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yannara

What is the best multiplayer platform today

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For years, I´ve been following Dengine developement, since it had best graphics, but there were always some issues with multiplaying. I don´t like Brutal Doom, because of its gore, but I got the impression, that it has best multiplayer capabilities?

Now since Brutal Doom 64 is released, I got my hopes rised, and 64 isn´t gore, which is good, but with BD 64, I can´t load classic maps and latest mod texture together.

If you would like to pass all doom classic maps together with your play buddies, what would be your choise today?

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What the heck is Dengine? Brutal doom is not a port. It also sucks ass in multiplayer.

The best ports for multiplayer are zandronum, zdaemon, and odamex. If you want any mods, you need zandronum pretty much. Zd looks pretty dead beyond Thursday night survival, but will play all the classics. Odamex doesn't support survival, so you get coop only and online its not very good for that. Maybe offline is better but zandronum and zdaemon both handle classic coop and survival anyway.

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Memfis said:

this is not true by the way

Virtually everytime I open up IDE and look at the playercounts it's pretty much a barren wasteland of less than 20 players at any given time. Back when I played ZD it was 50-70 players at any given time, and that wasn't even that long ago (2011-2012). How does a substantial drop like that not qualify as virtually dead/dying except for 1 popular event?

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Damn, looks like the weekend anomaly. Even still, only 35 by IDE's count, and doesn't discount the fact a lot of players have dropped off (at least 50% since 2012).

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The number can go up and down in a matter of minutes.

There were 54 players around the peak today. (Got this number because I joined a server around the peak time and didn't refresh the launcher since then. Don't know what might have been the actual peak number of players today.)

Survival server with ~20 players happens on a daily basis. Sometimes two servers. Here is a screenshot from today. As someone who joined ZDaemon in 2013, 50% drop-off is a nonsense. Regarding TNS, the average peak server population is actually rising since 2012. Might be true for deathmatch games but definitely not overall. Survival scene on ZDaemon is far from dead.



To go back to the question in OP, ZDaemon is more centered around old school, unmodded gameplay than Zandronum. It may happen that if you want to run servers with old classics without any gameplay mods and lure some players into them, you might have a better luck in ZDaemon.

Additionally, I haven't played Zandronum in a while but last time I did there was one quite irritating thing about the survival mode there (which might very well be changed by now). Once you joined one map you were autojoined at each subsequent map. Apparently there was no way to disable this. You had to reconnect to make it stop. I remember that was more stuff I disliked about the way Zandronum does survival mode but since I can't really recall what that was it probably wasn't too extreme.

However, if you only want to play with a few of your good friends, are looking for eye candy and don't get too irritated by minor inconveniences, Zandronum might be a better choice for this.

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Keyboard_Doomer said:

Once you joined one map you were autojoined at each subsequent map. Apparently there was no way to disable this. You had to reconnect to make it stop.


Type spectate in console.

Keyboard doomer said:

However, if you only want to play with a few of your good friends, are looking for eye candy and don't get too irritated by minor inconveniences, Zandronum might be a better choice for this.


Most people do that for Zandronum.

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Mobius said:

Type spectate in console.

Iirc, there's also both a keybind for it ( though not bound by default ) as well as command within the multiplayer window. Really, kind of hard to miss.

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Keyboard_Doomer said:

The number can go up and down in a matter of minutes.

There were 54 players around the peak today. (Got this number because I joined a server around the peak time and didn't refresh the launcher since then. Don't know what might have been the actual peak number of players today.)

Survival server with ~20 players happens on a daily basis. Sometimes two servers. Here is a screenshot from today. As someone who joined ZDaemon in 2013, 50% drop-off is a nonsense. Regarding TNS, the average peak server population is actually rising since 2012. Might be true for deathmatch games but definitely not overall. Survival scene on ZDaemon is far from dead.



To go back to the question in OP, ZDaemon is more centered around old school, unmodded gameplay than Zandronum. It may happen that if you want to run servers with old classics without any gameplay mods and lure some players into them, you might have a better luck in ZDaemon.

