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Blzut3

ECWolf 1.1.1 - Advanced Wolfenstein 3D Source Port

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For those who are still unaware, I've been working on an advanced source port for Wolfenstein 3D based of Wolf4SDL and ZDoom. In short it allows full soft modding in a format very similar to ZDoom while still retaining the quirks of the Wolfenstein 3D engine. It is dual licensed under both the original non-commercial license and the GPL (although the official builds currently use the non-commercial license, the GPL edition only switches the OPL emulator).

ECWolf 1.1 has been released today along with an updated tech demo. Builds are available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Ubuntu. My website links to some youtube videos of the engine as well.

Edit: ECWolf 1.1.1.

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Downloaded, but it crashes every time i try to launch it. Dang. I have Windows 7 32. I also don't have the sound card installed, could this be the problem? Well, anyway, "ZWolf" makes my dick hard, good luck.

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Is it a real crash or is it printing stuff to the console that you can't read before it closes? You'll probably have to run it from the command prompt.

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Console messages are printed to the DOS prompt for now. Running it from a command prompt will capture them. However, in my experience, Windows error code isn't very reliable.

I would suggest:

1. Make sure ALL of the data files that you choose to use (wl6, sod, etc.) are copied into the folder, including minor ones like VGADICT that are often forgotten.

2. Make sure that if you have any Steam copies of the game, they are completely unmodified.

3. Do not use modified base game data; use clean registered 1.4 or Spear of Destiny data files. You wouldn't mess with the IWADs in a ZDoom installation, so you shouldn't mess with the wl6/sod files in an ECWolf installation.

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Well I think that screen shot tells me about as much information as I can get from the console anyways. Hmm... It does seem likely that the lack of a sound card could be the issue. You can try opening your ecwolf.cfg in C:\Users\<username>\AppData\roaming\ecwolf and making sure the sound stuff is disabled.

SoundDevice = 0;
MusicDevice = 0;
DigitalSoundDevice = 0;
If ECWolf didn't get a chance to make the config just create ecwolf.cfg in the given directory with that as the contents.

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Tried that, no luck. I'll receive a new sound card soon, i'll wait and see if absence of it was the problem. Managed to move the console window tho, so here's a better screenshot:


In fact, why can't some games work without sound device? I have Spelunky, and since i removed the card it will not launch.

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All right, let me know if getting the sound card in fixes the issue. If so I'll see if I can gut a spare machine around here (or set up a VM) and hopefully figure out why it's not working.

To answer your question on why some games would not work. The game has to request access to sound hardware, and it may be programmed in such a way it never checks if the acquisition fails. Since not having a sound card is rare, it's easy for that assumption to be made.

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Will there be a way to keep the SIGNON screen or an equivalent static display, instead of having to see text flood the screen? I like the clean look of Wolf3D more than how Doom or Quake handle it.

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I'm pretty sure this is not normal:



The console gave no error message, but all hud graphics seem to be in the wrong order (this also applies to the in-game hud, but not sprites and textures. Everything else seems fine.)

Running Win7 64bit.

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printz said:

Will there be a way to keep the SIGNON screen or an equivalent static display, instead of having to see text flood the screen? I like the clean look of Wolf3D more than how Doom or Quake handle it.

True, but Wolf3D didn't have syntax errors and warnings to show. ;) Unfortunately it wouldn't be user-friendly for me to have an option to disable that.

rf` said:

I'm pretty sure this is not normal:

How did you obtain your data files? ECWolf requires the Activision (aka GT #2 IIRC) release to work properly. If you do not have this release you can download the patch utility on my website and that should solve the issue.

Proper md5sums for the latest version of Wolf3D are available on the wiki.

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Blzut3 said:

How did you obtain your data files? ECWolf requires the Activision (aka GT #2 IIRC) release to work properly. If you do not have this release you can download the patch utility on my website and that should solve the issue.

The patcher works like a charm, I must have had a different version. I honestly don't know where I got it from; its been a very long time and my copy has drifted from computer to computer in that time. :P

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Blzut3 said:

True, but Wolf3D didn't have syntax errors and warnings to show. ;) Unfortunately it wouldn't be user-friendly for me to have an option to disable that.

I'm using the built-in console from the IDE, which gets standard output. Since you seem to be using makefile, I'm assuming your workflow is different...

Does ECWolf have configurable variables instead of preprocessor macros, to get to different games? Can't older versions of Wolfenstein be supported by that? Do wolfenstein upgrade patches even exist?

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printz said:

Can't older versions of Wolfenstein be supported by that?

It'd be ugly because it'd mean riddling the code with needless checks and workarounds that would severely cripple its ability to be generalized. Instead of working with logical names like the Doom engine, it'd have to be working with a battery of offsets and counters like the Wolf engine.

printz said:

Do wolfenstein upgrade patches even exist?

Go here and scroll down a little bit.

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One thing that confused me during a recent run of Spear Of Destiny was that all enemies would be able to walk through each other (as though they had the ZDoom +THRUSPECIES flag set), which I'm certain isn't the correct behaviour -- you can imagine how artifically inflated the difficulty became when 10 SS guys and Mutants come rushing through a doorway simultaneously.

