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Eponasoft

Just starting out with new monsters, need some help

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OK so I downloaded a few monsters from realm667 and figured I'd try one out. I added the correct thing number to my map and loaded it up in odamex. It appeared as a blue box with an X in it. PRBoom noted that it was an illegal thing. Vavoom executed the monster correctly because it has DECORATE support. Now...how do I get this working in all ports? I've played pwads before in odamex that featured custom monsters, so I know it can be done. I've searched the forum here as well as newdoom and, of course, I asked uncle google for help too...but thus far I've been unable to find anything.

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Either make the wad for ports that support DECORATE or chose 2-3 very nice demons and learn dehacked. I can't tell you any more than that, as the only experience I have with sprites is trying to get a single framed thing with a blocking radius to turn into a cactus ;) If there's one person I'd ask about this it'd be Erik Alm, the maker of scythe/scythe2/scytheX, he seems to be active now since scythe X is going.

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OK it seems I was mistaken...the pwad I tried before actually failed to run in odamex, but it did run in Vavoom. So apparently I really am going to have to get this decorate thing down...well that's fine too. I like using Vavoom anyways, but don't like the fact that its music format support is so limited...or at least the version I have is (1.27)...if it supported mod music, it'd be just about perfect. And unfortunately, zdoom doesn't build here, and edge is too slow on my system.

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Eponasoft said:

OK so I downloaded a few monsters from realm667 and figured I'd try one out. I added the correct thing number to my map and loaded it up in odamex. It appeared as a blue box with an X in it. PRBoom noted that it was an illegal thing.

You should have tried Chocolate Doom as well. It might just have been crazy enough to work!

Only way to make custom actors that would work in Odamex and PrBoom would be by using dehacked, which means cannibalizing states from other actors.

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Chocolate bails:

Error: P_SpawnMapThing: Unknown type 30119 at (-96, 1856)
I guess I'll just stick with DECORATE for now, and perhaps either hack up the build of Vavoom I have to add mod playback, or just wait till there's a version available for FreeBSD that supports mods...or perhaps a different format. MIDI is out for me, so something streaming I guess would work...vavoom seems to have support for ogg. It's just too bad the most recent version won't build here.

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Eponasoft said:

Chocolate bails:

Error: P_SpawnMapThing: Unknown type 30119 at (-96, 1856)

That was heavy-handed sarcasm, just so you know. DECORATE is a ZDoom standard, and outside of ZDoom's family (GZDoom and Skulltag) only Vavoom adopted it. Odamex and ZDaemon have diverged too long ago from ZDoom to support it, and aren't interested in supporting it now; PrBoom is a completely different thing, Chocolate's mission statement is that it doesn't have advanced features, and the rest of the advanced ports (Doomsday, EDGE, Eternity, etc.) have their own, different methods for supporting custom actors.

As for running a recent build of ZDoom/GZDoom/Vavoom, I thought BSD systems were able to run Linux binaries. In that case, this poll might interest you.

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FreeBSD does indeed have a Linux binary layer available but not everything will run on it. I've not tried linux zdoom yet but maybe I should give it a shot.

And I know you were kidding about Chocolate, though I was wondering if perhaps it would run anyways and just ignore the invalid thing. :)

EDIT: zdoom is teh fail. :(

Could not open "/home/dave/.zdoom/autoexec.cfg"
 adding /usr/local/share/zdoom/zdoom.wad (133 lumps)
 adding doom2.wad (2919 lumps)
CPUID: GenuineIntel  (using MMX)
-> family 6, model 14, stepping 12
-> Processor has RDTSC
I_InitMusic
I_InitSound: sound module ready
/usr/local/lib/libHermes.so.1: ELF file OS ABI invalid
/usr/local/lib/libvga.so.1: ELF file OS ABI invalid
Could not find a suitable interface library among:
        libzdoom-x.so
        libzdoom-svgalib.so
I_InitHardware failed
It's likely that the libraries used to link the linux version are terribly out of date. I get that a LOT with precompiled linux apps, since my OS is very up to date and uses the latest libraries.

EDIT2: The source code for that version bails with errors:
src/m_fixed.h: In function 'void AM_activateNewScale()':
src/m_fixed.h:73: error: 'asm' operand requires impossible reload
src/m_fixed.h:73: error: 'asm' operand requires impossible reload
gmake: *** [src/linux/release/am_map.o] Error 1
EDIT3: And the latest version won't build either, since it required FMOD...obviously that can be disabled but that defeats half the purpose of the game engine. FMOD? Wtf were they thinking? It would have been much better to use SDL_mixer instead...it's already using SDL, so why tack on a proprietary library that has an incompatible license?

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Eponasoft said:

FMOD? Wtf were they thinking? It would have been much better to use SDL_mixer instead...it's already using SDL, so why tack on a proprietary library that has an incompatible license?

Because FMOD is a powerful sound system that does its job perfectly, while SDL_Mixer is a steaming pile of crap that is a nightmare to work with. :P

If there was an open-source sound system that was close to FMOD's quality, Graf would have made the switch long ago. He was really keen on trying to make GZDoom GPL back when Raven made the Heretic and Hexen sources available under that license. There's some Build code in the software renderer, but you could just say it's borrowed from the GPL release of the Duke Nukem 3D source, rather than from Build directly. The only real obstacle was FMOD... and even OpenAL fell short of expectations.

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Gez said:

Because FMOD is a powerful sound system that does its job perfectly, while SDL_Mixer is a steaming pile of crap that is a nightmare to work with. :P


I can sympathize with Graf. But what exactly are Linux users supposed to do to get ZDoom compiled successfully? AFAIK I have all the dependencies and it still doesn't work.

Sorry to be a little off topic but OP went there first.