Additionally, I haven't played Zandronum in a while but last time I did there was one quite irritating thing about the survival mode there (which might very well be changed by now). Once you joined one map you were autojoined at each subsequent map. Apparently there was no way to disable this. You had to reconnect to make it stop. I remember that was more stuff I disliked about the way Zandronum does survival mode but since I can't really recall what that was it probably wasn't too extreme.

However, if you only want to play with a few of your good friends, are looking for eye candy and don't get too irritated by minor inconveniences, Zandronum might be a better choice for this.

Didn't I specifically say that, aside from TNS, the population is dropping? I know the population of that server is pretty big....
If you joined in 2013, how are you going to notice the 50% drop in players? 2+2 does not equal 3 dude.
I don't get the complaint about survival's function. You don't like the you "joined the game" and then the port kept you in the game? I don't even know what to say about that. I guess zd keeps your items even if you spectate? Requiring you to rejoin the game every map seems pretty stupid, honestly.
Because of this thread I keep refreshing IDE and the population has been dropping since my first post, currently sitting at 26 players. I have no idea how in the world you can't consider this dropping off, but honestly ZD players have always been pretty good at sticking their head in the sand when in comes to port-related problems.

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I've seen other survival servers hit well over 20+ countless times, and a couple of times I've seen single servers with over 40 players.

Decay said:

Because of this thread I keep refreshing IDE and the population has been dropping since my first post, currently sitting at 26 players.


Euro players finished for the evening. This isn't surprising.

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Aright, there really is no need to make this a fight. I didn't mean to attack anything you said but to just point out things from insider persepctive.

Decay said:

Didn't I specifically say that, aside from TNS, the population is dropping? I know the population of that server is pretty big....


TNS doesn't live in a vacuum. What I wanted to point out but didn't say explicitly is that if the survival crowd in TNS is doing well then survival in ZD overall probably isn't dying. I wish I could say we're that good at marketing or organizing the event that we somehow get people to get their weekly dose of Doom survival purely from TNS but truth is most of the names you see in TNS you can also see sometime during the week.

Decay said:

If you joined in 2013, how are you going to notice the 50% drop in players? 2+2 does not equal 3 dude.


It's 2016. Are you saying all of the 50% drop happened between 2012 and 2013? Because I didn't see any noticeable drop since 2013.

Decay said:

I don't get the complaint about survival's function. You don't like the you "joined the game" and then the port kept you in the game?


I certainly don't like being joined when I didn't ask to be. When I join a game that means I want to play that particular map and I might decide to spectate the next couple of maps or just go AFK for them. Either way, Mobius' post solves this and it's a moot point now.

Decay said:

I guess zd keeps your items even if you spectate?


For vast majority of the servers the case is that you keep your items as long as you join until 3 minutes pass from the map start.

Decay said:

Requiring you to rejoin the game every map seems pretty stupid, honestly.


On the other hand, autojoining without my interaction and making me lose a life if I go AFK or Alt+Tab for 30 seconds is what seems pretty stupid to me. But to each their own, I guess.

Decay said:

Because of this thread I keep refreshing IDE and the population has been dropping since my first post, currently sitting at 26 players. I have no idea how in the world you can't consider this dropping off, but honestly ZD players have always been pretty good at sticking their head in the sand when in comes to port-related problems.


It's after peak hours. Of course it's dropping off. Currently are the ZDaemon's "quiet hours" and it's going to keep dropping off for a while, I can tell you that.

Mobius said:

Type spectate in console.

Arctangent said:

Iirc, there's also both a keybind for it ( though not bound by default ) as well as command within the multiplayer window. Really, kind of hard to miss.


Thanks, had no idea. Does this have the side effect of losing a life and not being able to rejoin if I do this in-game in a 1 life survival?

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As a long time ZD user (since 2001) I sadly have to say Decay is right about the drop in population. 10-30 players at most times seems far from dead to me, but as an Odamex player you need to take my opinion with a grain of salt :^) A few years back, 08 and prior, ZD could absolutely explode, breaking 100 at peak.

Between all 3 ports, the total number of online players has remained consistent for years now, so overall MP Doom is still very much alive, thankfully.

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Keyboard_Doomer said:

To go back to the question in OP, ZDaemon is more centered around old school, unmodded gameplay than Zandronum. It may happen that if you want to run servers with old classics without any gameplay mods and lure some players into them, you might have a better luck in ZDaemon.

