Changing Engines

[Fletcher`]

Patrick said:

Gnah, that's not it. That's the first thing I checked. I dont suppose it makes any difference that I'm using the portal things instead of the fancy new linedefs?

THen it may be easier to port to eternity.

[esselfortium]

rf` said:

THen it may be easier to port to eternity.

Er, what? He's using the old thing-based setup; the line-based setup is more or less a direct analogue to Eternity's line-special & sector tags system, as far as setup goes.

[Patrick]

Meh. This thread isnt so much about changing engines as it is that I need to find a more efficient way to get things done. This is taking ages.

[Graf Zahl]

About your plane, how about showing the map to someone who might help you find a solution? It's all nice and well to post a picture but without actually seeing what you did, all I can tell you that you didn't do it right - but there's just no way I could help you fix it.




Oh and one word about 'hoovering' features, as someone so eloquently put it:

What's wrong with it? Why are some people thinking that features have to be port exclusive? Even worse, why do some people think that some feature definition methods have to be port exclusive? This is Open Source, after all. Should I complain that PrBoom+ borrowed a lot of GL related code from GZDoom?

So regarding Eternity features, the polyobject enhancements are definitely on my wishlist and I will most certainly improve GZDoom's portal code when I get more material to test it with. We'll see how far I can get with that...

[andrewj]

Graf Zahl said:

Oh and one word about 'hoovering' features, as someone so eloquently put it:

What's wrong with it?

Nothing at all.

If your port is so popular and feature-rich that nobody ever uses another port, then that is purely a problem for the authors of the other ports, who might get a bit de-motivated when nobody makes anything for their port.

[Gez]

andrewj said:

who might get a bit de-motivated when nobody makes anything for their port.

Well, there are three EDGE projects that have been discussed on this forum recently:
* CeeJay's Duke Nukem mod
* Agar's Doomed again
* Hypertension (just one out of several threads about that one)

[andrewj]

FWIW I wasn't referring to myself -- I'm no longer working on EDGE for other reasons.

[Creaphis]

Haha, I didn't mean it as if "hoovering" were a bad thing. But here's why I said it: I feel as if Eternity is the up-and-comer that Doom hipsters are supposed to support, but that's hard to do when ZDoom and GZDoom are increasingly capable and when all of Eternity's important features are perpetually half-implemented. Your rapid implementation of features puts me in an awkward situation where I want to like Eternity, but there really isn't much going for it. This is a purely personal, insignificant sentiment.

[Gez]

Creaphis said:

Your rapid implementation of features puts me in an awkward situation where I want to like Eternity, but there really isn't much going for it.

I honestly do not expect linked portals to be in ZDoom or GZDoom anytime soon.

Still, it's perfectly possible to make a mod using advanced features that is compatible with both ZDoom and Eternity. You basically have to use the Eternity configuration for the map format and restrain yourself to using the EE map features that can be successfully translated by ZDoom. Any custom content will have to be declared twice, once in DECORATE and once in EDF, but that's definitely possible. EE has a few codepointer that ZDoom doesn't, and vice-versa, and some might have more parameters than the other, but there are enough that are in common that you should be able to obtain identical behavior for most new actors.

Then you provide both a MAPINFO and an EMAPINFO lump. In the ZDoom MAPINFO lump, you tell it to use xlat/eternity.txt as the translator. And it should work. Sure, it might be frustrating to not have access to some of either ports' most interesting features (linked portals, ACS), but just making something work on two different ports without remaining within the confines of Boom-compat is kinda neat, I think.

I wouldn't mind seeing some cross-compatible maps made this way.

[Creaphis]

Gez said:

I honestly do not expect linked portals to be in ZDoom or GZDoom anytime soon.

I honestly do not expect the linked portal clipping code in Eternity to be finished anytime soon.

[esselfortium]

andrewj said:

If your port is so popular and feature-rich that nobody ever uses another port, then that is purely a problem for the authors of the other ports, who might get a bit de-motivated when nobody makes anything for their port.

This.

[Kappes Buur]

This bit of see-saw dialogue has peeked my interest in having a look at ETERNITY.
However ...

[Xtroose]

You could download an SVN build.

[Gez]

Kappes Buur said:

This bit of see-saw dialogue has peeked my interest in having a look at ETERNITY.
However ...

Everything on http://www.doomworld.com/eternity/ is woefully outdated and cannot be considered as anything else than archaeological curiosity. If you want a homepage for it, you're better off using its wiki: http://eternity.youfailit.net/index.php?title=Main_Page

[printz]

The most likely homepage to Eternity is on this forum. Go to http://www.doomworld.com/vb/eternity

[Quasar]

I have to try to recover the password for my Doomworld account before I can bring the page up to date. I believe it is stashed somewhere in my 500 pages of old emails ;)

Actually I am a bit frustrated with still having to deal with the old site at all, to tell the truth. A new page has been in the works for a long time, but it isn't clear that it'll be ready at any particular time.

[Mordeth]

Quasar said:
I have to try to recover the password for my Doomworld account before I can bring the page up to date.

That, or fire off an email to the hosting guys at AtomicGamer.

[printz]

Go ahead and switch the engine, if that's what you considered. You can contribute with feedback and help the port grow.

As for Eternity being useless, I kinda doubt it. With it, there are more people working on expanding Doom, and they work on separate executables instead of being crowded to one project, which gives each team more freedom.

[Gez]

printz said:

Go ahead and switch the engine, if that's what you considered.

He shouldn't, not for this project. He'd spend too much time redoing everything that if he were to switch engines, he'd do much better to start a new project from scratch.

printz said:

As for Eternity being useless

Who said that?

[Xtroose]

He should do whatever he wants to. Granted, I do not see a point in changing the engine, even though I would love to see more projects made for this wonderful source port, because he will have to basically redo everything he has made so far and lose a lot of functionality that GZDoom offers, but if this is what he wants to do, than he should do it. I believe it will be more of an arduous task than fun, but if it makes him happy, nobody should try to stop him. Because, in the end, happiness is all that matters.

[Graf Zahl]

Xtroose said:

He should do whatever he wants to.

Sure. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't warn him that changing engines in mid project is in general a bad idea. I can't point to a single project - hobbyist or commercial - where it resulted in something better.

Quite the contrary. Most of the time it does more harm than good by causing endless delays or in the worst case cancellation due to overestimation of available resources.

[printz]

Gez said:

Who said that?

There have been statements implying this, or me understanding them this way, such as "well ZDoom can already do this with just a few words, why waste your time with that port?". I don't want to go further with this topic, it does mostly disservice anyway and may be fallacious or plain wrong as well.

[Graf Zahl]

The only post here mentioning anything even remotely related was Creaphis's post about 'half-implemented' Eternity features. I can't remember anybody saying it was useless.

[printz]

Well, I was also thinking about that, but I was not sure it was worth taking as an example and starting a debate :)