Batman Doom with ZDoom?

[Brandon D. Lade]

I am trying to play the Batman Doom TC using ZDoom. It works, but the weapons do not function properly (a single fire from a weapon uses more or less bullets than it should) and the monster count does not work. Is there any way to fix these problems so that I can run the TC using ZDoom?

If not, is there any other Windows-based source port I can use to run the wad? Note that I've already tried PRBoom, but it is too slow at points. I am running in Windows XP Pro.

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated. Thank you.

[Graf Zahl]

No idea about the weapons but the monster count is completely disabled in this WAD (which also has some other side effects.)

[Brandon D. Lade]

Graf Zahl said:

No idea about the weapons but the monster count is completely disabled in this WAD (which also has some other side effects.)

The problems with the weapons are:

-When I use the one that throws the exploding grey balls (weapon 5), my bullets decrease only by 1 at a time. They should decrease by 40. This makes things ridiculously easy.
-When I use the fist (weapon 7, used on the last level), it decreases my ammo by 40 each time I use it, making it impossible to beat the last boss. My ammo should not change as I use it.

[Coraline]

Are you running the TC with the DEH that Batman Doom comes with?

[Brandon D. Lade]

Chu said:

Are you running the TC with the DEH that Batman Doom comes with?

Yes.

Also, I forgot to mention: I also tried Doom Legacy to run the wad, but it crashes as soon as I try to load a map/navigate the menu.

[Catoptromancy]

http://www.chocolate-doom.org/wiki/index.php/Batman_Doom

[MasterOFDeath]

Batman Doom uses a lot of unique and clever dehacked tricks that ZDoom simply can't handle. You're better off using something that can handle these like Chocolate Doom. (see Catoptromancy's link above my post)

[Creaphis]

I can't imagine why a light-weight port like PrBoom would have problems. That's what I used to play Batman Doom, and it was flawless.

[Brandon D. Lade]

I tried Chocolate Doom; it was too slow again. But I then tried the Windows version of Eternity and it appears to be fine. Problem solved (hopefully).

Creaphis said:

I can't imagine why a light-weight port like PrBoom would have problems. That's what I used to play Batman Doom, and it was flawless.

It runs fast enough when nothing's happening in terms of items or monsters, but it suddenly and acutely becomes painfully and intolerably slow - essentially looking like the game has hung for about a second - when a monster shoots you (and possibly when an item is picked up). Any idea on what may be causing these hang-ups?

[Grazza]

Try the current version of prboom-plus, and make sure you are using -complevel 2. There have been lots of bugfixes and speed-ups compared to old versions and regular prboom (not that I ever found it slow compared with most other ports). -complevel 2 tells it to emulate Doom2.exe, which will ensure correct handling of the deh and prevent anything time-wasting that isn't needed. I don't know Batman Doom all that well, but I have tested the first half of the wad in prboom-plus, and everything seemed to work fine (and identical to the Doom2.exe behaviour).

If you still have problems, try both software mode and GL mode, and also try varying the resolution (including using one that matches your normal desktop resolution). But on a half-decent system it should work smoothly either way and with whatever resolution your system is happy with.

[esselfortium]

Brandon D. Lade said:

I tried Chocolate Doom; it was too slow again. But I then tried the Windows version of Eternity and it appears to be fine. Problem solved (hopefully).



It runs fast enough when nothing's happening in terms of items or monsters, but it suddenly and acutely becomes painfully and intolerably slow - essentially looking like the game has hung for about a second - when a monster shoots you (and possibly when an item is picked up). Any idea on what may be causing these hang-ups?

Sounds like SDL's palette-change dickery. A bunch of other people have had the same problem, so Quasar created a workaround that has SDL draw the game (still in 8-bit color) into a 32-bit display. Use the -8in32 command line parameter when launching Eternity to activate it. (It really should be made into a permanent setting...)

[skadoomer]

Hmmm, I was working on a translation of the batman .deh into more zdoom friendly systems a while ago. Maybe I should finish it.

[Vermil]

Are there any known gameplay issues with running Batman Doom under Doomsday?

I mean, everything appears to play correctly under Doomsday 1.8.6 (even the Bane scenario), even if it can't visually render all of the mods rendering hacks correctly.

[Coraline]

I just tested this in the newest version of EDGE and everything appears to work just fine. Give it a shot if you can.

[Quasar]

esselfortium said:

Sounds like SDL's palette-change dickery. A bunch of other people have had the same problem, so Quasar created a workaround that has SDL draw the game (still in 8-bit color) into a 32-bit display. Use the -8in32 command line parameter when launching Eternity to activate it. (It really should be made into a permanent setting...)

Or, play the game in windowed mode, or using the GDI driver instead of DirectX. The SDL 8-bit palette changing bug is only present in the DX5 refresh module.

Shame too because it's a goddamn one-line fix. A single boolean variable isn't being properly asserted in the fullscreen codepath through the palette change handler. I've reported it to the SDL guys both on the bugtracker and in the mailing list and they never did a damn thing about it.

Fortunately the code in question is NOT a part of the upcoming SDL 1.3 codebase. Unfortunately, SDL 1.3 is an entire new library more or less, so we're going to have to pretty much rewrite our system code again to change over to it.

Anyway, Batman Doom is known to function very well in the Eternity Engine. Last time I played through it, I had zero issues, other than some particle effects that may appear if you have them explicitly enabled. Fortunately you can turn these all off on the particle options page of the video options menu.