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Lippeth

Why does no one use Odamex?

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Servers are empty, and Odamex is the best source port (at least the most true to the original) in my opinion, while giving a few extra and well needed options. I tried getting on board with Skulltag and hate it, ZDoom is better but still doesn't have the same quality as Odamex. Am I alone here? I want to play with all of you on Odamex! So my question is, why does everyone seem to avoid this port like the plague? It's by far my favorite.

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There are many reasons people will give, but it ultimately boils down to market share and being set in one's ways. You could liken it to google+ muscling in on facebook (though on a muuuuuuuuuch smaller scale). Odamex is the newest one on the block, and only recently has it gotten to a point where it's really any level of production quality (caveats and exceptions apply). Unless it offers everything one would need that they get from what they already have, it's hard to entice people over.

The result is also akin to a catch-22 situation, whereby there are fewer people playing because they don't see many people playing in the first place. We need more players to get more players essentially.

From a developer/team member perspective, I would say we also don't "market" it as strongly as we could. This is a place where we have been weak and it's something we are working on for the end of the year.

Now that Odamex is the premier choice for the International Doom League, it has helped light a fire under our butts to get additional engine/game improvements in place, which minimizes the reasons people might have for not choosing Odamex as their preference.

Our goal has always been and continues to be focusing on providing an accurate Doom multiplayer gaming experience while bringing in enough modern-gaming flare to keep it interesting. Our ongoing challenge is striking the right balance between them.

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Mancubus II said:

Now that Odamex is the premier choice for the International Doom League, it has helped light a fire under our butts to get additional engine/game improvements in place, which minimizes the reasons people might have for not choosing Odamex as their preference.


This. You guys have been doing great work!

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Thank you Mancubus II, I suppose my only option is to spread the word and keep checking servers. This next bit is totally unrelated but Skulltag has 'infected' my computer and changed all my wad files into 'Doom data files' with the Skulltag logo and it's annoying to look at. Not the biggest deal but if there is a solution, it will be utilized. Maybe I should post this as a new topic.

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Lippeth said:

Thank you Mancubus II, I suppose my only option is to spread the word and keep checking servers. This next bit is totally unrelated but Skulltag has 'infected' my computer and changed all my wad files into 'Doom data files' with the Skulltag logo and it's annoying to look at. Not the biggest deal but if there is a solution, it will be utilized. Maybe I should post this as a new topic.


This is a file association thing. You can change that from within Windows. Look here if you have XP, there if you have Vista or 7. If you have Windows 8, drive a steamroller over your computer, it's the only way to be sure.

You can make it so that WAD files are associated to several programs, so that you can use right-click->Open With and chose then which port (or editing utility!) to use.

Also, Skulltag is dead and has been superseded by Zandronum, just FYI.

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All of the multiplayer ports seem kind of dead these days, Odamex is just the deadest of the three. Zandronum looks to be the most lively, but is just as dead when it comes to non-mod servers.

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Lippeth said:
So my question is, why does everyone seem to avoid this port like the plague?

In my case, I would use it but some dude they call "bug 878" hates me, lives in Odamex like a worm in an apple and has decided I should not play the game.

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Thanks, guys. I just downloaded Zdaemon and actually really like it for multiplayer. I use IDE as a server so I'm constantly checking Odamex. Thanks for helping with the file association thing as well. I plan to try out all the source ports and see if I fancy any as much as Oda. Internet Doom Explorer also lets me run my own maps in Odamex that I made in doom builder. Too cool. I missed the hayday of doom by not having a computer for years, so I'm making up for lost time.

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Odamex is a great port but what really lets it down is the amount of people who play multiplayer doom and who even knows it's there. Alot of players who play zdaemon or skulltag dont know much about odamex or dont want change.

There is alot of reasons not to choose odamex over already popular ports compared to playing it.

Personally I just play all 3 multiplayer ports when people are active and keep all 3 ports alive when I can, the amount of players will always haunt doom multiplayer :/

Also if you haven't already join up to #odamex on quakenet irc if you dont already. Alot of games get done when people are in that channel.

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myk said:

In my case, I would use it but some dude they call "bug 878" hates me, lives in Odamex like a worm in an apple and has decided I should not play the game.


I have a few questions related to your bug. Do other ports work? Especially Eternity, PRBoom, and Chocolate Doom since they share a similar sound engine, as well as ZDoom 1.22 since Odamex is based off of it. Has any version of Odamex ever worked for you?

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People are afraid of change.
I have nothing against any port, and i play the one that feels best to me. But each port has a silly stereotype which is sadly true in most cases:
1. Zdaemon (nazi's, mexicans, too much of those Drown in blood servers, etc)
2. Zandronum (80% of the servers are AOW, GVH, Whodunit, Megaman)
3. Odamex (pretty much empty half the time)
I started off with Zdaemon. Once I found ST, I moved along to that cus it delt with ping better and didn't crash as often as Zdaemon did with some wads. I learnt to live with the weird "uncapped" and those weird Zdoom functions ST (Zandronum) has.
Since the 0.6.0 release of Odamex and the new unlagged system, I seem to be giving up on ST due to its unfairness to high ping (Australian/people outside Europe and America) players.
I do use ST for singleplayer, but thats all I plan these days. I may go on ST for the casual play, but if its a serious duel....
I learnt my place as I don't have a chance to beat people with 250-350 ping on there (unless they are like new)... it's very painful when you 'appear' to have dodged a rocket but it still kills you, or charge up with an SSG, fire first but the server detects the other person fired first cus of their lower ping (server received their shoot command first). :(
All the ports are good in singleplayer, depending on which you prefer. But when it comes to online I prefer Odamex, because with the unlagged system they use I can run up to people and kill them FIRST, dodge rockets etc, it's beat :) If they added this unlagged to Zandronum and Zdaemon, it would be very difficult for me to choose which I'd play!

