PrBoom-Plus, ver. 2.5.1.4

[Da Werecat]

I have no idea what they do in glboom. Probably shouldn't be there.

 

For prboom, opengl renders an 8-bit picture, but uses GL canvas to display it. Might solve compatibility issues with 8-bit video modes on some systems.

 

Now, 32bit is different in that it renders translucency in real time instead of using a table. It will look smoother in most cases, but trash custom effects (on the very rare occasion of them being implemented).

[Marvv7]

Thanks for the answer, I see.
So 8-bit software render in Prboom+ is closest to vanilla doom, and opengl render in Prboom+ is similiar to how GZDoom handles software rendering?

[Da Werecat]

Ideally, 8bit and opengl should look exactly the same. All differences are under the hood.

[Spectre01]

I've been using the GLBoom+ executable to play in 8bit software mode for a while now. But that's been with version 2.5.1.7 and the latest DSDA fork. Also, the software performance for the 32bit mode is pretty darn bad in comparison to 8bit.

[seed]

19 minutes ago, Spectre01 said:

I've been using the GLBoom+ executable to play in 8bit software mode for a while now. But that's been with version 2.5.1.7 and the latest DSDA fork. Also, the software performance for the 32bit mode is pretty darn bad in comparison to 8bit.

 

Similar to the Truecolor Software Render in GZDoom, both are taxing as heck, but in the case of PrBoom, it makes no real visual difference, or I can't see it anyway.

[Edward850]

The 32bit mode in prboom, IIRC, refers to the final output. As in it's doing the palette conversion itself and outputting that, rather than relying on the window surface to handle an 8bit mode. In modern Windows these will be basically the same thing given it has to do the conversion at some point anyway.

[Spectre01]

21 minutes ago, seed said:

it makes no real visual difference, or I can't see it anyway.

From what I remember, 32bit makes translucency look slightly nicer. Like the colour mixing is better.

 

And from trying it out, that does seem to be the case. Here is a close up of a BFG explosion in 8bit and 32bit modes. As you can see, the colour blending is much nicer in 32bits, almost like in OpenGL. But you're better off playing in GL if that's a factor. It's unfortunate GLBoom+ doesn't have projectile translucency without loading trans_on.deh, which has the side effect of projectiles becoming invisible behind translucent walls.

[BunnyWithBeans]

On 12/29/2020 at 5:43 PM, Shepardus said:

Try 2.5.1.5 from this page, or dsda-doom, which is forked from 2.5.1.7. I get very similar mouse behavior with Doom64 EX, which I assume is something to do with the old version of SDL it uses.

This worked. Thank you.

[Da Werecat]

32bit mode also makes that fancy software texture filtering smooth. But not the lighting, which is still dithered.

[Pixel Fiend]

I've installed Prboom maybe four times, each time tried the graphic settings, played for a minute, and uninstalled. Didn't like both the gameplay feel and the graphics.

 

Is there a way to make it look like Crispy Doom?

[RottingZombie]

There are many pages in this thread, so I'm going to just ask instead of reading them all.

 

I'm having a strange issue (that may be normal behaviour) where the animation is very choppy seeming in capped software mode using prboom-plus exe. As compared to choco or crispy capped for example, which feel like 35fps to me. Any idea why? Using 2.5.1.4. I love the port otherwise, and could use glboom-plus exe I suppose, since that feels right when capped. I got the texture filter off, I just have to figure out how to turn blurry actors off.

[Spectre01]

25 minutes ago, RottingZombie said:

I got the texture filter off, I just have to figure out how to turn blurry actors off.

Under the General menu on one of the last pages there is Texture Options. It's got Texture Filter Mode, Sprite Filter Mode, and Patch Filter mode. Set those to None for the vanilla look. Alternatively, I have textures and sprites set to Linear Mipmap for better distance clarity. 

[RottingZombie]

@Spectre01 Thanks! I should have looked further, I just changed the first setting when I happened upon it in the .cfg file.

[Shepardus]

On 12/31/2020 at 5:13 PM, <<Rewind said:

I've installed Prboom maybe four times, each time tried the graphic settings, played for a minute, and uninstalled. Didn't like both the gameplay feel and the graphics.

 

Is there a way to make it look like Crispy Doom?

Are there specific issues you're encountering? The software renderer is fundamentally the same as Crispy Doom's, so if you choose a low resolution and select "8bit" in the renderer selection it should look pretty close to Crispy Doom. You may need to check how your monitor scales low resolutions, though, since I think versions up to 2.5.1.5 set the display's resolution to match the game when playing in fullscreen, which may cause a blurry or stretched image, as opposed to how Crispy Doom draws the image without touching the monitor's native resolution. If that's a problem you could try using the "screen multiple factor" in the options, or use 2.5.1.7 or later, which I think behaves similarly to Crispy Doom in this regard.