Hi, and thank you guys for answers!

Just about this one more question - if I´m after graphics (..and not pixels ;)), should I even think about ZDaemon? I could live without mods, but if thinking about old original doom, 2 things bugs me;
- Non 3D-object/items (bodies, ammo boxes etc are 2D).
- Pixel graphic - I need soften renders at least, mods are welcome.

This is what we´ve been playing few years back, still lovit but mp doesn´t work propertly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oODoC5LMCg

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The shittiest part about Zandronum survival is that waiting in line crap. Like when you join a server and maybe you will be actually allowed to play if you wait 5 maps or so.

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The queue is great in duel servers since it lets everyone get a turn, but yeah I rarely play in random survival servers because of that. You could be waiting 20 minutes or more to join, ain't nobody got time for that. Joining mid-game in survival would be a cool dmflag for Zand.

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If you can propose a good way to deal with that which would not be abused by trolls or sore losers, and which would keep the gamemode from just being coop suggestions would be interesting.

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Personally, I like survival the way it is, with one exception.

As for joining mid-game, I have to agree with Marc on it: allowing players to join the server and immediately join the game would totally cheapen the whole point of survival, as what's stopping us from playing a map, then one person dies, and the other says, "well, I'm likely not gonna make it at this point, why don't you quit and rejoin so we can win?" Or the dead player just makes that judgment call on their own. Never mind trolling players, but even amongst players that actually want to play Doom, it's still likely to be thoroughly abused.

The exception for my tastes with survival is when somebody exits the level as I'm at like 3% health and, Murphy's Law, the next level has enemies scattered around its start+lag+mapstart which usually results in me being dead before I can move, at which point I usually go grab another drink, because fuck it at that point.

How to circumvent that is of course a can of worms, as part of the problem is just a lack of basic cooperation, or a simple mistake, which happens. A couple ways I could think of to fix it, though admittedly these are likely not the best, if the "problem" is in fact even a problem and worth fixing in the first place, are:

- Allow respawns within the first x seconds of a map. Also could be just a join timer, which also allows for one respawn for players which survive the previous round. This wouldn't cheapen survival very much. I think join timers are a thing in Zand already though, aren't they?

Or

- Make it a stipulation that upon one player activating the exit, x amount of other players must also either activate the exit trigger or die (if all). This is a total can of worms in all likelihood, but perhaps could make for a good option when setting up the server. This would keep survival closer to how it is now, which I like, because the players will still be limited by the supplies of the previous map.

Of course, like I said, that might not even be a real "problem" and therefore there might be nothing there to fix, but they might make things more interesting. Still, I think y'all have done an awesome job with survival mode as-is; I greatly prefer it to coop.

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You can't quit and rejoin in ZD. If you die, even if you reconnect, you still need to wait til the end of the round. I think this is based on a clients IP so if you're using a proxy you can rejoin but that seems like a lot of effort for a little gain (though given how crazy some are, I guess that doesn't rule it out)

Like I said previously I think it would make a swell DMflag long as it worked as it does in ZD where reconnecting doesn't reset your lives. I also like the ability to wait a sec before spawning in a 16 player match but still keeping my old gear. These would both be nice as totally optional DMflags imo, neither detract from survival but actually enhance it. ZD does have an optional join limit timer too so it seems most bases are covered.

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We ended up with Zandorum 2.1.2, and I let the BD64 go. Actually with hardware rendering and pixel softing, original doom looks quite okay.

Now 2 questions;
1. We can´t find how to map weapons to other keyboard keys rather than 1-9
2. Where to take of coop playmate´s status from my screen, I all the time see in upper line his weapon, health and ammo.

...we´re looking for 1 more calm player to pass all classic doom maps from E2 to Final Doom... :) (there is a long road ahead).

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easiest to do both 1 and 2 is in the console.
Type: bind x (or whatever key) "weapon" (i think this is correct anyway)
Is there no binding options for it in "customize controls"? Some mods have specific options for them, but then again this is BD...

for #2, either to menu options > display > HUD options "draw coop info" no
or type in the console: cl_drawcoopinfo false

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