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wesleyjohnson

DoomLegacy alpha3 release

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DoomLegacy 1.44 alpha3 has been released (July 10, 2011).

Source is available.
Linux and Window binary packages have been compiled, which also contain the docs and legacy.wad (needed graphics and lumps).

http://doomlegacy.sourceforge.net/

The list of bug fixes and features is extensive (not all listed here).

Includes:
- MBF style sector friction and bobbing, with some enhancements.
- Monster movement uses sector friction, using full-time momentum. Monsters now have movement momentum on regular floors too, and no longer stall or surge when move from/to ice.
- Separate friction for each 3dfloor.
- Mouse menu interaction changed, must click to change setting.
- Start game message "already playing game", now asks if you want to abort or cancel.
- Savegame uses dynamic sized buffer, so as to save longdays.wad which has been seen to require 806K.
- More limits removed (spritelump, brain-targets).
- Extensive Voodoo doll bug fixes, and some enhancements with user controls. Coop and deathmatch playable with voodoo doll using wads.
Voodoo doll damage (usually) gets routed to player that triggered it.
- Fraggle's sprite flip offset patch.
- Bug fixes to several widely known bugs (WikiDoom bugs).
- Other Bug fixes.

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Tried adding this as a news item on the Legacy Wiki, but it seems I've shot myself in the foot with the spam filter. I assumed it was only blocking edits that contained 5 or more new external links, but it actually blocks all edits on pages that already have 5+ links on them, which is a bit dumb, really.


//EDIT:

un-nerfed, posted news and re-nerfed until a better solution can be found.

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I have many things in my TODO list.
- monster collision with semi-elastic rebound
- distance sorting improvements, to fix sprites on 3dfloors
- coronas generated from sprite texture bright spots
- fog and smoke generation that fills the sector volume
- a push-on/push-off switch
- automatic extension to taller sky (for look up)
- DEH modifications of strings by multiple wads.
- BEX
- Find and kill the sparklies
- etc.
- mind numbness prevents me from remembering more than 9 right now.

Demos are very unlikely to ever work totally, it will not be one of our priorities. It depends upon having the exact random number system, which really is a never ending burden upon other enhancements.

I am interested in what other players find to be the most important features, problems.

A "long way to go" depends upon which destination is being visualized.
Duplicating any other Doom port is not one I visualize, as it would be easier to just use that port. The unique features of DoomLegacy make it my choice for Doom play. I do want to be able to play the same PWAD reliably. For example the sector friction had to be made compatible.

Thanks for the Wiki update. Much of the Legacy information out there is outdated.

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wesleyjohnson said:

A "long way to go" depends upon which destination is being visualized.
Duplicating any other Doom port is not one I visualize, as it would be easier to just use that port. The unique features of DoomLegacy make it my choice for Doom play. I do want to be able to play the same PWAD reliably. For example the sector friction had to be made compatible.


I'm just talking basic stuff like the abysmal framerate on high resolutions, the midi being absolutely atrocious, sounds being wrong volume and played the wrong Hz rate, the fact that the palette can't be solid like it is on most other ports (windows still tries to apply its own palette to the screen), the fact that navigating the menus sets off windows firewall....

And that's just the surface.

Legacy was well known for its high performance on pentium CPUs back in the day (with framerates in the high 20s on 800x600 resolution on 200 MHz) but on my 900 MHz Core-based CPU it lags so bad that it's unplayable.

And I know that's not your fault; this is an aging codebase that you're trying to salvage. But I'm just hoping you realize all this. :P

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Csonicgo said:

And I know that's not your fault; this is an aging codebase that you're trying to salvage.



I think most of the problems can be attributed to the utterly shitty system interface libraries it uses (Allegro, ugh...) but of course you are correct.

Even the former maintainers realized that, hence the 2.0 version. While it's nice to see that some problems get eliminated, nothing of what gets done right now addresses the issues that makes Legacy virtually unusable for me.

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Is 2.0 even in development anymore? There were some promising screenshots up for about 2 hours half a decade ago and....... nothing.

Csonicgo pretty much said it. The reason I haven't touched Legacy in so long is the same reason I don't play around with Vavoom.. performance. I can run Company of Heroes at decent resolutions / features enabled pretty well. Legacy lags my cpu up pretty bad.

I hope for the best for this port though. Legacy has always had a history of unique ideas and even being the first to implement features that become standard for any usable port. Some of them are a bit brash, but it's always nice to see something and honestly say 'I've never seen this in a Doom engine before'.

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Am I the only one unable to make this thing work in 32bit colour mode? that 16bit banding just pops in your face.

Legacy had some nice stuff going for it, but it seems to me that developers stopped caring a long time ago.

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Ed said:

Legacy has always had a history of unique ideas and even being the first to implement features that become standard for any usable port.