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Weird graphics scaling problems that are still not fixed and most of the servers are empty, that is all ;p

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Coolster said:

Weird graphics scaling problems

Is there a bug report on this?

Coolster said:

most of the servers are empty

Well the only way to resolve that is to play more and help develop the community! There are plenty of people that will play with you in #odamex. I always try to get CTF games going when I am online.

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http://odamex.net/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=134

It's an old report but the screens posted there show what happens, i tried most of the settings but no matter what kind of resolution i either get distortion on everything or just on some animated objects, it annoys me to the point i don't want to use the source port itself, the day it gets fixed, i will give it a chance.

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Vulture said:

Well the only way to resolve that is to play more and help develop the community!

Well, is there any reason, besides good will, for people to do that when they already have two good online ports where they can find active servers in any time of the day? Would they benefit somehow if Odamex became popular, does it offer something that other ports don't?

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Coolster said:

http://odamex.net/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=134

It's an old report but the screens posted there show what happens, i tried most of the settings but no matter what kind of resolution i either get distortion on everything or just on some animated objects, it annoys me to the point i don't want to use the source port itself, the day it gets fixed, i will give it a chance.


Up until recently Odamex had a well-intentioned fix (the one marked by the 2006-11-14 comment) that actually made things much worse from my observation. Reverting that did not fix the problem, but sprites are MUCH less noticeably jagged than they used to be...the pistol is much less of a sawtooth in trunk. :)

Unfortunately, a true fix is a little more complicated. Sprites are broken into columns of pixels, which are then further broken up along transparency boundaries into posts. When you scale a sprite to a resolution that is not an exact multiple of the original resolution, there are going to be rounding errors. And because each post is rendered separately, starting from the first non-transparent pixel, unless the tops of the pixels are exactly aligned, the 'rounding errors' are not going to align correctly.

Modern ZDoom and Eternity Engine both handle this case in various ways. It's on our list of things to get to, but I am unsure if it will arrive before the 0.6.2 release. However, the good news is that one major "scaling" fix will make it to 0.6.2...true widescreen support!

Memfis said:

Well, is there any reason, besides good will, for people to do that when they already have two good online ports where they can find active servers in any time of the day? Would they benefit somehow if Odamex became popular, does it offer something that other ports don't?


Strictly in terms of features, both ZDaemon and Zandronum emulate OS play, but neither one actually uses the original gameloop, and neither one is capable of playing Vanilla demos (which is how you know when your port is Vanilla-accurate in terms of gameplay). Odamex is the only C/S port that does this, and it's also the only port that tries to accommodate both OS and ZDoom-style play under one roof.

Also, and I might be biased since I've had my fill of making map compilations (I'm the author of Duel32 for Skulltag and Zandronum), but being able to run a server that rotates between many WAD files at a time is really awesome. No more need for map compilations, and switching WAD files doesn't require trying to migrate everyone in the server someplace else. Best of all, we have a WAD file downloader built into the client...it's not as fast as HTTP, but it's great for smaller WAD files and Source-engine HTTP downloading is on our short-term TODO list.

We've also heard many compliments about our netcode, especially from higher ping players. We have true unlagged, player interpolation to account for jittery connections, and player extrapolation for when we don't get messages from somebody in a while. Our port plays host to the International Doom League, which is one of the longest running competitive league in Doom, so you have no shortage of highly competitive players to play against...it's just they aren't on the servers 24/7. :)

And this is not to say that the other development teams don't care about their respective communities, but at least in my view the Odamex developers really try hard to do right by their players. Our development is almost dogmatically transparent; our SVN changelog is on our homepage and our developers hang out and answer questions in the IRC channels, forums, and various other places in the community. Participating with us is easy and if you have a pet feature you'd like to see included, we're more than happy to listen. Best of all, we are kept honest by our license, which prevents us from doing a bait-and-switch by building up a community under an open source license and then closing it to give ourselves leverage over it. No matter what happens, we are ultimately accountable to our players, not the other way around.

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Vulture said:
I have a few questions related to your bug. Do other ports work? Especially Eternity, PRBoom, and Chocolate Doom since they share a similar sound engine, as well as ZDoom 1.22 since Odamex is based off of it.

Haven't checked Eternity in a while (which has worked when I did try it) but all the rest work, at least past where Odamex dies, as Chocolate has another occasional problem during play which isn't similar.

Has any version of Odamex ever worked for you?

Yeah, I've used it before and I just tested with previous versions and it works all the way up to version 0.5.4, and fails as described in the bug report in 0.5.5, 0.5.6, 0.6.0 and 0.6.1.

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