How much room of improvement is there for GZDoom?

[david_a]

How exactly does the Quake demo format work?  Does it record the positions of every entity?  I don't ever recall hearing about desyncs with those.  I imagine Quake-style demos would bloat the file size astronomically (not sure how much this matters in 2017 and it probably compresses super well), but would implementing something like that give us version-stable demos once and for all?

[Da Werecat]

It's essentially a bunch of network packets, IIRC.

 

[Arctangent]

The point where you're recording the position of everything at every tic is the point where you should just implement a screen recorder into your game.

[Edward850]

6 minutes ago, Arctangent said:

The point where you're recording the position of everything at every tic is the point where you should just implement a screen recorder into your game.

Well you shouldn't be doing that for a start, instead you record the difference. In Doom this is actually quite optimal because AI doesn't even function every tic, allowing for a lot of frames where AI doesn't even need to be recorded.

[Da Werecat]

The Quake way isn't that dissimilar to a screen recorder, it seems. It only acknowledges things that are relevant to the recording player.

 

Which is also its biggest limitation, since you can't just detach the camera and go see what was happening in another part of the map. In Doom, the demo file only contains input, but since everything else is deterministic - having a demo file means knowing everything that happened in the map.

[Bauul]

@Da Werecat If that's the biggest limitation, it seems a pretty small price to pay for a method that would seem to have such strong cross-version compatibility.

 

The only times I've seen people want to detach the camera and go see what happened far away from the player is in instances of highly advanced speedrunning or pacifist type demos, which few people would ever do on GZDoom anyway.  Compared to basically no-one using GZDoom demos at all, it's a small compromise.

 

I had no idea Quake demos worked like that, but honestly if there was someway it could be replicated in GZDoom, it would make a huge difference to how easy it is to share GZD demos.

 

Edit: Thanks for the link too, it was an interesting read!

 

[LexiMax]

18 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

CTC seemed like too much work for too little gain.

I might be a bit biased, but considering how widespread of a standard two-team CTF is in multiplayer-centric child ports, I'm kind of surprised that there is no upstream implementation.

 

It's work, but it's not THAT much work, and could pay dividends if GZDoom ever improves its multiplayer support.  I know that it could possibly be implemented in ZScript, but CTF isn't a game mode that changes a whole lot and there are already a bunch of maps for it out there.

Edited December 13, 2017 by AlexMax

[Phade102]

I like gzdoom, i find it very accessible but i'm not up to speed on the background sort of things. I think Graf has done an amazing job on it, but I would love an easier way to apply 3d slopes, but that may not be related to gzdoom or doom builder at all, just something thats limited by the doom engine in general.

[Nine Inch Heels]

One thing that may be worth looking into is cleaning up the menus. Certainly true for other sourceports as well, but since there are so many options in GZDoom that can be toggled, it might be wise to re-arrange a few things. Granted, I usually only visit a menu once for keybinds, and then some tweaking with mouse-sensitivity, but if you factor in all the rest of the menus for mods, compat settings etc yadda yadda, it becomes quite an extensive list of things.

[Graf Zahl]

7 hours ago, Bauul said:

 

I had no idea Quake demos worked like that, but honestly if there was someway it could be replicated in GZDoom, it would make a huge difference to how easy it is to share GZD demos.

Quake's way of doing demos is not really replicable in Doom. Essentially the demo player is an emulated server that's sending normal control events to the client. GZDoom does not have such a thing, and even Zandronum is not a clean C/S-port, as it still offloads a lot of work to the client to save bandwidth. But Zandronum would be thre closest option to implement it.