Redneckerz said:

• I saw your package and its definitely a package ''made for personal use''.  Is there also a package of just the Obhack Freedoom port available?
• Lastly, the Freedoom engine, is Obhack implemented as a module within the source code?

Please note that although i am not responding to the majority of your post, i appreciate that you laid everything out, regardless :)

 

Let me clarify here, since there appears to be some confusion.

 

The entire package has three parts:

• ObHack, the random map generator. This is a standalone application which generates a PWAD containing the randomly generated maps.
• FreeDoom, which is not an engine. FreeDoom is a set of music, levels, sprites, graphics, sounds, etc. It makes up an entire IWAD which, in the case of ObHack FreeDoom, acts like the DOOM2 IWAD file. It’s under an open content license allowing me (or anyone else) to distribute modified versions of it as long as we also include a copy of the license.
• Doomsday 1.8.6, which is an engine which combines the ObHack FreeDoom IWAD with an ObHack-generated PWAD to have a 32-level megawad of small levels (in can be completed in a couple of hours; it’s also possible to tell ObHack to make larger levels if a longer game is preferred).

So, that in mind, one gets ObHack, its version of FreeDoom, as well as Doomsday from GitHub. Extract this Zipfile, then do the following if running Windows:

• Run deng-1.8.6/deng-inst-1.8.6.exe to install Doomsday
• ObHack does not have an installer. It has a directory, ObHack-engine-697/. In that directory is a file called “ObHack.exe”; run this file to generate the PWAD, putting the resulting .wad file in C:\Doomsday (the default location deng-inst-1.8.6.exe puts files)  Note that ObHack.exe is not standalone; it needs the contents of the scripts/ and data/ folders to run (scripts/ has all of the Lua scripts which ObHack.exe runs to make the levels)
• In the folder FreeDoom is a file called “DOOM2.WAD”.  This is an IWAD file which is an open source replacement for ID software’s DOOM2, using new music, sprites, textures, sounds, and graphics. Put this in a place where Doomsday can find it, such as C:\Doomsday
• Run in C:\Doomsday the “Kicks.exe” file. For “Games”, select “Doom II: Hell on Earth”. For graphics, have 32-bit graphics at the native resolution of your monitor. For “misc”, uncheck the box that GLbsp needs to be run (For people paying attention to this thread, I have pointed out that ObHack comes with GlBSP), and increase the memory to 128 megabytes or higher (with only 32 megabytes, Doomsday 1.8.6 can crash when playing MAP31 or MAP32 in deathmatch mode with respawning monsters).  Maximize the screen. In the lower right hand corner, there is a long very short button which can barely be seen; carefully aim for and click this button to start the Doomsday engine.
• Doomsday/Kicks will search for and find DOOM2.WAD.  Click “yes” that this is the wad to use.
• To load a PWAD, reopen Kicks.exe, click on “Games” then “WADs”, and use the “Add” button to load up the PWAD generated by ObHack above. To make ObHack’s annoying Oblige level markers look less obnoxious, also add the “Watermarks.wad” file (in the FreeDoom/ folder) as a PWAD after the ObHack-generated megawad.
• For people who want a modern WASD FPS interface, open up Doomsday, then hit “ESC” to bring up the menu.
• In Options → Gameplay, “Always run” should be “Yes”.  “Jumping” should be disabled; it’s cheating with ObHack generated levels.
• In “Hud”, it’s desirable to set up a cross-hair to help with aiming
• In Options → Control, go to “Forward”, hit “enter” to choose the option, then hit the “w” key
• Likewise, “Backward” is “s”, “Strafe left” is “a”, “Strafe right” is “d”, and “use” is “mouse button 2” (right click on the mouse to choose this option)
• In Options → Mouse, turn on “Mouse look”

At this point, it’s possible to start playing a megawad in ObHack FreeDoom. Some other points:

• The music is optimized for Microsoft’s (actually Roland’s) built in 3-megabyte sound font for converting .MIDI and .MUS files in to playable music. ObHack FreeDoom can sound nice with an open source (and, yes, larger) sound font, but there are issues, such as the guitar in MAP09 sounding off, and the organ in some maps distorting with other sound fonts.
• The DOOM2.WAD works nicely with other source ports. It’s best to play in a graphics accelerated source port, such as prboom-plus-2.5.1.4, but it can work even in Chocolate Doom (albeit as a degraded experience).
• I have had issues with newer versions of Doomsday not cooperating with FreeDoom. I haven’t tested with Doomsday since 2015.
• There is a built in short demo. This is only here so that ObHack FreeDoom doesn’t crash in Chocolate Dooom.

