Worst Doom Source Port?

[FireballCaco]

Of all the Doom source ports, which ones are the worst?

[Wagi]

Doom95. Not only did it not add very many features, but it also broke things that worked perfectly fine in DOS Doom. Demo recording, mouse support were non-functional. The 320x200 and 640x400 modes had their HUD weapons horribly distorted. Sound effects were inexplicably pitched lower. Automap marks would fly across the screen as you moved the map and would even crash the game.

[seed]

Seconding Doom 95.

 

It was used as advertisement for the then new Windows 95, but it was very broken. No demo support originally, though that was fixed in a patch, borked fuzz effect/Specters, and I think music playback was also glitchy, but I'm not very sure. It added 640x400 and more sound channels, but the joy was short lived since D95 didn't do aspect ratio correction at all, so everything looked bad in it. Less of the player's weapons was shown on screen as well, the automap was almost completely broken, the monster frames at the end of the MAP30 showed in the top left corner instead of center, and the E4 intermission screens and par times were missing, using instead those of E1.

 

It was plain bad all around.

[Bauul]

Yeah, but Doom 95 had that awesome picture on the Launcher! So it's not all bad.

 

[rnemo]

It's definitely Doom 95, for all of the reasons state above and then some. Doesn't help that Doom 95 was the way that Doom was packaged and sold on Windows for around a decade for anyone picking up a copy for the first time. Someone buying Doom in 2005 or so was getting it via an explicitly buggy, subpar, and barely functional piece of software meant to advertise for an operating system that was irrelevant long ago.

 

Furthermore, basically every community built source port, no matter how it came out, was at least made with love and a passion for the game in mind, so even the source ports that didn't turn out to be good software deserve an amount of respect at least for the motivations behind them.

[DemonExterminator]

Doom95 isn't a source port, it's the official port of doom to windows. Same way jaguar doom or whatever aren't source ports.

 

Back to the topic... 

Definitely Risen3D, horrible compatibility, implementation of port features is literally retarded and often goes for the most inconvenient method possible (reliance on Things, scripts and stacking lines one on top of another), lack of the most basic cross-port features (e.g. loading pwads out of $doomwaddir), not to mention no multiplayer and no demos either I think. The framerate is prone to drops. No heretic/hexen/strife support, I feel like they could add Heretic at the very least. Also the developer has no interaction with the community whatsoever. Overall it's just a terrible port that should have never existed. On the plus side, its HD textures and models are kinda neat. Annnnd that's pretty much it.

[seed]

12 minutes ago, DemonExterminator said:

Doom95 isn't a source port, it's the official port of doom to windows. Same way jaguar doom or whatever aren't source ports.

 

Except it is, it was based off of the original Doom's code that was never released if I remember correctly, that being DOS Doom rather than Linux Doom.

[Smouths]

There's this one on the Microsoft Store

 

[Hypnotik]

Absolute worst in my opinion. I'm going with Vavoom and Edge. Those two are the most awful I've ever laid eyes upon. Played them both for maybe 5 minutes, and instantly tossed both of them in the recycle bin. I'd rather suffer with Doom95 then play those two ever again.

[axdoomer]

To Doom95's defence, the mouse did work. Just not under Windows NT (2000, XP, etc), because it used a VxD virtual driver and they only worked under Windows 9x and ME. You could get the mouse to work by changing a registry value on Windows XP, but it was disabled by default for security. 

 

On the subject, the worst source port that I've used was Doom3D. It had all kinds of graphic glitches. For example, the status bar would stay red after the palette effect when the player was hurt. The SSG sounds were lower pitched than they were supposed to. I also remember there were some weird instruments in the music, the guitar in E1M1's music was screwed up. 

[Redneckerz]

Doom95, but its also many user's first port since it was so omni-present. So how bad is it then, really?

 

Personally i don't really have a specific Worst port. Perhaps Legacy 2 for showcasing a lot of advanced rendering things but remaining unfinished or DoomGL/ZDoomGL v1 (The Kokak one) for its 3D models stuff.

 

From a technical perspective ZDoomGL v2 (by Timmie) was quite bad since despite its advanced feature set, GZDoom triumphed it and with twice the framerates. But i guess that's just a case of different programmers accentuating different things. ZDoomGL had a Quake 3 style shader system based on multitexturing which, in theory, would be a great basis for all kinds of crazy graphical effects. Sadly, it never really was used and actual shader systems took over.

