Do you think Zandronum should merge with [G/L]ZDoom at some point?

[drfrag]

Has anyone noticed how laggy Zandronum feels? I don't remember lag being so bad in the past, i mean even with a ping below 100 shots register a few seconds later.

I mean i actually play MP from time to time (coop) and what's the minimum ping now so the game runs well? 75? And most times someone with a higher ping will join making it lag anyway. AFAIR 150 was okay in the past, Odamex feels much better. And that's vanilla with mods things can get even worse.

Besides most servers are vanilla iwads or Brutal Dew, i believe most mods don't play well in MP. Or a few Zandronum specific mods. Would updating to a more recent GZDoom codebase help to get a better MP experience? BD is fun but i prefer vanilla MP myself.

I don't think it's a problem with net code itself, the change from 2.1.2 to 3.0 was a massive leap (from 2010's ZD 2.5.0 something to 2014) so may be the codebase is too bloated already for an efficient C/S MP i dunno.

[mifu]

1 hour ago, drfrag said:

Has anyone noticed how laggy Zandronum feels? I don't remember lag being so bad in the past, i mean even with a ping below 100 shots register a few seconds later.

I mean i actually play MP from time to time (coop) and what's the minimum ping now so the game runs well? 75? And most times someone with a higher ping will join making it lag anyway. AFAIR 150 was okay in the past, Odamex feels much better. And that's vanilla with mods things can get even worse.

Besides most servers are vanilla iwads or Brutal Dew, i believe most mods don't play well in MP. Or a few Zandronum specific mods. Would updating to a more recent GZDoom codebase help to get a better MP experience? BD is fun but i prefer vanilla MP myself.

I don't think it's a problem with net code itself, the change from 2.1.2 to 3.0 was a massive leap (from 2010's ZD 2.5.0 something to 2014) so may be the codebase is too bloated already for an efficient C/S MP i dunno.

 

There were complaints (and I do mean alot of complaints) about the current netcode in 3.0 of zandronum. 3.1 however does come with netcode changes to try and resolve these issues which a new beta should be arriving soon as @V-Pariah mentioned

 

I am going to say however that I normally dont beleive people when they say they get lag with less then 100 ping. I normally suffer from 250+ (the perks of being in the southern hemisphere) and my shots normally are on point. Unlagged for me seems to be helping alot in this case however. Lag in theory could happen any time to be honest and there could be many reasons why you may experience lag.

 

Most common reasons we find from users who get lag all of a sudden which becomes the new normal for them on my server cluster is normally when either their isp or my server providers isp has done something funky with routing.

 

EDIT: Mind you ive only been playing survival lately. When the new beta comes around ill be trying to get some DM games going for testing also.

[Ru5tK1ng]

For anyone that wasn't fond of BitBucket, Torr sync'd up his hg-git bridge repo on github:

 

https://github.com/TorrSamaho/zandronum

[ketmar]

4 hours ago, mifu said:

I am going to say however that I normally dont beleive people when they say they get lag with less then 100 ping. I normally suffer from 250+ (the perks of being in the southern hemisphere) and my shots normally are on point.

shots may be processed ok, but if shot sfx is not started until server says to start it, they may feel laggy. i believe this is something players simply have to become used to, because it is quite hard to fix. basically, we need completely new decorate actions for network cases, proper support for client-side entities (yeah, i know that Zandro has that), and mods written with network support in mind (which is not that easy to test, btw). i had to add some special decorate states in k8vavoom to turn projectiles into simulated proxies, for example, and it is still very fragile.

[drfrag]

I don't miss shots but monsters die later, seems "dead" monsters don't hit you tough. I've experienced that problem with a ping below 100.

I had no idea that a 3.1 version was in development. In the Zandronum Builds forum the latest is an alpha from 2018.

I've seen that repo but can you accept PRs there? I guess not.

[Marcaek]

Quote

Dwarfcleric: we're going to see modders also making multiplayer maps that require gzdoom to run, and that will ultimately kill it for a lot of people. It's also part of the modders' vanity that prefer to win cacowards and such at the expense of making lots of people unable to play the maps.

