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Quasar

prboom Issues Thread

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Note: if your post is about the newer port Prboom-plus, make it here.

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Because of the recent rise in threads addressing prboom bug complaints, I have decided to make this new sticky thread an official place for discussion of such problems. Hopefully this will help the prboom programmers out in some way, as well as keep the forum more clean of redundant complaint threads which receive only a couple of responses.

This thread will be for reporting and discussing bugs or usage problems only. General conversation, baseless opinions, flame wars, meaningless drivel, etc. are off-topic and will be deleted.

Please be sure to also visit the prboom bug tracker, at this location:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/prboom

There you can find the official place to report all prboom issues directly to the port's programmers. Let's all work together to help them out!

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There you can find the official place to report all prboom issues directly to the port's programmers. Let's all work together to help them out!


I applaud that attitude.

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here's a quick list :

- add support for WADs like Deus Vult map05
- remove "demo ZZZZZ.lmp recorded" annoying pop-up window
- add an "X alive monsters" counter, so that you know that you killed all the stuff in the map while playing coop.
- fix mouse weird behavior while recording (player often starting with an angle or being stuck with strafe ON)
- add chase/walkcam support from wc_prboom
- add ingame commands to fast foward / slowdown while playing a demo
- allow to use save/loadgame while in various compatibility modes such as doom2.exe or boom.exe modes
- fix intermission screen that seem to crash on some computers/comfigurations
- command to allow overwrite demos with same name
- make glboom brighter (just a suggestion:)
- fix player colors in coop (they all look black, usefull in DM but not in coop)
- fix coop stats screen when more than 2 players (the time and total time gets kicked out of the screen)
- eventually convert the stats screen to the quake system X/X kills Y/Y secrets so on ... % sucks

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Hiya:

I just formatted my hard drive, reloaded Windows ME as a clean install, updated my video card drivers, sound drivers and installed the latest version of DirectX (9.0b). I installed Doom, Doom2, and Final Doom clean. All with the proper updates and the such...I can run all the Doom games under DOS without a hitch, sound and video is good. I ran all my DirectX diagnostics and everything worked perfectly. I optimized my hard drive (defrag). I installed PrBoom 2.2.4 and I'm unable to run it, I get the following prompt...

Couldn't set 320 x 200 video mode
[DirectDrawSurface3::SetPalette
Invalid pixel format

Am I doing something wrong here? I kinda remember this problem happened a while back and there was a solution I believe...any help here?

Cadman - Member TeamTNT

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From that I'd say your graphics card sucks. To force another video mode try

prboom -width 640 -height 480.

And don't forget to check your config after you have quit the game.

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I have a GeForce2 Ultra Card with 64 megs of ram.


Cadman - Member TeamTNT

This card has worked just fine under Windows XP and a previous installation of Windows ME, ZDoom and PrBoom worked just fine. Also, on this machine...GLBoom works just fine along with Risen3D as well and my DOS version of Doom works just fine.

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It was a driver issue, the drivers were downloaded from 3DGuru and have been giving me problems since the get go. I went to the Nvidia web site and downloaded the latest official drivers for Windows ME and everything works just fine. The 56.64 drivers were a perfect match for the GeForce2...the card does not suck. The problem with most of the drivers on 3DGuru is that they have been tampered with in one way or another. Most of those drivers have been designed with the idea of tweaking most of the latest video cards and not some of the older ones that some of us still have. So now I'm back on track and good to go.


Cadman - Member TeamTNT

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I have another problem and it's not only prboom I think, maybe it's a computer problem.
The game (any ports) will lag once in a while, especially just before playing some sound (or maybe it's just a coincidence with some internal routine). The computer suddenly access the HD (scratching noise) and lag bit for a second or half a second.

I tried defragment my HD, change some memory settings and swap file settings but it does not really help. Could it be a sound driver issue ?
I didnt have these lags before.