[Spectre01]

2 minutes ago, Shepardus said:

"screen multiple factor"

What exactly does that feature do? Does it upscale lower resolutions?

[Shepardus]

7 minutes ago, Spectre01 said:

What exactly does that feature do? Does it upscale lower resolutions?

Something like that - I think it scales the image by an integer factor before drawing it, so for example 640x480 could become 1280x960 with 2x2 pixels.

[Pixel Fiend]

1 hour ago, Shepardus said:

Are there specific issues you're encountering? The software renderer is fundamentally the same as Crispy Doom's, so if you choose a low resolution and select "8bit" in the renderer selection it should look pretty close to Crispy Doom. You may need to check how your monitor scales low resolutions, though, since I think versions up to 2.5.1.5 set the display's resolution to match the game when playing in fullscreen, which may cause a blurry or stretched image, as opposed to how Crispy Doom draws the image without touching the monitor's native resolution. If that's a problem you could try using the "screen multiple factor" in the options, or use 2.5.1.7 or later, which I think behaves similarly to Crispy Doom in this regard.

 

Thank you very much. I'll have a look at it for sure. I'm just puzzled at that version you mention - where is 2.5.1.7?

[Shepardus]

1 hour ago, <<Rewind said:

 

Thank you very much. I'll have a look at it for sure. I'm just puzzled at that version you mention - where is 2.5.1.7?

The de facto home of PrBoom+ development has moved from Sourceforge to GitHub. The binaries provided there are out of date, though - you'd be better off checking the later pages of this thread, or probably easier to check out the dsda-doom fork, which adds some additional features on top of the latest PrBoom+.

[Dimon12321]

Is it fine that PrBoom's Fluidsynth soundfonts don't play the music exactly like external MIDI players? 

I played Going Down the Fast Way in PrBoom+ and through Keppy's MIDI Converter (VLC provides the same result, BTW). Keppy's soft plays it exactly like in the video, but for some reason the same soundfont (SC-55) sounds worse in PrBoom+. Some sounds are simply wrong! Here is a reference. 

Is there a way to fix it?

Here are my sound settings:

Spoiler

 

# Sound settings
snd_pcspeaker                 0
sound_card                   -1
music_card                   -1
pitched_sounds                0
samplerate                22050
sfx_volume                    2
music_volume                  9
mus_pause_opt                 1
snd_channels                 32
snd_midiplayer            "fluidsynth"
snd_soundfont             "SC-55 SoundFont v1.2a1.sf2"
snd_mididev               ""
mus_extend_volume             0
mus_fluidsynth_chorus         0
mus_fluidsynth_reverb         0
mus_fluidsynth_gain         100
mus_opl_gain                 50

 

 

 

 

Edited January 4, 2021 by Dimon12321

[vaa44]

On 8/2/2020 at 2:05 AM, Gradius said:

Smooth texture filtering will cause the edges of transparent objects to have a gradient from opaque to transparent, which can cause sorting issues (presumably pictured above). There's also a speed penalty to semi-transparency. So turning it off simply sets a hard cut off threshold for transparent edges (i.e. any edge >0.5 transparency is fully opaque, any pixels below that threshold are discarded entirely), which won't cause depth sorting issues or create graphically taxing overdraw but may look worse.

There's no way to fix this? There are no such problems in GZDoom.

[Pixel Fiend]

I am greatly happy - I've installed 2.5.1.7 and thus discovered I can actually play non-vanilla wads in something that looks and plays like Crispy/Chocolate Doom. 

 

In prboom-plus.cfg I changed screen_resolution to "320x240". Now, resizing the window the program scales the screen as "nearest neighbour" like GZDoom /  Crispy / Chocolate. However, when I go fullscreen, which I'd prefer, it switches to integer scaling with lower height (or the blurry one if I switch in the nvidia settings). I found an older thread that shows a trick how to play 320x240 in prboom+ but so far it hasn't worked for me. Seems like it is a possibility though.

 

GLBoom also looks interesting. Might it run in 320x240 somehow?
 

Why do the midis sound so amazing compared to gzdoom? (Edit: to this I think I found the answer: it comes bundled with TimGM6mb.sf2)

Edited January 4, 2021 by <<Rewind

[Da Werecat]

The correct one is 320x200. But it looks squashed in fullscreen (square pixels).