 

Quoting this for posterity. You're a huge asshole

Edited April 27, 2020 by Marcaek

[Gokuma]

14 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

 

Why? Because it was suffering from a design flaw, so it got replaced with a function that doesn't have the design flaw - the design flaw being that it mixes sound channel number and flags in the same parameter. In January I lifted the limit of 8 sound channels per actor but the way A_PlaySound is implemented makes it impossible to go beyond the 8 original channels with it as there are only 3 bits available for the channel index. So a new function was added that can address all of them and to point modders in the right direction the old one was deprecated. If I didn't, the outcome would be inevitable: Getting bug reports about "Why can't I use channel 16 with A_PlaySound? Why does it play the sound all wrong?"

 

Well that's a good explanation.   Still I couldn't help having a WTF reaction at seeing the notice of the longtime standard one being deprecated.

[Gez]

Reminder that "deprecation" in ZDoomese means "no longer going to be enhanced", not "no longer going to be supported". It's exceedingly rare that a feature be removed from ZDoom, and the only two cases I remember are when there was a very good reason to remove them. (Namely: the first was the "playmovie" thing that nobody ever used, and was only implemented on Windows anyway; the second was the ability to play CD music from the CD drive.)

[jazzmaster9]

3 hours ago, Marcaek said:

 

Quoting this for posterity. You're a huge asshole

i mean this is the same guy who blames GZDoom for his potato machine.

[mifu]

5 hours ago, drfrag said:

I don't miss shots but monsters die later, seems "dead" monsters don't hit you tough. I've experienced that problem with a ping below 100.

I had no idea that a 3.1 version was in development. In the Zandronum Builds forum the latest is an alpha from 2018.

I've seen that repo but can you accept PRs there? I guess not.

I think that would be a Zandronum Dev question as far as where you can submit pull requests too. I do know normally you would also need to raise a ticket on the Zandronum Tracker also. I would recommend contacting Torr either on the Zandronum Forums or on IRC as he would be able to tell you what you would need to do if you wanted to send PR's

 

23 hours ago, DwarfCleric said:

If this merge happens, we're going to see modders also making multiplayer maps that require gzdoom to run, and that will ultimately kill it for a lot of people. It's also part of the modders' vanity that prefer to win cacowards and such at the expense of making lots of people unable to play the maps.

I kinda want to know what makes you think this? Most zandronum folk want all the new gzdoom features for example. If zscript was not such a blocker, zandronum would of possibly backported the new renderer anyways.

 

Honestly how many people exactly that are left still using old hardware? You gota upgrade at some point.

 

Also I dont think all modders make maps or mods with the aim to win a cacoward. Thats quite far fetched my man.

[Graf Zahl]

4 hours ago, mifu said:

I kinda want to know what makes you think this? Most zandronum folk want all the new gzdoom features for example. If zscript was not such a blocker, zandronum would of possibly backported the new renderer anyways.

 

It's a typical fallacy of people using old stuff. For unknown reasons they seem to believe that if they stick to the old and obsolete, the same will be true for a large portion of other users as well. He's not the first person voicing this sentiment and he won't be the last - but all of them shared a certain ignorant attitude toward the advancement of technology and the consequences this entails.

 

But here's the thing: The last time GZDoom ran a survey on  an OpenGL 2 compatible version, the user share of such old systems was roughly 3%, this was Summer 2018, and already rapidly declining. And the EOL of Windows 7 support will only accelerate this. So one can do the math where it would sit now.

The bottom line is: This "large user base" does not exist, but supporting it would mean to reduce engine performance for those running more adequate systems. That was the sole reason why GZDoom dropped OpenGL 2.x - its mere presence made a Vulkan compatible refactoring of the engine impossible - and I'm sorry to break the news: Having better support for modern AMD and Intel hardware was deemed more important than keeping support for some ancient systems with low performing graphics hardware operational.

 

[mifu]

3 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

 

It's a typical fallacy of people using old stuff. For unknown reasons they seem to believe that if they stick to the old and obsolete, the same will be true for a large portion of other users as well. He's not the first person voicing this sentiment and he won't be the last - but all of them shared a certain ignorant attitude toward the advancement of technology and the consequences this entails.

 

But here's the thing: The last time GZDoom ran a survey on  an OpenGL 2 compatible version, the user share of such old systems was roughly 3%, this was Summer 2018, and already rapidly declining. And the EOL of Windows 7 support will only accelerate this. So one can do the math where it would sit now.