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Such delays can happen if the program has to read uncached data from the HD. If this only happens when a sound is played first this might be the cause. If it happens more often you may have a problem with your sound driver.

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Actually I use the windows default drivers. I have an integrated AC97 sound chip in my laptop (I regret the SBLive I have in my comp that stayed in France).
In games like Vice City and GTA3 I had horrible lag when multiple sounds where playing at the same time. When I removed the installed AC97 drivers and let windows put his own default drivers I had no more lag in these games !

Should I get hold of a new AC97 sound drivers ?

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Is your DirectX up to date? I had trouble with this soundcard (delay between action and sound, crashes) until I installed 8.1 from the cd that came with the motherboard (the guy at the shop had obviously forgotten to put it on). It's been fine ever since. (presumably newer DX's will be fine, but I wouldn't know)

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fix boom bex/deh support:
- applying new bitflags to floating monsters stops them floating
- bitflag mnemonics do not work at all
- lost soul cant be given normal death frames (always uses explode frames)
- can't add new respawn frames (e.g. give cyberdemon/spiderdemon respawn frames when creating new monsters)
- stuff

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cycloid said:

fix boom bex/deh support:
- applying new bitflags to floating monsters stops them floating
- bitflag mnemonics do not work at all
- lost soul cant be given normal death frames (always uses explode frames)
- can't add new respawn frames (e.g. give cyberdemon/spiderdemon respawn frames when creating new monsters)
- stuff

Are you sure about all this? Maybe you're just not following the rules of DeHackEd. For example:

1) DeHackEd fields replace values only. They are not additive or subtractive. Therefore, if you modify a thing's flag values, you must provide all the flag values which it has by default (which are listed in the BOOMDEH.TXT file, or available from Eternity's EDFs if you happen to have them).

2) Unless prboom has broken something, it should be perfectly possible to add different deaths and resurrection sequences to enemies. Of course, you must reuse existing frames to do this, since DeHackEd cannot define new frames period.

If this isn't what you're getting at, then what you're doing is requesting a new feature similar to EDF, and that is off-topic for this thread. If you want to request a prboom feature, please either talk about it in a new thread here, or go to the prboom site and post it there.

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STRAIN and Hacx demos still do not work in Prboom (but are OK in Eternity), so there is obviously something awry with the deh support.

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No, that's been (largely?) fixed, but there's still something not quite right. STRAIN and Hacx didn't work at all in 2.2.3; now they're playable (2.2.4 and 2.3.0), but there are still some problems of a less obvious nature (but sufficient to guarantee quick desyncs).

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VinceDSS said:

- fix mouse weird behavior while recording (player often starting with an angle or being stuck with strafe ON)


I assumed the 'kick' the player gets at the start was on purpose, to differentiate from DOOM2.exe

The pop-up window is definately annoying. It'd be nice if prboom shuts down quicker than it does now.

For the HUD a visible kill count like 110/145 and the same with secrets. A visible clock would be great so you could gauge how the run is going.

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Szymanski said:
I assumed the 'kick' the player gets at the start was on purpose, to differentiate from DOOM2.exe

I think it's just something to do with the music system being a resource hog while it starts up (the "lurch" seems to coincide with the music starting up, but it's quite erratic) - or the player pressing a key too early. The GF49 gametics perform the function you describe in any case.

The pop-up window is definately annoying.

Budko's modified version gets rid of that. (And the GF49 tics.)

For the HUD a visible kill count like 110/145 and the same with secrets. A visible clock would be great so you could gauge how the run is going.

Kills, items and secrets counts are already available (and have been since Boom itself - press F5) - it's a monsters alive counter that's missing. Budko's version gives you the option of adding a "millisecond" timer to the HUD (I used it in this screenshot).

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Do you have a link to Budko's version?

The HUD could be a lot clearer looking, personally I find it a bit messy. Something like the original layout with big numbers eg

Secrets Alive Health/Armour Time(map)/Time(total)

where both health/armour and the time info are placed above each other.

