Which features would you like to see in GZDoom?

[Fonze]

Client/server, dedicated servers, and demo controls.

[Lila Feuer]

This guy really loves to talk out of his ass.

[UndeadRyker]

1 hour ago, Fonze said:

Client/server, dedicated servers, and demo controls.

Can't see demo controls happening since GZDoom has a reputation of not making sure demos don't desync across its versions... But man, one can dream about all of these features making it in.

 

One small little feature I'd like to see is an option to revert the weapon firing alignment behavior back to its default behavior instead of forcing all the weapons to be centered. That little quirk just makes me go, "Yeah, this is really Doom".

[Fonze]

1 hour ago, UndeadRyker said:

Can't see demo controls happening since GZDoom has a reputation of not making sure demos don't desync across its versions... But man, one can dream about all of these features making it in.

Desyncs across versions is understandable to me, as new versions may fix a bug from a previous version or may change something else under the hood which can potentially alter the tiniest of minutiae, which is all it takes to desync a demo. Honestly, demo sync is something I can understand as being unimportant to the development of GzDoom, but it's demo controls which are the one thing that makes me scratch my head, as regular users are more than capable of understanding the limitations of the port, but the tool: demos, is still there. 

 

That all said, I was pleasantly surprised to learn a few months ago that zand has some basic demo controls: nextmap and skipsec I believe, so it's entirely possible that I'm just stupid and haven't researched as well as I should have; indeed I would be happy to find out I'm wrong on that point, but to my knowledge they are not present and that is a major drag on the usefulness of demos as feedback for long maps. Even zand's controls are really not enough, imo, for the sp community beyond episode runs.

 

But it's just a thing I'd like to see; the port devs already do a great job with the flexible and advanced port they've built and continue to build. Though for mappers serious about feedback and growing at their hobby, and especially for newer mappers, accentuating the feedback tools in-place seems important to me. Still, for a hobby, what we got is amazingly great, so I hope my words don't come across as ungrateful to the work and time that others have put into their hobby to bring such an amazing family of ports to light for the rest of us to play with and/or nitpick with our silver spoons in our mouths, heh.

[Ferk]

Imho, GZDoom is already packed with features.

The only thing I would ask is to have it ported as a libretro core so it can take advantage of the amazing portability (Android, consoles, etc!) and convenience of Retroarch.

But I know it would be quite a lot of work. I'm hoping the sdl2-libretro library could make this achievable.

[Cacodemon345]

Walkable polyobjects is totally absent in GZDOOM.

It will take a lot of work.

[Spie812]

I always thought that there should be a "pistol start" option in the menus somewhere which would make every map have a pistol start. It's hardly necessary since idclev works just fine for that, but it would be nice to have the option.

 

Maybe it could be defined in MAPINFO as well.

 

e: you can do it in MAPINFO with a combination of the "ResetHealth" and "ResetInventory" properties. I'd still like to be able to do it on the player's side though.

Edited January 14, 2018 by Spie812

[Herzon]

If any feature should be added into GZDoom, hands down its splitscreen. Splitscreen is something that is awesome in Doom and adding it to the sourceport with the most mods available for it and features, it would be awesome. Like imagine inviting a few friends over to play 4 player deathmatch in Russian Overkill on a big monitor? That would be awesome.

[lunoir]

and have 4 mice and 4 keyboards connected?

[Dragonfly]

GZDoom already has controller support, which I imagine is how someone interested in split-screen would play it when playing with friends.

An idea for 'split screen' would be to have 4 instances of the game running connected to eachother in a netplay game, set the screens to windowed mode and have them sit in each corner.

 

Idea above is untested, so, it might not work or whatever. :P

[Blastfrog]

It amazes me how poorly GZDoom performs compared to something like an early Source engine game. Having AO and AA enabled should not have me dipping below my preferred 144fps. And if models are in use, it must be sparingly or that'll tank performance as well.

 

I get that supporting all those software mode quirks in GL might have an impact, and I have no clue what I'm really talking about, but is this really as good as it can get?

 

Any why was the look range capped to less than 90 degrees up or down?

 

All that being said, it's still a fantastic engine, and has only become better over time.

[Cacodemon345]

See this ZDoom thread for more info: https://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=56740

[Cacodemon345]

@Blastfrog, look at the ZDoom thread above.

[Fonze]

3 hours ago, Dragonfly said:

GZDoom already has controller support, which I imagine is how someone interested in split-screen would play it when playing with friends.

An idea for 'split screen' would be to have 4 instances of the game running connected to eachother in a netplay game, set the screens to windowed mode and have them sit in each corner.

 

Idea above is untested, so, it might not work or whatever. :P

This has worked in the past for me with other source ports, should work for GzDoom as well. The only iffy thing would be if the computer could smoothly handle all that going on, especially in a port like GzDoom which already has a larger footprint than, say, prboom+. But I'd imagine a built-in split screen would have less overhead than separate clients in each window.

[Arctangent]

2 hours ago, Blastfrog said:

It amazes me how poorly GZDoom performs compared to something like an early Source engine game.

This is a pretty false equivalence.

 

The Source engine stems from the GoldSrc engine which itself stems from the Quake engine. You might remember that the whole big deal about the Quake engine is that it was the first PC game that was both fully 3D and didn't run like hot garbage. While it was made by id, they completely redid the level format and renderer and so on from scratch, as that way they could optimize everything they could ( to the point of feature loss, see below ) to make it so that the engine would fundamentally be built for the kind of rendering necessary for these quickly renderered, 3D spaces that would soon become the standard. Doom just doesn't have that - its engine was optimized with a lot of assumptions that don't translate well to the 3D standard, such as using level structures more easily translatable to quads, not tris.

 

Also, something to remember: in Source, most the level geometry just flat-out can't move. You have to convert a brush into a brush entity to allow it to be moved by itself or by other things, and creating a map entirely out of these brush entities causes it to perform far worse. On the flip side, literally every floor and ceiling in a Doom map is capable of moving - and there's no real feasible way to specifically mark a sector as "will move," as while it would be relatively simple to do so via scanning the map's specials while just playing vanilla Doom, that flies right out the window when you have to deal with ACS scripts not only being able to move floors and ceilings based on a variable sector tags, but also being able to manipulate sector tags and line specials. And that's not even getting into the fact that line specials can be called from DECORATE and MAPINFO.

 

You just really can't compare GZDoom to a full 3D engine built as a full 3D engine, because it's not one of those. It's a full 3D engine built from a cobbled-together, limited, and non-standard 3D engine, and that's a huuuuge difference due to just how much baggage that carries.

[Cacodemon345]

GZDoom performs things extremely hostile compared to full 3D engines.

[Bauul]

5 hours ago, Dragonfly said:

An idea for 'split screen' would be to have 4 instances of the game running connected to eachother in a netplay game, set the screens to windowed mode and have them sit in each corner.

I recall there was a conversation a few months back about GZDoom using Quake's demo approach (which, IIRC, is to basically create an internal multiplayer game and pipe the all actor's movements in as if they were being transmitted from a server). Graf explained that GZDoom's netplay code just isn't robust enough for that approach, so I wonder if it would be the same for splitscreen.

 

However, if the rumoured Zandronum merge does indeed happen, Zandronum's net code is hopefully robust enough that it could happen.

[Cacodemon345]

17 hours ago, Bauul said:

However, if the rumoured Zandronum merge does indeed happen, Zandronum's net code is hopefully robust enough that it could happen.

What?