The bottom line is: This "large user base" does not exist, but supporting it would mean to reduce engine performance for those running more adequate systems. That was the sole reason why GZDoom dropped OpenGL 2.x - its mere presence made a Vulkan compatible refactoring of the engine impossible - and I'm sorry to break the news: Having better support for modern AMD and Intel hardware was deemed more important than keeping support for some ancient systems with low performing graphics hardware operational.

 

To be quite honest, I can sort of understand the frustdration of something no longer working anymore and it worked fine for ages. Seeing Doom is a 25 year old game also kinda means some people may have an expectation that "Oh hey its doom, this should run fine on my potato since the games old" and it goes down hill from there.

 

However @DwarfCleric you sir made some hefty claims. Claims that you think players wont be able to play newer maps should a merge happen. Not all mappers use and/or abuse most of the feature set gzdoom has to offer.

 

Your other claim being "It's also part of the modders' vanity that prefer to win cacowards and such at the expense of making lots of people unable to play the maps" implies that all modders in the community really want to try hard and get that cacoward. Surely you do not really beleive that (then again you do blame gzdoom for your woes, so I remain skeptical)

 

Honestly, sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and upgrade your PC. You will need to do it at some point anyways when your old PC (Australians like to call them shit boxes, just like very old and run down cars) decides to fail, just like an old car failing because the engine finally died after 20 - 40 years of use.

[Graf Zahl]

3 minutes ago, mifu said:

To be quite honest, I can sort of understand the frustdration of something no longer working anymore and it worked fine for ages. Seeing Doom is a 25 year old game also kinda means some people may have an expectation that "Oh hey its doom, this should run fine on my potato since the games old" and it goes down hill from there.

 

 

I can understand it - that part isn't the problem. But at some point this just won't save the vast majority anymore. If it becomes a question between giving 99% something better or continue serving that last percent of holdouts at the expense of the other 99% such choices have to be made.

That aside, sticking to such old computers is bound to cause endless frustration because more and more things cease to work when the amount of maintenance required to keep old systems working stands in no relation to the result.

[ketmar]

it is always fun when people want to run games on their 20+ y.o. boxes, and in the same time the same people demand today's graphics. seeing people complaining about "bad optimisation" in FOSS game engines is even funnier. for some strange reason they're not demanging Doom Eternal to work silk-smooth on their potatoes. (interesting fact: Eternal maps are somewhat easier to render efficiently, due to being immutable. the worst thing for todays accelerated rendering is mutable map geometry.)

[Gokuma]

On 4/27/2020 at 6:05 PM, Gez said:

Reminder that "deprecation" in ZDoomese means "no longer going to be enhanced", not "no longer going to be supported". It's exceedingly rare that a feature be removed from ZDoom, and the only two cases I remember are when there was a very good reason to remove them. (Namely: the first was the "playmovie" thing that nobody ever used, and was only implemented on Windows anyway; the second was the ability to play CD music from the CD drive.)

You don't mean the cd track setting in mapinfo, do you?   That's a vanilla Hexen feature and I've been using it in recent Doom and Hexen work.

[Gez]

6 hours ago, Gokuma said:

You don't mean the cd track setting in mapinfo, do you?   That's a vanilla Hexen feature and I've been using it in recent Doom and Hexen work.

Not the MAPINFO setting, just the ability for the game to actually play a physical CD audio from an actual, physical CD drive.

 

I think you can set up a folder with ripped audio tracks as files and have it play that instead of the regular music lumps. At least you can in Raze for several games, and it has the same audio system as GZDoom.

[Graf Zahl]

Currently you can't, because the CD track substitution is in the game-side code, but of course the same system can be added for Hexen, too.

 

[Gokuma]

What?!   WHAT?!...

 

*SCREAMS IN REVENANT!!*

 

*shaking Doom Music, Hexen, Hexen II, Heretic II, Fragging Fanatical, Quake series, Samurai Shodown II, MK Trilogy, Red Alert soundtrack CD's in air*

[Graf Zahl]

The main issue with Hexen's music is, of course, that the digital tracks aren't really that much of an improvement over the MIDIs being played with a decent synth. This is very different from those other games which either had only digital content or their CD tracks were completely different from the provided MIDIs.

 

As a result this never really was an issue that required support.

That aside, there will certainly not be any handling for the other games - the music player will pick up Ogg replacement automatically already if the name matches.

 

[Gokuma]

*Continues screaming in revenant!*

[Death Egg]

So regardless of this port and that port merging, is there any work that has been done on a client/server version of GZDoom?

