Starting using Eternity, initial thoughts

[Spectre01]

I've tried the, I guess, stable release at the top of the forum, and the sound volume is a lot better there.

[Altazimuth]

@Spectre01 Check Windows volume mixer. Your Eternity.exe volume might be lower than you expect it to be, even if you didn't manually modify it.

[Spectre01]

@Altazimuth Cheers man! It was indeed set way lower than my system volume.

[printz]

On 26.02.2018 at 4:43 AM, Killer5 said:

Also one observation:

- Is it possible to have a monster counter similar to prboom+'s counter with smart totals off? Currently the counter in eternity's boom style hud shows what appears to be the number of monster kills I have acheived out of the number of monsters in the map rather than the number of monsters dead vs the number of monsters in the map. I would have expected the monster counter to never exceed the total monster count in the map.

This sounds like an important feature for new mods where a lot of monsters may arbitrarily spawn (such as by scripting) or be resurrected, but I wouldn't enable it for classic maps, because I like it when total kills exceed 100% because you let an archvile do its work, or final demon spawners. Definitely won't be enabled for vanilla Doom gameplay in case you want to run for max kills.

[Killer5]

@printz

Hmm I don't follow that design decision especially from a max kills perspective (I am assuming you mean something like UV Max).

 

UV Max requires you to exit with all monsters dead including monsters rez'd by viles. You obviously don't need to worry about lost souls. If the monsters killed counter keeps increasing beyond the original total monster count in the map then the count is useless because it is possible to have monsters alive when the monsters killed count is greater than the count of monsters originally in the map.

 

The numbers will need to end up being equal to one another after everything other than lost souls are dead if you want to allow the player to verify everything is dead via the counter. I guess you could also use iddt at the end of the demo you recorded and verify that way assuming you can turn everything except the live monsters black. Seems more worthwhile to bring meaning to the monster counter though because you can simply skip to the end of your demo and take a second to check the counters in order to verify your max.

 

Here is a simple map outlining what I mean:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/52dr14ijloyi7cm/MAP01.wad?dl=0

 

You can kill the zombieman a bunch.. the monsters killed exceeds the total monsters in the map and the counter loses all meaning as far as UV Max is concerned.

 

I am not using the -vanilla command because I very rarely run maps which would use that command (mostly boom compatible maps).

 

I am using the 64bit dev build from February 21. I have looked at the hud options but didnt see a way to modify the counter so I assume the behavior I described is the only behavior for the counter.

 

Because people in the past have submitted invalid max demos because of the monster counter incorrectly showing all monsters killed I think it makes a lot of sense for the counter to behave similar to prboom+ with smart totals off if max running is something yall wish to support.

 

Here is an example of someone posted an invalid max due to counter error:

 

I guess another use case for a monster counter that can definitively prove everything is dead would be during map testing if speedrunning is not a priority.

Edited March 15, 2018 by Killer5

[printz]

That seems like an arbitrary pushing of the goal posts, especially when the demo was recorded and metered with vanilla Doom. If you decide to camp and kill revived zombiemen, then fair game, you did get 100% kills, didn't you? By that logic, why not also require killing all lost souls?

 

I see what you mean but I'm not much a fan of changing it (it would possibly marginalize vanilla Doom for some arbitrary port expectation, something which I'm against), unless running a mod with lots of non-vanilla thing spawning.

[Spectre01]

3 hours ago, printz said:

If you decide to camp and kill revived zombiemen, then fair game, you did get 100% kills, didn't you?

Max kills is generally considered to be: All starting and any revived enemies killed, excluding Lost Souls. You can't farm resurrections even if it says 100% at the end.

[Altazimuth]

There's always the possibility of having it be optional.

[Killer5]

Can someone explain exactly what this command does and how it is used: -recordfrom

[Altazimuth]

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Parameter#-recordfrom

"This parameter was meant to record from a saved game, where savegame is generally a number from 0 to 5, and demo the name of the lump to be recorded. It was never fully implemented, as in versions 1.0 to the leaked "1.4" of Doom it warps to the start of the level the saved game takes place in, instead of loading the saved game, and does not record a demo. In later versions, it was removed."

Lee Killough re-added it in 1998.

[Killer5]

Ugh.

 

I assume that there is a way to detect when someone actually uses this? I need to use this command to figure out what the demo looks like.

[Altazimuth]

Dunno. Literally never heard of this command line parameter before.

[Killer5]

Hmmm I guess this doesn't allow a person to 'append' commands to another demo already made. One of my reasons for hating prboom+ and one of the reasons I streamed was because of the recordfromto command.

 

This is also one of the primary reasons (if not THE reason) why I use eternity.

 

It appears to just start the player from the start of the map again causing the entire demo to desync. So it is whatev. Thanks for the info!

[Linguica]

4 minutes ago, Killer5 said:

This is also one of the primary reasons (if not THE reason) why I use eternity.

 

I mean, if someone wanted to cheat with Eternity, they could just add the code to enable such a command themselves anyway.

[Killer5]

Hmmm.. if demos created by phony versions of eternity are possible and would stay in sync with official versions then that is unfortunate. I guess in the end it doesn't matter when it comes to cheating huh?

[Gez]

You could always run the game, regardless of executable used, in a virtual machine with save states. Then you could save the entire image of the process and its data and its environment (including stuff such as the system clock) at a given moment, and reload it afterwards, and the executable would be none the wiser.

[Spectre01]

What level of TAS'ing is currently possible in Eternity?

[Killer5]

LOL. whelp. I guess if someone really wanted to do all of that to cheat then gg. The fact that tas stuff isn't supported out of the box is fine with me at the moment.