Why do people still map in Boom format?

[Giomancer]

@Graf Zahl, @kb1 : Well, that explanation makes things much clearer, honestly. It's one thing to say a port is an obstacle from the perspective of a port author (Graf's original statement) and another to say it from the point of view of someone trying to reach as large an audience as possible (Graf's expanded statement).

 

That said, I don't think there's any reason to view PrBoom as an obstacle. After all, you don't view Chocolate Doom as an obstacle to defining a standard, do you? Of course not.

 

Define your new Boom+ standards. Implement them. PrBoom is a port dedicated to its own goals, namely compatibility and preservation. There's no need to change them, is there? Go forth, make progress.

[kristus]

On 2017-4-22 at 4:33 AM, Cynical said:

So, at the risk of getting off-topic, I tried playing Phobia TA with it... and found that the -digmusic option no longer works.

 

That's right -- Legacy no longer runs Legacy compatible wads anymore.  Christ, what a worthless port.

017-4-22 at 10:22 AM, Graf Zahl said:

Yes, that's a downer - but at least it runs without frying my system... :D

 

One of these days I really need to take a look at Legacy's lighting system and try to port the necessary parts to GZDoom, but the code involved is some of the worst stuff I've ever seen in a Doom port. :(

 

 

After I got thinking of Phobia, I made a vanity search and this came up. And I dunno how many projects were made for Legacy that makes it a meaningful effort for anyone to make sure they are playable in GZDoom for instance. But it seem to me like it'd be easier to just convert the projects themselves to GZDoom. Of course. Someone would have to do it too. But I bet that would be a lot less effort than creating a mirror of Legacy functionality. Since it was a port that you would have to rely on hacks a lot to get anything useful out of.

[Graf Zahl]

11 minutes ago, kristus said:

But it seem to me like it'd be easier to just convert the projects themselves to GZDoom. Of course. Someone would have to do it too. But I bet that would be a lot less effort than creating a mirror of Legacy functionality. Since it was a port that you would have to rely on hacks a lot to get anything useful out of.

That's probably true. But considering the low number of Legacy projects there's not much to do.

 

Nimrod, HTH2 and Icerial2 work out of the box, they could benefit from a special MAPINFO, though, and maybe some customization of dynamic light effects in case of Nimrod. But this would be superficial tinkering at best because the lighting is not that complex.

HTH2 already comes with a GZDoom GLDefs lump which takes care of most of the issues.

 

The only reason why Phobia is having problems is because it relies so much on the quirks of Legacy's dynamic lighting which, to be honest, are a mess to support. The biggest problem has always been that I never have been able to make any sense out of SetCorona's arguments, but there's a few other things at play here, too (e.g. lighting of empty two-sided textures. GZDoom only lights actually visible pixels.) If it wasn't for the intricate lighting, most of Phobia would work. At least none of the parts I played showed any problems as long as 'fs_nocheckposition' is set in MAPINFO. It just looks incredibly dull... :(

 

 

[kristus]

That's sort of my point though. It's unreasonable to port in that functionality in GZDoom for instance. When it would be a lot easier to

 just make a new version of Phobia where any such hacking and legacy specific effect would be replaced with a similar effect done with GZDoom.

[[McD] James]

Whoops, wrong thread.