 

35 minutes ago, Hypnotik said:

Absolute worst in my opinion. I'm going with Vavoom and Edge. Those two are the most awful I've ever laid eyes upon. Played them both for maybe 5 minutes, and instantly tossed both of them in the recycle bin. I'd rather suffer with Doom95 then play those two ever again.

I'd have to disagree:

• Vavoom uses Quake's renderer and has some advanced rendering features like normal maps or stencil shadows.
• EDGE simply exposes a different kind of modding through DDF, for one. People who used DDF say its one of the most flexible things, surpassing most other script languages except for ZScript i reckon.

Atleast these ports attempted something differently. A truly bad port would be a port that simply adds one or two features that could be submitted as a diff patch or exist as a source modification.

16 minutes ago, axdoomer said:

To Doom95's defence, the mouse did work. Just not under Windows NT (2000, XP, etc), because it used a VxD virtual driver and they only worked under Windows 9x and ME. You could get the mouse to work by changing a registry value on Windows XP, but it was disabled by default for security. 

 

On the subject, the worst source port that I've used was Doom3D. It had all kinds of graphic glitches. For example, the status bar would stay red after the palette effect when the player was hurt. The SSG sounds were lower pitched than they were supposed to. I also remember there were some weird instruments in the music, the guitar in E1M1's music was screwed up. 

Funny enough Doom3D was the basis for Doom64EX and in that retrospect, the KeX Engine.

[Vic Vos]

43 minutes ago, Hypnotik said:

Vavoom

*very fast @ketmar running at incredible hihg speed*

[Cacodemon345]

I frankly wouldn't include Doom95 in the list of source ports; it was more of a officially approved port of Doom to Windows 95. Going by the logic of it being based off the original Doom source code, that'd be true for pretty much any Doom-engine port done back then (including console ones).

 

In my opinion, NTDOOM is absolute shit. Just a mere source port that adds nothing real of value (apart from being a base for ZDoom). Same for ATB Doom (also a base for ZDoom), which was basically incomplete.

[Graf Zahl]

The worst port I can remember is Doom Legacy 1.42. It featured all those great things people love, like frequent crashes - or a sound system that was at odds with the OS (I still remember that every time I used the engine I had to reboot my computer to get my music player working again, I have no idea how they managed to do that) - poorly implemented features and lots of other things.

 

 

[printz]

7 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

The worst port I can remember is Doom Legacy 1.42. It featured all those great things people love, like frequent crashes - or a sound system that was at odds with the OS (I still remember that every time I used the engine I had to reboot my computer to get my music player working again, I have no idea how they managed to do that) - poorly implemented features and lots of other things.

 

 

Also they had the audacity to call themselves Doom 3 (based on file names).

[seed]

6 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

The worst port I can remember is Doom Legacy 1.42. It featured all those great things people love, like frequent crashes - or a sound system that was at odds with the OS (I still remember that every time I used the engine I had to reboot my computer to get my music player working again, I have no idea how they managed to do that) - poorly implemented features and lots of other things.

 

You know, I was unironically waiting for someone to mention Doom Legacy, 'twas about damn time you did :D .

 

No but seriously, this port does have a reputation that preceeds it, so I would assume that reputation didn't come from nowhere.

[Pirx]

43 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

The worst port I can remember is Doom Legacy 1.42. It featured all those great things people love, like frequent crashes - or a sound system that was at odds with the OS (I still remember that every time I used the engine I had to reboot my computer to get my music player working again, I have no idea how they managed to do that) - poorly implemented features and lots of other things.

 

 

 

 

we still had fun with it at lans, iirc it was the first port i saw featuring player skins, and one thought he had to troll playing as a shotgun shell box... but that being said, yeah it crashed a lot. i remember a frozen image of a rocket about to hit me, and the music of dwango5 still playing.

 

 

[ReaperAA]

Speaking about Doom Legacy, has anyone managed to get the latest versions (1.47.x) work on windows (especially windows 10). 

 

I tried to use it some time ago but couldn't get it to launch the game. There were 2(?) startup launchers. Neither worked for me. What's weird is that I also tried running the ancient 1.42 (from 2003 or 2004) verison and to my surprise, that one actually launched (with bugs ofcourse). What gives? 

[Redneckerz]

1 hour ago, Graf Zahl said:

The worst port I can remember is Doom Legacy 1.42. It featured all those great things people love, like frequent crashes - or a sound system that was at odds with the OS (I still remember that every time I used the engine I had to reboot my computer to get my music player working again, I have no idea how they managed to do that) - poorly implemented features and lots of other things.

 

 

Funny (Or sadly enough) that particular version was used for a lot of platform specific source ports, like GizDoom for the equally ill-fated Tiger Gizmondo.

