prboom Issues Thread

[wesleyjohnson]

I have prbroom compiled on Linux 2.4, no problems.
Those error messages are about privileges which Windows does not have.
I compile prboom under root, otherwise will have to do some target directory substitution when it wants to install to a directory that you do not have the privilege. They are from configure which is weird.
I may be that you are not the owner of the directory that you are compiling under. Did you just un-tar it and leave the owner as the guy who made the tar file??

[wesleyjohnson]

Trying to run prboom under OpenGL (to test some wad). I thought I did this before but now cannot figure it out. Either it is missing from the docs or prboom does not have opengl capability. It does mention it in the code which is confusing.

[RjY]

Both work for me.

In the case of OpenGL I've recently upgraded my debian installation and found I needed to install the rather obnoxiously large package libgl1-mesa-dri to get /usr/lib/dri/swrast_dri.so to make software emulation of GL work again. (I don't use nvidia's binary blob drivers.)

As for having to build as root, well, *shrug*. I can build and install as a regular user fine. You do have to tell configure where you want stuff installing, you can't defer it until running make install, though. I.e.

./configure --prefix=/path/to/wherever && make && make install

rather than

./configure && make && make install prefix=/path/to/wherever

[wesleyjohnson]

You are using the stock nv X-driver ?? I have that on my new Linux 2.6
installation and it acts like video is getting interrupted about 1/10 second every 3 to 6 seconds. Like something is sticky instead of being smooth. It is one reason I am still using Linux 2.4 and have not switched over to Linux 2.6. Are you getting the sticky effect, or is it just mine ??

I cannot discover the command line switch for opengl.
I thought it was
>> prboom -opengl -file xx
but that does not seem to be working. Is that the right switch ?
Is it anywhere in the prboom docs, or am I just reading all the wrong places ?

[RjY]

Since I upgraded I've been using nouveau since new kernels seem to pretty much mandate it, but up until a couple of months ago I used nv. Both work fine, though, with no intermittent freezes. I have had freezes when my machine's memory filled up and it started swapping heavily, however.

For GL you want "-vidmode gl". I have no idea if any documentation mentions this anywhere, I never look at it :-)

[ducon]

PrBoom lost the ability to make noise with XMMS.
Is it an ALSA or a PrBoom problem?

[RjY]

ducon said:

PrBoom lost the ability to make noise with XMMS. Is it an ALSA or a PrBoom problem?

Does that mean "when XMMS is running, PrBoom doesn't produce any sound", i.e. whatever was responsible for mixing sound output from different programs on your system is no longer working?

[ducon]

Yes, and it used to work. :-\

[RjY]

Well I can happily run PrBoom and mpg123 at the same time and get sound from both, but then I am lucky to have a sound card that has two inputs and can mix them in hardware.

You're going to need to provide a lot more information, anyway, "it used to work but stopped recently" isn't enough to go on.

[tm512]

ducon said:

PrBoom lost the ability to make noise with XMMS.

I've had this happen with other things on my system. Make sure the OSS module is not loaded:

sudo rmmod snd_pcm_oss

If that fixes it, consult your distro's documentation on how to blacklist modules from loading, then blacklist the OSS module.

[ducon]

tm512 said:

I've had this happen with other things on my system. Make sure the OSS module is not loaded:

sudo rmmod snd_pcm_oss

It did not fix the bug, even when I remove the OSS mixer module.

I_Init: Setting up machine state.
I_InitSound: couldn't open audio with desired format
S_Init: Setting up sound.
S_Init: default sfx volume 6

[bananaoil]

I'm new to Prboom and have a question; can it play The Ultimate Doom and, if so, how? I have no problems loading Doom 2, TNT, Plutonia, or the few Doom II mods I have, but I cannot for the life of me get it to run The Ultimate Doom.

I use Lubuntu, btw. I switched to Prboom because the latest version of skulltag (i.e. the only one I know how to download) won't let me save my games.

[Mithran Denizen]

PrBoom plays Ultimate Doom just fine. I don't know about it's functionality on Linux (I really only use Chocolate Doom and ZDoom on my Linux box), but it should be as simple as pointing it to the right IWAD via the -iwad parameter. It will probably give doom2.wad precedence if you have them all lumped together in the same directory, so that might be your problem.

For PrBoom on Windows, I set up a simple CMD batch file to let me pick the IWAD via a dialog box, and to load PWADs via drag-n-drop. You should be able to do the same thing via a simple shell script.

[bananaoil]

It won't work for me. In the configure file I point it directly to .prboom/doom/doom.wad and, while "The Ultimate Doom" background art pops up, the menu is from Doom II (i.e. no reference to the episodes) and starting a new game causes the progam to crash. Drag-n-drop yields the same result.

[Mithran Denizen]

That's odd. It almost sounds like you are loading Ultimate Doom as a PWAD over top of the Doom2 IWAD. But if that were the case, it shouldn't crash upon starting a new game, unless MAP01 is somehow missing. What happens if you use the -warp parameter to start directly on a Doom 1 level (ie. E1M1)?

[bananaoil]

Now, I'm very ignorant about this stuff. It took me this long to figure out where to tell prboom where my wads were in the first place. Sorry for being a newb.

[bananaoil]

So, now The Ultimate Doom screen shows up, but episode 4 is not listed and I cannot play the second two episodes.