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Szymanski said:

I assumed the 'kick' the player gets at the start was on purpose, to differentiate from DOOM2.exe

This is most likely caused by the program intercepting mouse events before the player can move. Win32 Eternity had this problem up til the last version, but I fixed it by telling SDL to ignore mouse events at startup, and then re-enabling mouse event handling on the first true gametic. This stops sudden lurching when using -warp, -episode, or other parameters that make the game go into a level immediately.

BOOM had this problem in DOS at one point IIRC, so this is hardly a new phenomenon.

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I have another problem, but it's not only prboom, it also happens with legacy and zDoom (I dont use any other ports).

Sometimes Win XP will lag for a 1/10 of a second if I was pressing a mouse button during the lag the game will act as if I was still pressing that button. So in my case, it keeps shooting (left button) or going foward (right button).

Very annoying when recording a run, when this weird lag happens, I either keep shooting (annoying with RL) or keep running foward (great on ledges).

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Quasar said:

Are you sure about all this? Maybe you're just not following the rules of DeHackEd. For example:

1) DeHackEd fields replace values only. They are not additive or subtractive. Therefore, if you modify a thing's flag values, you must provide all the flag values which it has by default (which are listed in the BOOMDEH.TXT file, or available from Eternity's EDFs if you happen to have them).

2) Unless prboom has broken something, it should be perfectly possible to add different deaths and resurrection sequences to enemies. Of course, you must reuse existing frames to do this, since DeHackEd cannot define new frames period.

If this isn't what you're getting at, then what you're doing is requesting a new feature similar to EDF, and that is off-topic for this thread. If you want to request a prboom feature, please either talk about it in a new thread here, or go to the prboom site and post it there.


1. yes i know that

2. obviously.... zdoom was perfectly happy to let the archvile use the respawn frames i'd created (using frames knicked from elsewhere) but prboom continued to pretend they weren't there

using whacked2 in bex mode

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There are some Dehacked problems, such as items not sticking to the ceiling properly (see Aliens Doom for example) and also I often have trouble with wads with custom flats for some reason.

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Which version is that? As noted above, deh handling has improved in recent versions. Examples of the troublesome wads would be useful too.

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I've come across a new v1.9 demo desynch with both prboom 2.2.4 and 2.3.0 (didnt try earlier older or Eternity, CDoom crashed early but that could be XP's fault).

The demo in question is the newly uploaded 30cn3519 in Compet-N incoming. It plays fine up to map30. Player 1 teleports and keeps on but strangely player 2 stays in the start and does not teleport. The boss monster spawns are also different. It plays back with doom2.exe v1.9 perfectly (obviously).

I checked Anders/Henning 30cn too and it plays back fine with prboom.

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The only idea that occurs to me is that you paused in map24. That might be throwing something out. I recall Donatas mentioned something about the gametic number influencing some events. If Doom2.exe is being affected by this, but prboom is ignoring the pause (presumably as its way of making it possible to pause during demo playback without causing desyncs), then that would account for it.

Presumably that is testable. If I'm right, it's not something you'd want reversed in Prboom, but you might ask for it to draw a distinction between pauses recorded in a demo, and pause being pressed during playback.

This is just speculation, of course.

BTW, I tested it with Eternity (schepe's modified 3.31 beta 5), and the same desync on map30 occurred.

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that's possible. I remember that prboom tend to desynch any long demos if I pause too much during playback.

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I use pause during playback very frequently, generally without problems. The very few occasions where this has led to a desync (or one happened coincidentally?) was when I paused during an stats screen.

Anyway, the fact that your map30 desync happens in both Prboom and Eternity suggests it was something introduced by or before Boom 2.01 (that's where the two ports' genealogy diverges) or something caused by a recent fix shared by the Prboom and Eternity guys.

I think I get the same desync with CDoom 2.05 (hard to tell, since I watching with -fastdemo!) but your player didn't leave the start area. That port was based on MBF.

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