So has this been fixed, or am I just remembering the original game incorrectly?

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I know that guards do clip through things to some extent (the basic guards have a radius of 44, which makes them more than a full tile wide), but that sounds a bit extreme.

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I've never seen Nazis clip through each other with their guns at you. However, I definitely got the impression that they might do this otherwise, but it was happening mostly while I was killing one of them -- maybe they were merely moving through the falling corpse.

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printz said:

I've never seen Nazis clip through each other with their guns at you. However, I definitely got the impression that they might do this otherwise, but it was happening mostly while I was killing one of them -- maybe they were merely moving through the falling corpse.


This wasn't something as simple as that (which is a frequent and standard event).

This was a flood of allsorts running around, passing through each other as though they weren't even there. When they would start coming through a doorway, shooting the 'leader' would stun him into pain states, and allow all his friends to just rush through him as he recovered. Try Pistol-Starting Floor 16 of Spear Of Destiny (Ubermutant) with ECWolf v1.0, and just watch what happens at the start.

Nightmarish stuff.

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printz said:

Can't older versions of Wolfenstein be supported by that?

In theory with a bunch of hard coded checks it could be supported, but like Gez said it's not worth it since I have patches on my website.

BaronOfStuff said:

So has this been fixed, or am I just remembering the original game incorrectly?

I'm fairly certain you're remembering things incorrectly. In Wolfenstein the AI is tile based (it picks a tile to move to) so not having enemies clip through each other would likely seriously cripple their movement. The easiest way to notice this in vanilla is to get a room full of dogs to bite you.

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Blzut3 said:

I'm fairly certain you're remembering things incorrectly. In Wolfenstein the AI is tile based (it picks a tile to move to) so not having enemies clip through each other would likely seriously cripple their movement. The easiest way to notice this in vanilla is to get a room full of dogs to bite you.

I wonder if Wolf4SDL "fixed" that.

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After some testing between ECWolf and Spear.exe, I noticed the problem. Enemies can and do pass through each other in Spear.exe -- but only while already moving to their next tile. They would not/could not move into a tile already occupied by another enemy.

ECWolf apparently ignores this, and allows several enemies to sit on and move to the same tile with each other:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZeyJq5bxAE

Not the greatest example of 'proof', but 1:20 shows the main issue that makes the game's difficulty explode on some maps. I've never had this happen in wolf3d.exe or spear.exe.

Also, you can see at 0:50 that an Officer is unable to move because all surrounding tiles are occupied. ECWolf doesn't keep this behaviour as seen at 1:57 - everyone just piles onto that one tile to get a shot in.

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All right. I'll probe around the source and see if I can find what causes the difference.

Edit: Check your PMs.

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Scypek2 said:

Does/will/could it have something like a DECORATE equivalent?

Pretty sure this has been its driving force. Please don't misuse the active-sound feature. It's more of a Doom gimmick and Wolf3D enemies aren't supposed to signal their presence to you all the time like the Doom monsters do (this helps make maze levels in Wolfenstein less boring and more dangerous).

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Scypek2 said:

Does/will/could it have something like a DECORATE equivalent?

It has a slightly modified form of DECORATE in order to accommodate the differences in the Wolf3D engine. Do note that it is implemented from the ground up so refer to the wiki for what properties, flags, and functions are supported. The parser is also more strict than the one in ZDoom (in other words, be sure to enclose your strings in quotes). Open ecwolf.pk3 to see some examples.

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I don't know how I missed this, but the Ãœbermutant's death animation is broken. He appears to start firing (just uses the frames), then begins falling back... and stops 2 or so frames before hitting the floor.

Functionally, everything's fine (he drops the key, and doesn't remain an obstruction), it's just the animation that's incorrect.

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Blzut3 said:

Builds are available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Ubuntu. My website links to some youtube videos of the engine as well.


Which Windows, Mac OS X, and Ubuntu?

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Csonicgo said:

Which Windows, Mac OS X, and Ubuntu?

My website said:

Supports Windows 98 and later.

Binary for x86 based Macintoshes. Supports Mac OS X 10.4 and later.

Supports Ubuntu 10.04 LTS or later.

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Blzut3 said:

Fixed. I need more testers like you. :)


I try!

I'm going through Wolf3D at the moment, and then "The Lost Episodes", so I'll be sure to notice any other oddities and nonsense that crops up during play (although everything regarding the latter should be fine already, seeing as those games are literally just reskins of SoD).

EDIT:
Aw shit! Found a general problem already!

Each game ignores any other game's save files; they don't show up on the Load/Save list. This isn't a problem in itself, in fact this is quite a good thing; this means you can't accidentally load a SoD save in Wolf3D and blow up the universe!

What is a problem though is that it ignores them completely, seemingly pretending that they don't even exist. If you have a savegame for SoD (let's just assume it's savgam0.ecs), and then make a first save of your progress in Wolf3D, your save for SoD invariably gets overwritten.

A way around this would be to create separate save directories for each main game, although I'm not sure how this would affect any mods.

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