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Hell Theatre

Field of view in Doomsday engine

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Playing Hexen with the Doomsday engine 2.0 felt somehow off but I only realized what was different after loading GZDoom in parallel and comparing the images.

It looks like on widescreen displays, instead of extending the view to the sides, Doomsday crops it at the top and bottom, making the view look a lot more cramped.

Can I change this somehow?


Unrelated, but noteworthy:

IWAD detection seems to be spotty. It did register Freedoom as Ultimate Doom but failed to discover both my actual Ultimate Doom and Registered Doom IWAD.

Is it just me or do others find the visual discrepancy between the main selection menu and the in-game presentation as jarring as I do? The selection menu feels professionally designed, albeit completely different in style to the actual game, but the in-game optiom menu is just - meh. I'd expect something this sloppy from Doom Legacy but not from an engine that values its presentation.

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You just made me curious so I also installed it. I can confirm the narrower field of view and have to say this makes the game a bit awkward to play if you are used to other ports. Somehow the bobbing appears to be a bit exaggerated which makes the port feel quite different than what I am used to.

I couldn't at first reproduce the IWAD mixup but then I got an idea and started renaming them. Doomsday seems to assume that all IWAD names can only apply to one given game. Renaming doom.wad to doomu.wad and doomu.wad to doom.wad indeed produces the error you describe.
For something this fancy I think the detection requires improvement, it also should be able to detect show Freedoom as its own game, if both regular Doom and Freedoom are present.

What struck me is the insane memory requirements of the engine. Just opening the main menu of Doom 1 allocates 512 MB RAM. GZDoom is at 85 MB at that point, ZDoom at 22.

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Doomsday's extensive range of options can be accessed by pressing the tilde key and clicking the cog/gear icon.

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Urthar said:

the tilde key and clicking the cog/gear icon.


Not surprising that people won't find it. I remember having the same problem some months ago and asking the same question. And guess what: I've long forgotten!

Sorry to repeat myself from back then: Having two entirely separate option menus - one in the game and one only accessible by doing strange things is not good design. The in-game option menu should have an entry 'Engine options' to go there as well because that's where most users are going to look when they want to change some settings!

I hope this is on the radar and the current in-game menus just a placeholder until clicking on the Options menu item goes to the engine menu.

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You got to be kidding! :(

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction but here I have to question the programmers' sanity. That's truly and utterly stupid to have two entirely different levels of settings menus and not add the slightest hint in the one everybody would visit first that another one exists.

This whole thing almost feels like an emulator that just tries to run Doom, not like a genuine engine for the game.

Well, I have to admit anyway that I feel a bit disappointed here. I'm sure that there's some neat graphics features lurking in there somewhere, but overall GZDoom feels a lot better and easier to use because it doesn't even try to make the UI look 'modern', not to mention this strange separation of features. It just nicely blends with the old game. It may not look modern but that part looks entirely deliberate. Doom is an old game, it has all rights to have a menu that looks the same vintage as the game.

This entire Doomsday feels a bit schizophrenic with its high end, shiny and modern main menu and then switching to that ancient game underneath, just like Frankenstein's monster where parts were stitched together that just don't fit.

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And wait until you try the Risen3D menu system ;-) *cymbal crash*

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What about it? That's the Doomsday options menu from 10 years ago. But guess what: Aside from not that great looking it's at least well integrated into the engine.

And the binary size is reasonable as is the memory footprint. I find it somewhat funny that Doomsday went to utterly bloated from here, but none of the bloat brings any improvement for the actual GAME! It's all shiny toys on the packaging.

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