[Grazza]

Presumably you have the complevel set to 0, 1 or 2. It needs to be set to 3 (either via command line or by editing the cfg) to emulate Ultimate Doom and to make Episode 4 available.

You get to episodes above 1 in just the same way you do with the original game or any other port. Either with -warp, -episode, or (most simply) by moving the skull cursor down on the "Which Episode?" screen.

[bananaoil]

Okay, I uninstalled and reinstalled prboom through synaptic package manager. I was required to download the freedm engine, but I opted not to install FreeDoom. Now, I configured complevel to 3 and put the location of my doom wad in wad 1. I loaded prboom and The Utlimate Doom background art appears, but the annoying FreeDM music plays, there are no episodes listed, and starting a new game just dumps me into the "first level" of the freedm engine.

[Gez]

bananaoil said:

I was required to download the freedm engine, but I opted not to install FreeDoom.

FreeDM is an IWAD (main data file), not an engine. The engine would be PrBoom (or PrBoom+, depending on what they put in their package) here.

bananaoil said:

Now, I configured complevel to 3 and put the location of my doom wad in wad 1.

That may actually be the source of your confusion. Isn't "wad 1" for an addon? Meaning that you'd actually start the FreeDM IWAD and load Doom 1 as a PWAD. Since the IWAD is of the "Doom II" variety (MAP01 to MAP32, like Doom II, Plutonia, TNT, Freedoom and FreeDM), the episodes and maps from Doom 1 are not available, regardless of complevel.

[bananaoil]

I know prboom is an engine and Free Doom is an IWAD. I was referring to FreeDM, which linux requires me to install. Oh well.

Let me see if I can load it as a PWAD instead, although I don't remember where that option in the config file is.

[bananaoil]

Okay, the config file does not list pwad anywhere. The only options are for two wad files and two deh files.

[Gez]

FreeDM is also an IWAD.

[bananaoil]

Okay. Would you happen to know how to make it to where The Ultimate Doom is the pwad that loads?

[Mithran Denizen]

You need to load Ultimate Doom as an IWAD, not a PWAD. Loading it as a pwad is what's giving you problems. Depending on what engine (PrBoom?) you are using, and your system configuration, you should be able to run the executable from the command line with the -iwad parameter pointing to Ultimate Doom's DOOM.WAD.

If you're not concerned with FreeDoom (ie. you just want to play Ultimate Doom), you could probably just delete the FreeDoom IWAD, and put DOOM.WAD in the local directory of the executable. It should then load Ultimate Doom by default instead of FreeDoom.

[edit:] As I mentioned a few posts up, you should be able to write a short shell script to launch Ultimate Doom as an IWAD. At the most basic, it could look something like this:

#!/bin/sh
cd [_YOUR_ENGINE_DIRECTORY_HERE_]
[_ENGINE_EXECUTABLE_] -iwad "[_FULL PATH TO DOOM.WAD_]"

But that wouldn't let you pick between multiple IWADs or let you quickly load PWADs (and I honestly can't remember how you would implement such via a .sh anyway).

If you're more comfortable using some kind of fancy GUI-based thing, you could probably put the arguments that you want into a symlink icon on your desktop, but again, I don't actually know how you'd set that up ATM.

[phobosdeimos1]

My Prboom's screen melt effect isn't smooth, not a huge issue but it's annoying, anyone else have this? Btw I realise I can turn it off, but it's seamlessly smooth in Zdoom, Eternity and chocolate doom, why would Prboom not be the same?

[Average]

phobosdeimos1 said:

My Prboom's screen melt effect isn't smooth, not a huge issue but it's annoying, anyone else have this? Btw I realise I can turn it off, but it's seamlessly smooth in Zdoom, Eternity and chocolate doom, why would Prboom not be the same?

It's the same for me but only at the end of a map. I have no idea why it would be the case though.

[RjY]

phobosdeimos1: the low level video code drops every other frame when the game is paused or in the menus/intermission/etc.

By coincidence the other week I happened to investigate why scrolling around the automap is so slow when the game is paused, and the reason is the same. I don't know why; it doesn't seem to save a lot of CPU, since D_Display is still doing all of its work every frame even if the frame is skipped. It does seem to be very old code though, it goes back as far as the last release of LxDoom (before it was merged into PrBoom)

Average:
It's the same for me but only at the end of a map. I have no idea why it would be the case though.

I_SkipFrame skips every other frame when gamestate!=GS_LEVEL or the game is paused. On entry to the map, gamestate==GS_LEVEL, so I_SkipFrame lets all frames be drawn and you see a smooth wipe. But on exit, gamestate is set to GS_INTERMISSION before the screenwipe happens and I_SkipFrame drops half the wipe updates. So there you go :-)

[entryway]

phobosdeimos1 said:

My Prboom's screen melt effect isn't smooth, not a huge issue but it's annoying, anyone else have this? Btw I realise I can turn it off, but it's seamlessly smooth in Zdoom, Eternity and chocolate doom, why would Prboom not be the same?

Probably because I do not use wiping for years, because I always used GL and vanilla glboom (IIRC) does not support wiping at all. I have added it for glboom-plus and turned it off in the same day (render_wipescreen 0).

Fixed in prboom-plus.

[phobosdeimos1]

So in a non-programmer's language, what's the solution?