International Doom League Moves to Zandronum

[HumanBones]

On behalf of the IDL, it is my pleasure to announce that beginning with next season we will be moving to Zandronum. This is an exciting step for us to take, as Zandronum hosts the most popular multiplayer and developer community. This of course means that we will be saying a heartfelt goodbye to Odamex after three successful seasons.

The league would like to thank the entire Odamex team of Admins, Developers, and Server Hosts. AlexMax, for being a walking encyclopedia and helping whenever was necessary. Manc, for not only hosting the IDL website and forums, but for getting the website up and running for us to use. Ralphis, for doing his best to recruit players and basically acting as the middleman between the Developers and the players. HeX_Vulture, for offering his servers as IDL servers in the event that ours went down. Finally, Dr. Sean, with who the move to Odamex never would have been possible. He is the absolute nicest and most helpful guy I've ever come across. He works his ass off and has had to put up with the IDL community for years and he hasn't quit yet. That should tell you something. I sincerely wish nothing but the best for all of these people as well as Odamex. I will continue playing and I am still, still, still waiting for Survival. Make it happen!!

On to the future, what we have in store with our new move includes:

1) A newly designed and easily accessible website.

2) A new version of the IDL wad, which will see it expand up to at least 40 maps. We will be scouring new wads for maps, so suggestions are always welcome.

3) Yet another reboot of IDL Radio, which has been dormant for the better part of the last year. I anticipate having quite a bit to talk about.

It is my goal to complete this transition and have a new IDL season up and running by the end of July. I hope to see you all there!

http://intldoomleague.com

[40oz]

I'm sorry to hear that. /odafanboy

[Doomkid]

As another Odafan, I agree with 40oz. I understand the reasoning, though. (Just beware of how awful Zandronum's auto aim is with Vanilla flags!)

[Marnetmar]

Well, fuck.

[capodecima]

Good luck on building new zandronum IDL players. I doubt this will succesful, but i guess zandronum deserve also your shoot in IDL.

[Memfis]

not joke????

So what was wrong with Odamex?

[Doomkid]

It seems to be solely because of port popularity, judging by the OP.

You guys may already know this, but in addition to crappy auto aim, Zandronum also allows the player to move with more momentum from a standstill. I just made a basic map with 3 pillars that you have to strafe run accross to test this. In Dos Doom 2, it is absolutely, positively impossible. In Zandronum, it's easy as cake. Stuff like this may seem tiny but makes a huge difference in competitive play.

I do love Zandronum's many, many MANY extra and exciting features, but Odamex definitely has much better vanilla compatibility, which as far as I'm concerned is key in Deathmatch. The netcode does seem to give me a better connection in Odamex than in Zandronum as well - I average about 300 ping to an American server, so I can definitely tell the difference. I generally use Zandronum for the crazy newfangled stuff, and in coop/survival. But hey, I'm not part of the IDL, just my 2 cents :)

(I love all 3 major online ports, just to be crystal clear here. I ain't no hater.)

[Memfis]

I noticed that momentum stuff too but it's probably air control or something that can be tuned?

[capodecima]

Memfis said:

not joke????
So what was wrong with Odamex?

Its not joke for sure. Sadly odamex 0.6.x wasnt this good and had couple of bugs, so this probably discouraged a lot players play it. Odamex isnt in good position you know, both ports ZD and ZAN are too different and some ppl cant get use it probably. Sadly. For me personaly its just doom port, i dont see different from other doom ports. For me is just ZD with bad unlagged, ZAN with weird movement and odamex is basically vanilla doom (with right settings). I wish some veterans try new odamex. There are fixed couple of bugs from previous version, 32 bit render and much more.

edit
Ye doomkid is right about zandronum being too much newschool and broken old doom standarts. Also there is missing enemycolor cvar, you can die when stay on respawn in CTF (which is also dumb), not the best PWO (you cant set 2 weapons or more on same priority), broken mouselook on key, and many others zandro "standarts" which are bad.

[TendaMonsta]

Wow this is bad news. I don't even follow IDL, but just the thought of Odamex losing a portion of players is sad as I find it to be the best port for online play with more oldschool wads and such.

[Clonehunter]

Can't say I feel one way or the other, but regardless, was never the biggest CTF fan. Hope the season works out though. But I highly doubt much will change minus some of the Zandro stuff like the speed starts.

[Gez]

Sad news for Odamex; good news for Zandronum; interesting news for everybody here.

[abyrvalg]

Memfis said:

I noticed that momentum stuff too but it's probably air control or something that can be tuned?

Pretty sure that's the thing. And yeah, air control can be turned off if you're perverted enough to actually desire that behavior :D)( But then again, that also might be an engine quirk getting its roots from the ancient zdoom versions. Zandro still has insanely high vilejumps for instance, even though those are going to get fixed in version 2.0. (Hope they won't fix this too :p)

[dew]

As Bones mentioned, we'll cover the topic in an IDLradio episode soon(ish). We've been resisting this move for years and even now it hasn't been an easy decision. I'll spoil a little and admit that public demand (and the self-preservation instinct) has indeed been a considerable factor.

[40oz]

My biggest gripe with zandro has always been getting used to the nerfed ssg. I got my ass handed to me in a game against novice players because I was sure I could nail them from a reasonable distance, but apparently you need close to a full blast to land a one hit kill, and every partial hit that didn't kill them was certain death for me.

I hope some day odamex will win the idl back with more features geared towards competitive players while remaining distant from the gimmicky stuff that sells zandro to all the weirdoes like weapon mods and skins and scripts and what have you.