I can name so many features in legacy that I want to see in other ports:

Dev_water: this warpy water effect really blew the crappy "swirly flat" water out of the.. erm.. water. It actually warped and swirled and had a transparent flat on top of it that animated, making for a creepy, goopy look. it worked perfectly on nukage. I really hate that no other port tried something so novel, but its implementation in mapping was a bit shoddy, using negative IDs on sectors to determine the height of the water which a lot of editors didn't like at the time.. but it kept legacy from making yet another map format/lump.

Floor decals: Legacy was the first on the scene with decals, called "splats", and if FaB hadn't left the team, it'd be the first port with "splats" on the floor too. The code was fully functional, though it was a mess.

By-pixel translucency: Legacy had the ability to determine WHAT pixels of a sprite were to be translucent and which ones were not. this allowed flames on torches to stay translucent while the rest of it stayed opaque. Lost souls also inherited this look, keeping the skull solid while making the fire translucent. This was hardcoded, sure, but FaB was planning on making it moddable, as he always joked about on the forums.

"Solid corpses" : This was absolutely fun. Legacy had code to make corpses of enemies "solid" so you'd have to walk over them. it also gave the ability to "stack bodies" if you were savvy enough to make baddies fall off ledges in the right place. To this day I haven't seen a port that could replicate this, and it's hilarious to see it even today.

So yeah. I miss Legacy a lot.

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I'm thinking of switching to Legacy, as Prboom is getting really laggy on my system for some reason, does Legacy support .bex extended dehacked files?

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Csonicgo said:

I can name so many features in legacy that I want to see in other ports:

Dev_water: this warpy water effect really blew the crappy "swirly flat" water out of the.. erm.. water. It actually warped and swirled and had a transparent flat on top of it that animated, making for a creepy, goopy look. it worked perfectly on nukage. I really hate that no other port tried something so novel, but its implementation in mapping was a bit shoddy, using negative IDs on sectors to determine the height of the water which a lot of editors didn't like at the time.. but it kept legacy from making yet another map format/lump.


And the implementation wasn't any better which is the major reason no other port ever tried to do this.

Csonicgo said:

Floor decals: Legacy was the first on the scene with decals, called "splats", and if FaB hadn't left the team, it'd be the first port with "splats" on the floor too. The code was fully functional, though it was a mess.


... which seems to be the case for lots of old Legacy code (and is the main reason for today's problems of the engine and which makes so much of this old code useless today. FaB and Hurdler were utterly shoddy developers who seemed to be incapable of writing decent code. (Sorry to be harsh but it's really that bad!)

Csonicgo said:

By-pixel translucency: Legacy had the ability to determine WHAT pixels of a sprite were to be translucent and which ones were not. this allowed flames on torches to stay translucent while the rest of it stayed opaque. Lost souls also inherited this look, keeping the skull solid while making the fire translucent. This was hardcoded, sure, but FaB was planning on making it moddable, as he always joked about on the forums.


... and the hardcodedness was again what made this pointless. Anyway, with today's hardware rendering ports this can be done much easier by setting up the texture graphics accordingly but for software rendering it would probably become too slow if used on a larger scale.

Csonicgo said:

"Solid corpses" : This was absolutely fun. Legacy had code to make corpses of enemies "solid" so you'd have to walk over them. it also gave the ability to "stack bodies" if you were savvy enough to make baddies fall off ledges in the right place. To this day I haven't seen a port that could replicate this, and it's hilarious to see it even today.


Actually, any port which uses Hexen's z-aware collision detection code could do that by setting/clearing a few flags when the monster dies.

phobosdeimos1 said:

I'm thinking of switching to Legacy, as Prboom is getting really laggy on my system for some reason, does Legacy support .bex extended dehacked files?


If you got problems with PrBoom, Legacy will even be worse. Are you talking about the software renderer or OpenGL? For Legacy, better forget that it actually has a software renderer. It was always extremely slow for me.

And no, Legacy does not support BEX.

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As long as it's the only source port with split-screen multiplayer, Legacy will always be relevant to me - despite it's supposed technical flaws (which I've never encountered personally). I've downloaded the new alpha and will give it a whirl soon.

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Csonicgo said:

Dev_water:

I thought this had only been in a beta version and removed afterwards.

purist said:

As long as it's the only source port with split-screen multiplayer

FYI, it's on the devs' plate for Doomsday 2.0. DaniJ had posted some screenshots a few months ago.

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purist said:

As long as it's the only source port with split-screen multiplayer

Also, the next version of 3DGE will have this, but it will only be local.

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Gez said:

I thought this had only been in a beta version and removed afterwards.

It was version 1.28, still available for download here.



The effect has also been fully implemented in the heavily modifed SRB2 engine.

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DooMAD said:

It was version 1.28, still available for download here.



The effect has also been fully implemented in the heavily modifed SRB2 engine.


Oh my god, wow. I'm glad someone finally finished it.

EDIT: I played the first level of srb2 and the water effect is amazing. That's exactly what it was "going" to look like:

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Yeah, would love to see a few more ports steal features that have been added to SRB2. Vertical pushers, crumbling sectors, breakable walls, disappearing 3D floors, inverted gravity. All clever stuff that could potentially be used to good effect in Doom.