 

320x240 displays with correct proportions for me, but the weapon is all jittery due to being resized with such a low pixel density.

[Pixel Fiend]

Yes.. thanks for reminding me of that. I'm gonna start playing in 3:2 - the monsters probably don't look too wide. If you run some 90's adventure games in 3:2, the characters are visibly too wide.

Jittery pixels in 4:3 is what I hate most about Doom. But I don't like any other screen ratio than 4:3. Unfortunately we can't have both clean pixels and 4:3 ratio.  

 

[fabian]

20 hours ago, Shepardus said:

Something like that - I think it scales the image by an integer factor before drawing it, so for example 640x480 could become 1280x960 with 2x2 pixels.

 

Is anybody still seriously using this option? I am about to entirely remove it from the UMAPINFO fork. All it does is a mere upscaling by <factor> before rendering to screen without taking the screen resolution into account or making use of different scaling methods.

[Shepardus]

14 minutes ago, fabian said:

 

Is anybody still seriously using this option? I am about to entirely remove it from the UMAPINFO fork. All it does is a mere upscaling by <factor> before rendering to screen without taking the screen resolution into account or making use of different scaling methods.

I'm not using it. I considered using it before to prevent the game from setting my monitor to a tiny resolution, but in the UMAPINFO fork it doesn't do that anyway.

[fabian]

51 minutes ago, Shepardus said:

I'm not using it. I considered using it before to prevent the game from setting my monitor to a tiny resolution, but in the UMAPINFO fork it doesn't do that anyway.

 

Yep, right.

[maxmanium]

That fork still needs proper 320x200 upscaling -- suffers from blurry pixels.

[Smite of Disrespect]

9 hours ago, <

Why do the midis sound so amazing compared to gzdoom?

It's a different soundfont.

Download a midi player called VirtualMIDISynth - this thing lets you change your soundfont in real-time.

Here are some example soundfonts I like:
SC-55:

Musyng Kite / RLNDGM / Orpheus / Arachno

Change your Doom's midi player to VMS by selecting "Portmidi" in PrBoom options, VMS in GZDoom options, or using crispy's setup.exe and change music to midi/flac/etc

Note: VirtualMIDISynth and FluidSynth (GZDoom/PrBoom default midi player) will sound different even when using identical soundfonts. I personally leave it on vms and change my soundfont depending on what I want, though you can also use fluidsynth in gzdoom or prboom with different soundfonts as well. Explore the gzdoom sound options, everything is there, i.e. change midiplayer or change soundfont. To use fluidsynth + custom soundfont in prboom you need to copypaste the soundfont into prboom's folder and change the soundfont in the .cfg file. And again, you can use VMS with any doom port and change your soundfont in real-time by opening vms

 

Edit: Forgot to mention, Going Down seems to have music specifically designed for prboom's default music setup (fluidsynth+tim6gmb or whatever), so I switch to that when playing doing down. The synths sound amazing, especially maps 20&21. And while I'm here, the only wad I use arachno soundfont for is Valiant - on the moddb page it says use Arachno soundfont with Valiant, though I'm not sure if those are the map author's own words

[Smite of Disrespect]

9 hours ago, <

Is this your graphics card doing that? I know new cards come with that now. I tried 320x240 and entered fullscreen and it looks like this:


There is a free program called "Lossless Scaling" (i got it from steam) that applies integer scaling to windowed programs and with that I was able to do 320x240 with integer scaling but the HUD numbers and Doomguy's face are all wrong and weird looking to me:

Spoiler

 

Chocolate Doom and Crispy Doom don't have those borked HUD numbers etc. when playin in lo-res mode. It's not the worst thing in the world though because there's still the Woof source port!

 

Also, I don't mean to derail the thread, but why is monster infighting different in Boom (cl9) vs MBF (cl11)?
I would use Woof for Boom wads as well as MBF, but the different monster infighting can make sections extremely difficult that rely on Boom/Doom monster infighting

Edited January 5, 2021 by RonnieColeman

[Da Werecat]

5 hours ago, RonnieColeman said:

There is a free program called "Lossless Scaling" (i got it from steam) that applies integer scaling to windowed programs and with that I was able to do 320x240 with integer scaling but the HUD numbers and Doomguy's face are all wrong and weird looking to me:

 

Try it with 320x200. 320x240 is not Doom's native resolution.

 

Something tells me it's gonna be squashed though. There has to be some sort of aspect ratio correction to turn 5:4 into 4:3, integer scaling won't cut it.