 

Linux users and Macintosh users have the entire source code, and can port and compile programs as needed to run ObHack and a FreeDoom-compatible Doom source port. There is even a script which compiles ObHack in CentOS 7 in the Git tree, and compile instructions at the bottom of README.md. 

 

If someone purchased for me a Mac Mini with a 6-core i7, 64 gigabytes of memory, and 2 terabytes of storage, I would port all this stuff to a Mac.

Edited March 8, 2020 by samboy : typo fix

[Ferk]

On 3/2/2020 at 5:50 AM, samboy said:

One problem with Doomsday 1.8.6 is that it crashes with versions of FreeDoom higher than 0.7. 

 

Why would this be? is it maybe a bug in Freedoom?

Specially the newest versions are meant to be vanilla compatible, any engine should work out of the box, I'd expect.

[Graf Zahl]

Freedoom may be vanilla compatible - but I'd not be so sure about Doomsday 1.8.6...

[samboy]

I’m not sure making FreeDoom proper Doomsday 1.8.6 compatible is important. As long as FreeDoom works in Chocolate Doom (it does), and as long as it works with a 1990s version of DOS Doom (is this being tested?), if it crashes in an older version of Doomsday, that’s a bug on Doomsday’s side, not FreeDoom’s side—and it’s a bug the Doomsday team has already fixed.

 

It would be more important to work with the Doomsday team to make FreeDoom a fully vetted IWAD for playing Doom-like games with—but I am not sure the Doomsday and FreeDoom team have the resources to engage in that kind of cooperation.

 

Getting FreeDoom to work with Doomsday 1.8.6 is important to me, and that’s why I still maintain a fork of FreeDoom 0.7 which is fairly deeply frozen (only updating a few sprites, and updating the music since there was a bug with long periods of silence with a number of the sound tracks).

[Redneckerz]

On 3/3/2020 at 7:04 PM, samboy said:

Let me clarify here, since there appears to be some confusion.

 

The entire package has three parts:

• ObHack, the random map generator. This is a standalone application which generates a PWAD containing the randomly generated maps.
• FreeDoom, which is not an engine. FreeDoom is a set of music, levels, sprites, graphics, sounds, etc. It makes up an entire IWAD which, in the case of ObHack FreeDoom, acts like the DOOM2 IWAD file. It’s under an open content license allowing me (or anyone else) to distribute modified versions of it as long as we also include a copy of the license.
• Doomsday 1.8.6, which is an engine which combines the ObHack FreeDoom IWAD with an ObHack-generated PWAD to have a 32-level megawad of small levels (in can be completed in a couple of hours; it’s also possible to tell ObHack to make larger levels if a longer game is preferred).

Amazing insight (Apologies for the late late answer), thank you.

I am lowkey wondering though (And likely its not going to work because of Obhack) but is it possible to merge Doomsday and Obhack into one executable? Doomsday for rendering, Obhack for random level generation, and Freedoom as IWAD.

The reason i ask this is because a few ports i recently wrote for the Wiki have similarities with what your setup does, namely Random Doom and ManDoom.

 

Perhaps this is useful to look into. :)

 

2 hours ago, samboy said:

I’m not sure making FreeDoom proper Doomsday 1.8.6 compatible is important. As long as FreeDoom works in Chocolate Doom (it does), and as long as it works with a 1990s version of DOS Doom (is this being tested?),

You mean DOSDoom the port or Vanilla Doom (So Doom2.exe)?

[samboy]

17 minutes ago, Redneckerz said:

is it possible to merge Doomsday and Obhack into one executable? Doomsday for rendering, Obhack for random level generation, and Freedoom as IWAD.
 

Is it possible. Of course. Given enough thrust, it’s possible to make pigs fly. It is feasible and practical? Not from where I am sitting.

 

This is where I give my open source economics lecture, because if I don’t give out this lecture, I put myself in a position where I can burn out like Andrew did—there’s a reason Andrew no longer makes new releases of Oblige and locked the entire Oblige forum.