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DooMAD said:

Yeah, would love to see a few more ports steal features that have been added to SRB2. Vertical pushers, crumbling sectors, breakable walls, disappearing 3D floors, inverted gravity. All clever stuff that could potentially be used to good effect in Doom.


I have already integrated most of these effects into 3DGE - I was going to keep it a surprise to "one-up" some of the other ports. Oh well. :)

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Well let me start by saying I've been a HUGE Legacy fan, and used it from 2003 up until about 2007 when I stopped playing Doom religiously...Is there going to be a 64 bit Windows version available?

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Those graphic and music problems must be on Windows systems, because I do not have those problems on Linux.

We do not have any Windows developers, only Linux people, so unless someone running Windows with debugging experience takes a look, I have no expectation of fixing Windows problems.

OpenGL graphics is totally dependent upon having a decent hardware driver for SDL OpenGL graphics, otherwise SDL will use a software implementation. I have run it both ways, on Linux with the default nVidia driver which is unplayable on a 1600MHz CPU, and with the nVidia closed driver which uses the hardware accelerated graphics, which plays fine upto 1024x768 on this old 16 Meg nVidia card.

The DoomLegacy 2.0 developement team is separate from DoomLegacy 1.44 development.

I have to find a document on BEX.

DEH support may change to support multiple modifiers (IWAD and PWAD) of same string, so that FreeDoom can change some strings without blocking PWAD from changing those strings.

Crumbling sectors ?? Anyone got docs on linedef codes and behavior ??

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wesleyjohnson said:

Crumbling sectors ?? Anyone got docs on linedef codes and behavior ??

Some info on the SRB2 wiki, but not sure how helpful that is.

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DoomLegacy 1.44 coding standard is C99 (not quite perfect, but thats the target) so it will compile on most old machines.
The problem with using so many new-fangled C++ features and special libraries, is that they vary across machines and are especially difficult on older machines.

I tried to compile EDGE last night on my Linux 2.4 system, and failed.
It wanted a library that I did not have. I also seem to be missing edge.wad, and instructions on install locations for binary and wads (it is a multiuser system). So far, it is only DoomLegacy and prboom that have got to the point I can run them.

(Update: got the edge.wad (but it is the wrong one), then was missing ppm directory. Found something like that in source directory, so copied it. Edge still does not run right.
Are all other ports this hard to setup ??)

There is a windows 32bit binary, which I believe is compiled on Linux using Wine, but not 64bit. It should not be much trouble to get it to compile 64 bit. But we really someone with a native windows compile setup to be doing this.

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PM me and I can do it for you - on the contrary, I only compile sources in Windows (usually for Windows) and have never successfully compiled for Linux.

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Thanks. Is that windows debugging or just compiling ??

We have bug reports from one user that imply crashing at a specific teleport linedef in hth2.wad, that we do not get at all using Linux.
I cannot tell if it is his SDL setup, his video card driver, or a general Windows port problem in DoomLegacy.

I think DoomLegacy only needs SDL to run on Windows.

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wesleyjohnson said:
I tried to compile EDGE last night on my Linux 2.4 system, and failed.
It wanted a library that I did not have. I also seem to be missing edge.wad, and instructions on install locations for binary and wads (it is a multiuser system). So far, it is only DoomLegacy and prboom that have got to the point I can run them.

(Update: got the edge.wad (but it is the wrong one), then was missing ppm directory. Found something like that in source directory, so copied it. Edge still does not run right.
Are all other ports this hard to setup ??)[/B]


What errors are you getting? It did take me awhile to set up the environment, but I'm using Win32 - are you compiling a Linux executable? Basically, you compile the exe and use it with the latest EDGE release (1.35), which is the one you should be compiling from anyway.

wesleyjohnson said:
Thanks. Is that windows debugging or just compiling ??

Windows compiling. Not too experienced with debugging yet.

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DoomLegacy on Win32, it would help just to have someone else compile and test on a Win32 or Win64 system.

- To play the download binary, and a separately compiled binary, and compare, to see if there is some fault in our compilations.
- see bugs reports at http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=2479&atid=102479
- hth2.wad, Map 6, linedef 7855, position: x = 2616, y= -1567: a user reports teleporter at top of elevator shaft, does not work. It always works for us using Linux.
- UltDoom e2m7, switch at lower left of map does not work, using OpenGL
- Reported on Win XP: Clicking the mouse wheel button swaps straight to Windows. They can alt-tab back, but this happens only in OpenGL mode, never with software renderer.
- and others

Thanks for any help, debugging, or just confirmations about Win32.

I got Edge running, by downloading a linux binary too (wrong Linux version, wrong CLib) and copying the necessary parts. I downloaded 1.35 (which uses Make, 1.34 used Scons) and compiled my own. Could not find edge.wad ver 6.01 anywhere except in the binary packages.

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DoomLegacy currently does not have BEX, but I am working on it now.
Maybe next release. It has Dehacked support in files and lumps.

Sorry it took so long, but first I had to figure it out myself.

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