 

One of Legacy's better ideas was wide platform support - A lot of obscure platform ports got a port based on Legacy. At the very least the additional features make it a better option to put on a rare platform then just porting Vanilla Doom over.

 

So atleast it had that going for it. But yes, they were crash prone - And it didn't do the image it had a lot of good.

[vanilla_d00m]

I havn't tried them all but I would have to say DOOM95.  I like how the sound fx/music is loud on this one but it glitches a little bit running over the max vanilla static limit maps.

 

It can run them though without crashing on me. 

[Quasar]

2 hours ago, Redneckerz said:

Atleast these ports attempted something differently. A truly bad port would be a port that simply adds one or two features that could be submitted as a diff patch or exist as a source modification.

Funny enough Doom3D was the basis for Doom64EX and in that retrospect, the KeX Engine.

There was nothing left of Doom3D long before the Kex Engine even became separated from the Doom64 EX codebase. Kaiser's rewrite of the renderer to use OpenGL instead of Direct3D replaced nearly 100% of its unique code. The rest was lost in the process of separation of the utilities and core rendering code, and to additional changes in EX.

[Doomkid]

People complaining about Doom95 clearly maybe weren’t playing on 9x by the time they got it. The mouse worked for me as a kid although I didn’t use it and a good deal of the bugs people mention come from using an ancient piece of software on a newer OS.

 

The first time I ever played a version of Doom that didn’t look like scrunched-up shitpixels was Doom95 thanks to 640x480, which looked perfectly fine on a 4:3 display, mind you. It also made loading a pwad or starting a network game 999x easier (especially for kids who didn’t know jack about mangling DOS) thanks to having a launcher/frontend, which it also pioneered. The slightly lower sound effects just gave the game more buals, not really worth complaining about.

 

Similarly, Doom Legacy pioneered 3D floors and swimmable water, complete with splash sprites and sounds for fuck’s sake! It was the first port with proper splitscreen, a feature other ports can’t even get right to this very day. In the early days of Doom Connector Legacy coexisted with ZDaemon and Skulltag despite not even being C/S, just on the basis that it was so feature-rich.
 

FWIW the only Legacy versions that ever gave me trouble are the latest builds, they boot but enemies walk everywhere backwards. So I guess the latest builds of Legacy can be mentioned, but why? Why shit on someone’s hard work even if it didn’t turn out right? 

 

Seeing a whole lotta ignorance on proud display in this thread. The only “bad” ports are ones that are incomplete. For example CSDoom was a literal flaming bag of garbage in terms of functionality even right up to it’s death, but hey, it let me DM online, so I loved it..

Edited June 23, 2020 by Doomkid

[Smouths]

42 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

People complaining about Doom95 clearly weren’t playing on 9x by the time they got it. The mouse worked for me as a kid although I didn’t use it and a good deal of the bugs people mention come from using an ancient piece of software on a newer OS.

 

To be fair, most retail copies were actually missing DMOUSE.VXD, breaking mouse support in even 9x. Has been the case with every Windows-CD copy of Ultimate Doom, Doom 2, Final, and Collector's Edition I've encountered, frustratingly enough. I have a hard time hating on Doom95 or Legacy though since those were my first non-vanilla experiences with the game.

 

Some of my absolute favorite gaming memories are of Dwango5 DM in Legacy over Doom Connector, even though I constantly got my ass handed to me since I was way too young to be hanging out on there, lol. Months went by before I finally tried playing with a mouse.

[taufan99]

4 hours ago, Hypnotik said:

Edge

*stares with malicious intent*
(Don't worry, I have nothing against you.)

[Pirx]

1 hour ago, Smouths said:

 

 

Some of my absolute favorite gaming memories are of Dwango5 DM in Legacy over Doom Connector, even though I constantly got my ass handed to me since I was way too young to be hanging out on there, lol. Months went by before I finally tried playing with a mouse.

 

you know what pissed me off in legacy dm? people mouse-aiming the bfg at the ground so their tracers hit right away. especially bad since dw5m1 has 4 spawn points outside. iirc. 1 on 1 with a friend in legacy was basically him with the bfg on the lawn, and me with the ssg inside.

[Dark Pulse]

Atari 2600 Doom, of course.

 

 

[xvertigox]

The worst port is my attempt to remove limits from Choc. I spent about 20 minutes setting shit up then couldn't figure out how to compile Choc and went back to mapping. I will sit down sometime and make myself less dumb and be able to actually compile from source.

