What's a Good Nodebuilder for Zdoom?

[Frederick the Great]

Can anyone point me in the direction of the best one?

[Tormentor667]

ZDBSP is the best one in my eyes, fast and accurate!

[Ichor]

I've always liked Zennode.

[Grazza]

If your map is Zdoom-only (not designed for and doesn't work with anything other than Zdoom or its offspring), then you might as well use zdbsp.

If the wad is designed also to be used with other ports (e.g. it is for any Boom-compatible port, or any limit-removing port), then try Zennode or glbsp (this builds normal nodes as well as gl nodes). If you use zdbsp in this case, you will get texture misalignments.

[Frederick the Great]

Thank you everyone for the help!

[ellmo]

Tormentor667 said:

ZDBSP is the best one in my eyes, fast and accurate!

Likes to crash a lot.
ZENNODE isn't that fast, but it's very stable and reduces the size of your map a bit.

[Ismaele]

I use Zennode: not very fast, but surely good! :)

[Enjay]

ellmo said:

Likes to crash a lot.

Really? What were you doing to make it crash? I've used it thousands of times and not a single crash.

[Graf Zahl]

ZDBSP rarely crashes. So far I have discovered only a few maps where it had problems - and all with GL nodes, never with regular ones.

[Csonicgo]

Zennode. Zdbsp is buggy and is only made for episode replacements with ridiculous detail that never get released.

[TheDarkArchon]

That's why ZDoom uses it for maps that don't already have nodes (such as Space Station Omega by Gooberman)

About the stability:

Enjay, who is NOT AFFILIATED WITH KDIZD, said:

Really? What were you doing to make it crash? I've used it thousands of times and not a single crash.

[ellmo]

Enjay said:

Really? What were you doing to make it crash? I've used it thousands of times and not a single crash.

Built nodes for maps with more that 1000 sectors... but I guess it could've been also my CPU which couldn't handle that.
Anyway - I'm using Zennode for about two years. Never let me down.

[Graf Zahl]

ellmo said:

but I guess it could've been also my CPU which couldn't handle that.

That sounds more likely. My previous computer always rebooted when the CPU was close to 100% and running a node builder on a complex level is definitely doing that.

Anyway, if you plan to make larger levels for ZDoom it is advisable to use ZDBSPs compressed nodes. They are significantly more precise and create less rendering errors. But the best option would be compressed GL nodes because then you can run the WAD with GZDoom without having the engine to rebuild the nodes itself.

For small and medium sized maps that require ZDoom there is no need to build external nodes at all. The internal node builder is fast enough to handle them without noticable delay.

[Ezxariarch]

I use ZDBSP because I use a lot of polyobjects. It helps reduce the bleeding and it's pretty darn fast. Zennode is also pretty good though, though i've never used it for my Zdoom-Hexen formatted maps.

[Darkfyre]

I use to use Zennode, but it couldn't handle my maps anymore. ZDBSP is faster and can handle more complex levels, and I mean severly complex :P