[Ru5tK1ng]

Doomkid92 said:
You guys may already know this, but in addition to crappy auto aim. . .

The autoaim is the exact same in all 3 multiplayer ports. They are *all* vanilla. They all shoot out 3 tracers to see if they hit. Odamex may recently have added in a feature that fires more tracers or uses line of sight calculations for players, but if anyone wants vanilla then Zandronum has that covered. All 3 ports maintain the autoaim issue where you get deadzones. But if you have issues with Doom's auto aim, rest assured mouse look is allowed in IDL. :)

Doomkid92 said:
Zandronum also allows the player to move with more momentum from a standstill. I just made a basic map with 3 pillars that you have to strafe run accross to test this.

Did you turn the compat flags on for air movement and set sv_aircontrol to 0? Because if you didn't then that would explain the results your experiment returned. By default, Zandronum uses ZDoom's over powered 'velocity gain' when you press jump.

40oz said:
My biggest gripe with zandro has always been getting used to the nerfed ssg.

This is a simple fix thankfully. Turn on compat flags for old random, and there is your vanilla SSG. Without the flag on, your play experience will be rageful.

[Gez]

Ru5tK1ng said:

Did you turn the compat flags on for air movement and set sv_aircontrol to 0? Because if you didn't then that would explain the results your experiment returned. By default, Zandronum uses ZDoom's over powered 'velocity gain' when you press jump.

Zandronum's default behavior is not ZDoom's, in fact you have to use a compat flag (compat_limited_airmovement) to get ZDoom behavior.

[Superluigieth1]

I hate Zandronum. ZDaemon is better!

[duh]

[dew]

XCOPY said:

As for the jumping/movement issue, is there any wad file where those issues are evident and easily "reproductible"?

One of the most prominent cases is zdctf map26 (Status: Idle) where Zandronum's extra air control lets players sr50-jump back into the central tunnel with the blue armors. You end up a bit short with vanilla/old zdoom physics/no air control. Being able to escape from the base so easily is a game changing difference that upsets the defensive nature of the map.

[Doomkid]

Ru5tK1ng said:

But if you have issues with Doom's auto aim..

Certainly not, DOS autoaim works a charm. Perhaps the lag I experience (usually around 300ms) effects my playing worse on Zandronum because of the different netcode used. (Odamex uses a CSDoom base, where as Zandro doesn't, if I'm recalling correctly that is.)

The autoaim glitch is apparently cross platform, as explained here: http://www.doomworld.com/vb/doom-general/62808-vanilla-doom-autoaim-glitch-bug/ So I guess I can just pin it down to lag having a worse effect on Zandro than on Odamex. Others have made the same complaint a few times as well, glad I've looked into to see it's likely a ping issue. I'd never noticed it in the other ports, but next time someone says Zandro has worse auto aim, I'll fill them in. (It's a fairly common misconception.)

Superluigieth1 said:

I hate Zandronum. ZDaemon is better!

All 3 ports are slightly different beasts, all with their strong points :)

XCOPY said:

dmflags

Thanks for those flags, I'll be using them from now on in any Zandronum DMs!

[Dr. Sean]

Doomkid92 said:

Certainly not, DOS autoaim works a charm. Perhaps the lag I experience (usually around 300ms) effects my playing worse on Zandronum because of the different netcode used. (Odamex uses a CSDoom base, where as Zandro doesn't, if I'm recalling correctly that is.)

I would say the issue is not auto-aim but rather the fact that Zandronum uses your round-trip ping time (calculated once a second) for the unlagged system. This is problematic when your connection has jitter (packets don't always have the same round-trip delivery time), which is usually pretty noticeable when you're playing over-seas. It means that when you press fire, the packet containing your input may not reach the server in the same amount of time as the last ping value and thus your accuracy will suffer.

[Quasar]

While I have nothing to do with the multiplayer community in general, I still feel disappointed for some reason.

[Patrol1985]

Quasar said:

While I have nothing to do with the multiplayer community in general, I still feel disappointed for some reason.

I feel the same. If Doom is ever to appear on Quakecon again I would prefer it to be played on Odamex again instead of any other port. With Odamex's popularity taking this sudden drop this might not be the case...

... but I'll get seriously worried about it if Doom is announced as a Quakecon game. So far, I have a hunch it won't :P

[dew]

Patrol1985 said:

... but I'll get seriously worried about it if Doom is announced as a Quakecon game. So far, I have a hunch it won't :P

Already confirmed as no chance in hell, haha.

[Patrol1985]

dew said:

Already confirmed as no chance in hell, haha.

DAMN IT! :P

Who confirmed it and when?

[Dr. Sean]

Patrol1985 said:

DAMN IT! :P

Who confirmed it and when?

Sponge from id Software has confirmed it several times on IRC. He's also one of the organizers of QuakeCon and was great to work with regarding the 20th Anniversary tourney at last year's QuakeCon.

[Quasar]

Naturally, I mean it's clear they need more time for slobber-swapping mini-games, t-shirt tossing convention babes, and Todd Hollenshead whatever poor oaf took Todd Hollenshead's place to get up on stage and say things that are basely offensive to anyone that is not a late-teens white male gamer.

[dew]

You make sucking balls through a long spit-covered tube sound so dirty, Quasar.

[Patrol1985]

Those mini-games were atrocious :D And this poor sap in Todd Hollenshead's place was no other than Tim Willits - current creative director of id Software. I hated the guy after the performance, but later liked him upon hearing RAGE (which I really enjoyed) was "his game".

I just hope they drop the idea of mini-games altogether this year.