 

Open source economics is this: When people aren’t getting paid for their work, the expectations one has in a customer-supplier relationship are not there. The reason why Oblige has not implemented every single random feature someone on the Internet asked for, the reason why ObHack has not implemented every single random feature someone has asked for, and the reason why any popular open source project has not implemented every single random feature asked for is because the developers are not being paid to implement random features nor are the developers being paid to provide support. 

 

With open source economics, there are a lot more people out there asking for features than there are developers implementing the features. So, yeah, ask for a feature: But if it’s not a feature I’m interested in developing, and if it’s not a feature anyone else is interested in developing, it will not get implemented. 

Sure, if Mike Bloomberg came up to me and gave me a $100,000 contract to make a “ObHack-rogue” variant, combining the Doomsday code and the Oblige/ObHack code in to a single binary, I would do it. But as long as I am not getting paid, there’s little motivation for me to implement this feature.

[Redneckerz]

16 hours ago, samboy said:

Is it possible. Of course. Given enough thrust, it’s possible to make pigs fly. It is feasible and practical? Not from where I am sitting.

 

This is where I give my open source economics lecture, because if I don’t give out this lecture, I put myself in a position where I can burn out like Andrew did—there’s a reason Andrew no longer makes new releases of Oblige and locked the entire Oblige forum.

 

Open source economics is this: When people aren’t getting paid for their work, the expectations one has in a customer-supplier relationship are not there. The reason why Oblige has not implemented every single random feature someone on the Internet asked for, the reason why ObHack has not implemented every single random feature someone has asked for, and the reason why any popular open source project has not implemented every single random feature asked for is because the developers are not being paid to implement random features nor are the developers being paid to provide support. 

 

With open source economics, there are a lot more people out there asking for features than there are developers implementing the features. So, yeah, ask for a feature: But if it’s not a feature I’m interested in developing, and if it’s not a feature anyone else is interested in developing, it will not get implemented. 

Sure, if Mike Bloomberg came up to me and gave me a $100,000 contract to make a “ObHack-rogue” variant, combining the Doomsday code and the Oblige/ObHack code in to a single binary, I would do it. But as long as I am not getting paid, there’s little motivation for me to implement this feature.

A reasonable position to make. When the expection of payment isn't available, all one can do is make the changes to the code he/she they wants. This is ofcourse not mutally exclusive, but it is a compelling argument to put forward as to why someone would retain ultimate control over the decisions he/she they makes to the code.

In this case, we are talking about a niche of a niche to a niche. It is very doubtful that monetary gains can be made - I am sure you know that as much as i do.

 

The only reason i asked (Not requested!) is in terms of unification and visibility: Such a binary would be easier to market as it isn't composed of 3 seperate things.

Nevertheless, i hear you, and as said, its a reasonable take to have :) Thank you for addressing!

[smeghammer]

On 3/9/2020 at 8:53 PM, Redneckerz said:

The reason i ask this is because a few ports i recently wrote for the Wiki have similarities with what your setup does, namely Random Doom and ManDoom.

 

On 3/2/2020 at 5:48 PM, samboy said:

A fork of wad2pdf which is there so I can make PDFs of the files, only showing items which show up when playing single player maps at Ultra Violence difficulty.

 

These are neat.

 

Just checked into the random map versions after also checking out wad2pdf. Managed to get wad2pdf working on win10 via the CLI version of glbsp.exe and generated a PDF of my in-progress map. Result.

 

The older ramdom map port (random doom) doesn't like 64 bit OS, but ManDoom runs great.

 

It amazing what you stumble on randomly browsing these threads :-) 

 

I was only here looking for freedoom stuff...

[Danfun64]

It would be nice if Doomsday 1.8.6 got a maintenance fork. AFAIK the latest versions of Doomsday still can't properly record demos. Not to mention it IIRC uses dead APIs, probably can't be compiled with modern compilers, and probably has unfixed security vulnerabilities which make me uncomfortable with using it.

[Redneckerz]

On 4/19/2020 at 3:59 PM, smeghammer said:

The older ramdom map port (random doom) doesn't like 64 bit OS, but ManDoom runs great.

 

It amazing what you stumble on randomly browsing these threads :-) 

 

I was only here looking for freedoom stuff...