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sparerib1968 said:

But what exactly are Linux users supposed to do to get ZDoom compiled successfully?

1. Solve the problem; and 2. Submit a patch.

;)

For Linux/Mac/BSD/whatever else support, the devs are dependent on users who can manage to compile it to tell them what needs to be done.

I suppose you could ask for help on the Skulltag forums. They do compile Linux builds and some members of the team use Linux exclusively (e.g., Blzut).

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sparerib1968 said:

Sorry to be a little off topic but OP went there first.

I live in off-topic land. :D Besides, the original issue has been resolved.

There is no FMOD for BSD, so zdoom will never compile here without tearing out the FMOD code. It's kind of ridiculous that there is an FMOD port for Solaris, which is used far less than BSD...it IS available for Mac though.

I really don't see what the problem is with SDL_mixer. I use it all the time and it's never done me wrong. I actually used to have lots of problems with FMOD during the 3.x days, maybe it doesn't suck in 4.x form. But regardless, when you lock yourself into a proprietary library like that, you limit the platforms your product can run in, and therefore you limit your userbase. SDL_mixer works just fine if you know how to use it, and besides, you can always use libmodplug instead of libmikmod for much better playback accuracy. It is certainly not the best library there is, but it's not as bad as people like to make it out to be, and the fact remains that its platform support is far greater than just about every other library out there.

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Gez said:

and even OpenAL fell short of expectations.


I find it hard to believe that OpenAL that works just dandy for Doom3 and it's derivative games isn't enough for Zdoom.

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kristus said:

I find it hard to believe that OpenAL that works just dandy for Doom3 and it's derivative games isn't enough for Zdoom.

OpenAL can be difficult to use. A friend of mine was making a game development library using it (called yagl) and he said it was a real headache. It's not for everyone, and it's certainly nowhere near as easy to use as FMOD. So it may not be that it wasn't enough but may be more than the programmer didn't quite grasp how it works, which is completely understandable. Besides, its methodology is not the same as DOOM's so making the conversion would probably be a lot of work.

EDIT: Oops, almost forgot...it looks like the latest build of Vavoom does actually support mod playback...as well as ogg and flac. cmake was looking for said dependencies. However, the build failed due to a missing wxWidgets...I hate this ass of a library!

EDIT2: I decided to skip out on trying to build the entire util directory...that allowed cmake to start doing its thing. It got pretty far before bailing on some libraries that should have been built in util, so I built them manually. But now, it cannot find libglvis, despite it being built AND copied into /usr/local/lib AND /usr/lib AND the source directory just in case! I'm not sure where it wants to find it...it first whined about libglbsp, which I built and copied like this, and it found it just fine. So I'll keep plugging away at this and hopefully I will be able to get this built.

EDIT3: AHAHAHAHA! What a silly build system. It was saying that it was missing "libglvis", and so one would normally think "ok, so let's find libglvis and make sure it can see it". Well, that would be normally the case, but this was actually looking for liblibglvis! Nice screwup in the makefile...but anyways, after I fixed that, it began to build again, but is now failing again, once again not finding libglbsp. :( Here goes again.

EDIT4: After getting that all to finally work, it looked like the engine was built. Guess again!

fbsd# make
[  3%] Built target timidity
[ 59%] Built target vavoom
[ 92%] Built target vavoom-dedicated
make: don't know how to make progs/common/CMakeFiles/engine.dir/depend. Stop
*** Error code 2

Stop in /usr/home/dave/vavoom-1.30.
*** Error code 1

Stop in /usr/home/dave/vavoom-1.30.
fbsd# gmake
[  3%] Built target timidity
[ 59%] Built target vavoom
[ 92%] Built target vavoom-dedicated
gmake[2]: *** No rule to make target `progs/common/CMakeFiles/engine.dir/depend'.  Stop.
gmake[1]: *** [progs/common/CMakeFiles/engine.dir/all] Error 2
gmake: *** [all] Error 2
I reckon that this part requires vcc, which I also built but there appears to be no resulting binary for...don't ask how that works (or doesn't work in this case).

EDIT5: Still getting this to work...vcc built and was found inside utils/bin. The whole problem with utils is because cmake's script can't find the wxwidgets library, so I have no idea what is building properly in utils and what isn't.

EDIT6: Since vlaunch was the only thing that required wxWidgets, I cut it out of the directory and built the whole thing without it. Everything proceeded to built after that (well, after fixing two malloc.h errors in utils/acc), but it crashes when it starts:
Adding /usr/local/share/vavoom/basev/common/basepak.pk3
Doing C_Shutdown
Doing CL_Shutdown
Doing SV_Shutdown
terminate called after throwing an instance of 'VavoomError'
terminate called recursively
Abort trap (core dumped)

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OK now everything is hosed. :( And the thing is that the entire system built correctly, minus vlaunch which is unneeded. So I'm not sure where to go from here. :(

EDIT: So I said "screw it" and just did pkg_add -r -f vavoom to reinstall the port version. That got it working again. Then I figured "hey, lemme check the configuration". So, make config in the ports directory for vavoom...it seems almost everything was unchecked. So I reconfigured vavoom to include all the nifty options (like mod support!) and am rebuilding now. The source is a bit older, of course, but at least it should work.

EDIT2: Well, after about 20 minutes, it finally built, and with all the options I requested. "version" on the console says 1.27, though the source indicates 1.28. Weird. But at least now I have a working Vavoom with proper audio. The colors are smooth and clear, the framerate is high, the audio kicks ass, and it controls like a charm. Now I can make things the way I want to make them without worry. But I still can't clear my own MAP30 on HMP without cheating...oh well. :) At least now I get splattered in full color and sound. :D

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