[V-Pariah]

If you mean between the time that the thread was created up until right now, then the answer would be no.  At this point, it's only been a discussion as you can see.  For updates, I would just recommend bookmarking this: https://github.com/coelckers/gzdoom/compare/clientserver

There is a high likelihood that the time for which C/S for ZScript is actually implemented will surpass the likely lifespan of this thread.  There's still catching up to do in Zandronum before the first build that had ZScript e.g. 2.8.1, and the "c/s core" has to be actually made (so as you can probably guess merging would be futile at this moment anyway), etcetera.  Just try to keep your hopes up, fingers crossed and with the right amount of luck none of us will get burnt out from all the discussion and we'll actually make it there.

[kinker31]

So, Zandronum might've gotten a new update, I think, but it all just seems to be minor tweaks and stuff, but that's at least enough proof that the branch still might be active. However, do any of you think that GZDoom having it's own, newer, but more experimental netcode could work out for the better?

 

I don't know what you think, but I'd personally would love to be able to run GZDoom 4.3+ mods on something like TSPG, and there really ain't much people who develop anything for Zandronum anymore...

[Redneckerz]

5 hours ago, kinker31 said:

So, Zandronum might've gotten a new update, I think, but it all just seems to be minor tweaks and stuff, but that's at least enough proof that the branch still might be active. However, do any of you think that GZDoom having it's own, newer, but more experimental netcode could work out for the better?

Probably, but the issue remains - someone has to do the actual coding.

 

There aren't that many coders who are capable of doing so, and even if they were, they have their own projects to focus on.

[Gokuma]

I never got to use it, but I think what we're really currently missing is Doom Connector which gave a client-server-like ease of setting up internet games.   Really surprises me that someone didn't keep that up or jump in to keep that up.

[bob_smith]

bump, I liked this discussion.

[Mr.Rocket]

On 5/4/2020 at 11:12 PM, Gokuma said:

I never got to use it, but I think what we're really currently missing is Doom Connector which gave a client-server-like ease of setting up internet games.   Really surprises me that someone didn't keep that up or jump in to keep that up.

 

Doom Connector was actually running for a few years after Zorcher shut it down some years ago.

Vin6 updated the DC client basically as much as it could be with its old code base. ~ the client is in VB6.

I did some cosmetic additions to the client, but mostly made new game support for Doom ports/engines or related Doom Games. ~ DC supports almost all Doom source engines.

Delta had the service hosted for awhile, a little over a year I think, and eventually it was shut down "again" last fall, as he basically got fed up with no one connecting.

I mean really, who would want to idle in the Lobby by them self?

The web site is still hosted: https://doomconnector.com/

And the client can be installed, but the server is currently not running.

 

If anyone would like to host the service, let me know and I'm sure we could probably work something out.

 

[Redneckerz]

11 hours ago, bob_smith said:

bump, I liked this discussion.

I mean, what's to discuss?

• A merger only happens with sufficient coders
• Several changes need to be made before such can happen
• Even getting Zandro to a more modern GL renderer is one significant task

On 5/5/2020 at 5:12 AM, Gokuma said:

I never got to use it, but I think what we're really currently missing is Doom Connector which gave a client-server-like ease of setting up internet games.   Really surprises me that someone didn't keep that up or jump in to keep that up.

For Vanilla (and DOSBox) There is this.

[V-Pariah]

Look, this discussion earned the branch two commits in April, and the first two commits in 2020 haha.  I mean, come on!  That's progress, right? :-)

 

Honestly, Torr is probably the only person that knows zan-netcode.  The internal structure is not documented, and it's clear that if Zan gets to ZDoom 2.8.1 level, that netcode will still not be in any way compatible with zscript.

Besides that, well.... dpJudas probably doesn't have a good grip of how the GZDoom playersim functions as a whole (I got this from phantombeta on the ZDoom GZDoom Dev channel not too long ago.)  Sorry dpJudas, wish I knew this information as well.  I would definitely help you on that in any way possible.

[The Strife Commando]

I think people miss the point of what Zandromum is supposed to be. If they want GZ, then why not use that? Why not just make a fork of Zandromum that has GZ's features? A lot of forks of Chocolate Doom exist, but not Skulltag or Zandromum. Also, merging would cause issues, specifically with mods. Compatibility would be a problem, such as features breaking or the mod not working all together.

Edited July 3, 2020 by The Strife Commando