Thanks for the compliment :)

• Random Doom not working on 64 bit OS will make sense because its based of DOSDoom. So it requires DOS to function.
• ManDoom is a modified ZDoom 2.7.1 (Not the latest ZDoom, but the version prior) so that may run quite well on modern systems.

Feel free to stop by the Doom Wiki where more of this stuff is located :)

On 4/27/2020 at 9:46 PM, Danfun64 said:

It would be nice if Doomsday 1.8.6 got a maintenance fork. AFAIK the latest versions of Doomsday still can't properly record demos. Not to mention it IIRC uses dead APIs, probably can't be compiled with modern compilers, and probably has unfixed security vulnerabilities which make me uncomfortable with using it.

Doomsday is just a framework to host the several dll's contained within. PVS uses a modified JHeretic 0.93 because it was still a seperate executable then. In order to maintain that 1.8.6 framework, you would have to maintain all its seperate game dll's aswell - So JDoom, JHexen and JHeretic.

 

That seems a bit excessive.

 

Would it not be better to test which version of JDoom is used the most in demo's, and maintain that? JDoom was a seperate executable prior to being part of Doomsday.

 

Whilst unifying these has been easier for end users, i feel it would be easier to focus on one executable. Visually the unification has not brought much improvements - A pre-Doomsday JDoom visually can look much the same as those Doomsday 1x releases. The only observed difference is in the later ones, and even those changes aren't that visually different from how JDoom used to look.

 

And to be fair - I very much would love JDoom as a seperate port see maintained, in a LZDoom style fashion. Before GZDoom took over, JDoom in particular was often mentioned as one of the most visually impressive ports and i believe it still holds a place even today. But i prefer not to bother with the whole Doomsday unification - Sometimes just a smaller, seperate port is preferred. JDoom LTS or something like that :)

[samboy]

The point of Doomsday 1.8.6 (or the corresponding version of JDoom) is that this is a “looks nice and runs on anything” version of the Doom engine. GZDoom is pretty close if we want something which is maintained today (not quite as nice looking as Doomsday; but it runs demos nicely unlike Doomsday 1.8.6, which, as far as I can tell, has no demo support), but Doomsday 1.8.6 has the advantage that I know it runs really well on a really old 2010 Intel N455 Netbook which I used to use; that’s the “lowest common denominator” I target.

 

Maintaining Doomsday 1.8.6 is probably more work than it’s worth; if one wants to play online, use GZDoom instead. 

 

Doomsday 1.8.6 is still playable for network games when one is on a home LAN firewalled from the Internet. I know, that’s not a thing these days, but I have very pleasant memories of playing my buddies deathmatch when I brought my computer to their house and we did a bunch of 1-on-1 deathmatch levels. I miss those days; to recreate that experience, I play the old Nexuiz against the bots, but it’s not the same as the real-time banter that comes when the guy’s on the other side of the room from you.

[Redneckerz]

10 hours ago, samboy said:

The point of Doomsday 1.8.6 (or the corresponding version of JDoom) is that this is a “looks nice and runs on anything” version of the Doom engine.

This is because JDoom/Doomsday 1.8.6 target an older OpenGL version than what GZDoom does, OpenGL 1.x. Because of it, it flies on legacy hardware or underperforming hardware such as the aforementioned Netbook. GZDoom's advanced visual features require OpenGL3.

 

However, what Doomsday/JDoom lack is the advanced scripting and software renderer improvements that are in GZDoom/LZDoom. I can see a case can be made for legacy hardware, but it comes at the cost of non-updated compatibility.

 

Its great that these old versions can still run (as they are), but they will inevitably run into issues when using modern OS's or modern graphics cards - OpenGL 1.x is just too dated for any advanced visual fluff. What it does implement now though does result in a good looking version of Doom. It just does not support a lot of advanced WAD sets.

 

10 hours ago, samboy said:

Maintaining Doomsday 1.8.6 is probably more work than it’s worth; if one wants to play online, use GZDoom instead. 

For multiplayer id rather recommend Zandronum if you also want OpenGL support. Because it targets a legacy GZDoom build (ironically also called 1.8.6) it gets by on modest hardware. It lacks advanced scripting though.

 

The other two multiplayer focussed ports have interesting things (true color in Odamex, Slopes in ZDaemon and SSAA) but they are pure software renderers.