[dmdr]

I hate everything and don't mind shitting on other people's hard work so HERE WE GO

 

Chocolate: 320x200 haha fuck you. External program to bind keys. Verdict: SHIT

Crispy: Not Boom compatible ('but that's out of scope for the port'; I don't care, I want it, this is my post I'll type what I like). External program to bind keys. Verdict: SHIT

Doom Retro: Changes the pickup messages to some weird gender-neutral third person semi-grammatical nonsense, annoying splash screen on startup, have to use the ini to rebind keys, (possibly used to have) kinda buggy Boom/MBF dehacked support. Verdict: SHIT

Eternity: Heaps of awesome features, or would have if any of them were finished. Compatibility options use double negatives extensively. I'm a KB-only player but by any time I bring Eternity up on Discord someone will jump in and complain about the shitty mouse handling so there's that too. Verdict: SHIT

GZDoom: not demo compatible, ugly arse defaults that require me to page through millions of options to fix (a problem so bad the devs implemented a fuckin 'options search' to make things less tedious... which only works if you know exactly what you're looking for). Verdict: SHIT

EDGE: I used to use this a lot since it's renderer was better than GZDoom's in the sense it was actually able to render lighting contrast instead of making everything look exactly the same. Haven't used it in years so it might be great now but since I've already started being a wanker about everything I'm going to call it SHIT.

PRBoom-Plus: Also has millions of options, has gamma correction set to 4 by default for some reason, by all accounts the source is a packet of two minute noodles so development efforts are likely to be an uphill battle and thus probably has an uncertain future. Verdict: SHIT

ZDaemon: Closed source. Verdict: SHIT

Zandronum: Like GZDoom except outdated in many ways and compiling from source is a major pain in the arse. Verdict: SHIT

Odamex: Slightly dodgy dehacked support, not Boom compatible (but that will change soon apparently). I'm hoping this will take over from Eternity as the 'demo compatible port with advanced modding features' since it's more actively developed but getting feature parity even with EE will probably take years, and they may not even go in that direction anyway. Verdict: SHIT

K8Vavoom: What the hell is an 'Elven Gift' and why is it on by default? Verdict: SHIT

Legacy: Haven't used it in years but probably SHIT

Doom95: Shit for reasons already discussed but since this is a contrarian post at heart, it's AWESOME

Any other port I forgot/have never used: SHIT

[Graf Zahl]

9 hours ago, Redneckerz said:

Funny (Or sadly enough) that particular version was used for a lot of platform specific source ports, like GizDoom for the equally ill-fated Tiger Gizmondo.

 

 

The reason for that is that it was the last version released by the old management. So it kind of stuck...

A bit of trivia: The general instability of this port was what made me implement 3D floors in my pre-GZDoom engine then so that I could play Nimrod without constant crashes.

 

8 hours ago, Doomkid said:

Similarly, Doom Legacy pioneered 3D floors and swimmable water, complete with splash sprites and sounds for fuck’s sake! It was the first port with proper splitscreen, a feature other ports can’t even get right to this very day. In the early days of Doom Connector Legacy coexisted with ZDaemon and Skulltag despite not even being C/S, just on the basis that it was so feature-rich.
 

 

It all doesn't help if the thing just doesn't work right. The FraggleScript engine had several serious bugs that made it crash constantly. I remember because I know how many things I had to fix when I ported it - and why I based my work based on the one in old Eternity, not the one in Legacy.

 

8 hours ago, Doomkid said:

FWIW the only Legacy versions that ever gave me trouble are the latest builds, they boot but enemies walk everywhere backwards. So I guess the latest builds of Legacy can be mentioned, but why? Why shit on someone’s hard work even if it didn’t turn out right? 

 

I cannot really say, the last one I checked out was 1.46. It seemed to work better than 1.42 but these days, what's the point?

It certainly made a few odd and off-putting design decisions so interest in its development is slim to non-existent.

 

I think the biggest problem of Legacy these days is still the same as it was in 2003: It's being developed on Linux and tested only with Linux toolchains. As a result the code runs poorly on Windows and only compiles with GCC which means that there is zero chance of other developers picking it up and making it better.

 

[ketmar]

40 minutes ago, dmdr said:

K8Vavoom: What the hell is an 'Elven Gift' and why is it on by default? Verdict: SHIT

yay, only one sentence! i am quite proud. but... on by default? that couldn't be. i mean, if you aren't ketmar -- literally, it is on by default only on non-windows, and if you're building from the source, and if your user name is "ketmar". so now, as we removed this only thing that makes k8vavoom shit, we can conclude that k8vavoom is The Only Non-Shitty Sourceport Out There. bingo!