The /newstuff Chronicles #59

what post is enhanced doom port? i do not know of a port called that. do they mean anything like jdoom or legacy?

don't be silly; you ought to know it means any port that removes most of DOOM's limits, the ones that would cause large or complex PWADs to crash or show HOMs or medusa effects, and whatnot. That means most ports used today. legacy will do, jdoom, i suppose, as well, don't know much about it myself. read the documentation or just try it.

i already uploaded it (a friend helped). thanks to all who called to help... look for "cloudssg" in newstuff in a week or so...

-heapsize 16 seems to be more than sufficient. Keep in mind that if you don't have the memory available physically, zdoom will have to use virtual memory and for a game like DOOM, that can really kill it. I doubt very many people really have 64 MB of free physical RAM under windows at any given point :P

I'm currently working on a DeHackEd patch to engineer new mega-weapons especially designed for quickly taking out the tightly packed hoardes of creatures in nuts.wad -- I currently have a 40x power BFG chaingun with explosive field effect (spawns explosions in addition to the normal tracer damage) -- this works wonders on the first room but is still less than optimal in the second room, since the cybs & spiders are immune to radius damage. I'm trying to come up with more ideas.

"You died :P Or did the demo just go out of sync?

How in blazes can that wad be completed anyway?"

You have to watch the demo with boom.

Yes, he beat the map. He didn't even try to kill all the monsters, but he beat it. And without getting hurt, by the way.
Nice work, but I'd love see it beaten the guns a'blazin' way.

re:dehacked

change the bullet puffs and blood splats to explosions, then go reduce the frame durations on the ssg and let rip ;-)

Also, for ZDoom, you can use the "detonate" codepointer and give the BFG a missile damage value of something like 100000. The missile damage value determines the blast radius as well, so you will have factored in the weapon's damage the hit, the blast, and the tracer. Just see how far it can go before it crashes. :P

And I like that shotgun idea...
* UAC PR Dept. goes off to do that right now.
Oh, and perhaps even have every currently frame between the firing frame and the refire set to fire as well, with a duration of 0? Helluvalot of damage there...

How does such a shitty map become such a big focus? :-) You've gotta commend the author for spending all that time placing the monsters, though... unless he used WadC.

I even gave ZDoom a -heapsize of 128 megs (whereas I have 256 total physical) running nuts.wad. It still only ran at about 4 frames per second, but then again my video card is only an ATI Rage X-pert 128 (16 megs), and my processor is only 333... Running Win98 with no TSR's, does anybody think I should hope for better performance? Also consider that I have Windows using 64 megs as my cache...
Boom, though, performed about twice as fast as ZDoom on that map.

"How does such a shitty map become such a big focus? :-)"

Yeah, it really is becoming some sort of (short lived?) phenomenon.

There's something about it.

It makes even fast machines run choppy as hell, source ports need extra parameters, its impossible to get 100% kills without cheating in some way, and there is no exploration at all and little gameplay. Despite all that, I had to keep playing it until 36 minutes later I had 100% kills.

36 minutes in a 2 room map!

Odd, very odd.

Well, regardless of what the person who made this map was thinking, at least this nuts.wad has given us something to use to compare source ports and whatnot. Anyone could have made this map, but it must have at least taken a bit of time to get the enemies all lined up nice and neat and with seemingly none overlapping or anything.

For example I, for one, didn't was quite surprized at just how much better a job boom did with this map than zdoom, even with a massive '-heapsize' implemented with the latter. Now I have a reason to give one more go at getting that damned thing to work with my sound card….

I doubt anyone is still reading this thread, but if they are:
Boom renders as the real game does -- it renders the screen internally. Zdoom and all the other ports use the windowsAPI -- that is they use the windows 2d renderer- Directx. and Directx is sadly slow.
nuts just exploits things that Boom handles well.
Boom is still one of the best ports... and if I had to choose just one, I think that might be it. nod to TeamTNT...

"re:dehacked

change the bullet puffs and blood splats to explosions, then go reduce the frame durations on the ssg and let rip ;-)"

Uhm, what if you get shot?

sssshhh, keep it quiet. I was hoping nobody would notice that flaw in my idea ;-)