Shadow Hog

Whoops, completely forgot that might be possible. Toggled some Impassible flags to prevent that happening in future builds, thanks for the heads-up.

I suspect it'd more be the introduction of another, higher cross-platform mapping standard, with traditional Boom/MBF-compatible not really going anywhere for legacy reasons. In the case of UMAPINFO, the mapping itself is more or less exactly as limited as ever, it's just there's a bit more freedom in how maps are ordered in the overall flow of the playthrough. I guess BossAction is an exception, you can do some interesting setups on any given map with that, but that's about it.

Apologizing in advance for tooting my own horn, but I went ahead and released a version of the mod I've been working on using this feature. So, now there's content using it you can test against. In fact, while I'm aware there's still discussion to go about how UMAPINFO WAD demos are going to need to be formatted going forward, I've nevertheless made a recording of me playing through one path of the mod, going across two secret exits and such. Plays back fine in PrBoom+/UMAPINFO 2.5.1.7. IDK if this is of any use to anyone, but in case it is, there you go. I do have another feature to request, though I'm not sure how we'd go about implementing it (and if it doesn't happen, I can deal with it): some way to do Doom [1]-esque splats/"YOU ARE HERE" on the intermission screen, indicating where you are and where you've been. Given the nature of the mod I made, having some way to track what maps you've visited on a chart would be useful. Granted, I'm not sure how it's handled in the original Doom; maybe it just blindly puts splats on every map before the current one, maybe with a special case for secret maps? I haven't paid very close attention to it, I admit. (EDIT: I went ahead and checked it and it does appear to do exactly that, blindly put the splats on every map before the current one. Didn't check how it handled secret levels.) That would be a great way to promote the feature. What more do you think needs to be done as far as presentation goes?

Yeah, afraid that's the catch with 32-bit operating systems, and why everyone's moved on to 64-bit now. Though I will admit having a 32-bit OS makes it feasible to run 16-bit programs... although I have to imagine most of those kinda won't work even still, because Windows has just changed that much since ye olde 3.1.

This works for me, provided #3 is in fact the case. I think everyone in this argument was cool with "label = clear", yes?

I mean that's nice, but I would really rather something being there be the default, with the option to disable it on the user's end should they prefer that look, as you do. I'm with you insofar as this additional field could be used to change it to something non-standard. I'm really not with you on the standard then being "nothing at all".

I will say one thing for this discussion: I genuinely had never noticed Doom 2's default labels were "LEVEL 1" etc. and not "MAP01" etc. until this fact became a sticking point. So, that's one positive thing that came of it, I guess? TIL.

As a mod maker, I don't want to be forced to explicitly include the label just to have it appear. This feels like it's passing the buck onto me for no apparent good reason.

That sounds like a nightmare. I'd really rather this behavior be consistent across ports. I definitely get the appeal of allowing modmakers to change it away from the lump name if they so chose to, because that's a thing DeHackEd let you get away with and the inability to do it would be a step backwards. That's fine. I don't get why the default has to be not showing any label at all if this new "Label" field is not populated, though.

Assuming you mean that as in "don't display MAPxx and just show the map's title", no, that is definitely not the behavior I was expecting to see...

Honestly, it might be better to get feature suggestions out now while discussion's active rather than holding your peace. I know I still want NoCrouch and NoJump, although given the discussion on an enhanced format standard brought up a theoretical "JumpStrength = x" variable (because apparently, but understandably, the jump height isn't consistent across all Doom source ports that implement it), that might be preferred (with "NoJump" being superceded by "JumpStrength = 0", or maybe it'd be better to override JumpStrength entirely with NoJump? IDK.).

"Label = clear" should probably fill this niche of "explicitly don't display anything here".

For my own two cents, for a naive mapper's perspective on this, I should note that for my own mapset, I had just assumed the engine would prepend the map name to the automap, and didn't realize it was actually a hard-coded part of the string in the vanilla executable (and thus modified as such with DeHackEd patches). The proposed additional parameter of "Label" or "AutomapLabel" or whatever the final wording comes to works for me, but I don't intend to really use it unless I absolutely have to to continue getting what I'm already getting: the map's lump name verbatim. I can certainly see the use for people who want to be cute with the names and say things like "Level 1" instead of "MAP01", though.

Although this is just shy of a month after the OP asked about it, "vanilla Doom monsters but occasionally one of them is stronger" sounds exactly like LegenDoom to me. It doesn't change the enemy spawns or anything, but certain enemies are randomly set to be "legendary" (in the sense of Bethesda Fallout games) and, when they would normally die, will suddenly reveal (with a specific sound effect and a little pentagram symbol beneath them) they had 3x the usual health for their monster type and get faster and more aggressive accordingly. Killing the legendary monster will drop a randomized weapon that can replace one of the slots of your usual loadout, all with one specific randomized upgrade over a stock weapon. The catch would be you can only carry one of each slot, so you have to pick-and-choose which perk you think will actually benefit you more in the long run.

This thread was created entirely out of posts from the thread about Graf's UMAPINFO-implementing variant, so it should be about that; the thread title doesn't actually mention that fact, however, which is probably why people are confused.

Just to follow up on what I was saying earlier about opening bug reports on the UMAPINFO implementation in GZDoom, I've gotten around to making the bug reports. Five of them, in fact: [GZ 4.1.3] UMAPINFO-defined episodes don't show skill select [GZ 4.1.3] UMAPINFO: InterMusic inconsistencies [GZ 4.1.3] UMAPINFO and ZDoom clusters do not mix well [GZ 4.1.3] UMAPINFO "Episode = clear" and ordering weirdness [GZ 4.1.3] SIGIL UMAPINFO thinks every E5 map is E5M9 Obviously not entirely relevant to PrBoom+/UMAPINFO 2.5.1.7 discussion, but relevant to UMAPINFO discussion as a whole, I suppose.

I suspect that's more a debate about whether we're talking last stable release or last experimental release, and whether the inclusion of "test" in the version name means it counts as the latter or if it's still considered the former.

Might as well just get this example WAD out before I go to bed even if it's not exactly "later today" like I promised. Here's my base resource WAD stripped down about as bare as I can make it. "UMAPINFOBugExample.wad" is the main WAD here; it's without "Episode = Clear", but there's a separate WAD file in the same ZIP file (with the not-at-all-longwinded filename "UMAPINFOBugExampleAddon_EpisodeEqualsClear.wad") whose only lump is a copy of the UMAPINFO with "Episode = Clear" added, which you can load after the main WAD to force that line's presence. This way you can see that the episode selection isn't working in either case, but the difficulty selection also breaks down when "Episode = Clear" is present. There's some GZDoom bugs exhibited in this sample WAD too, but I'll open tickets for that on the relevant forum tomorrow. 20190617_UMAPINFOBugExample.zip

My understanding was that Crispy Doom was Chocolate Doom with a raised resolution (hence it looks more "crispy", and the name also evokes the image of crisped rice, which is a common inclusion in chocolate bars). I don't think it's Boom-supporting but this is me speaking without actually researching to confirm if it is or not, so I could very well be wrong on that matter. I am just as lost as you about Doom Retro however.

Plopping this back in the thread it belongs in after it got moved to a thread about naming: as far as wide-eyed dreams for this port go, I really don't have any features to suggest that aren't directly related to UMAPINFO itself (and at the moment that'd just be stuff like NoJump and NoCrouch, stuff that this particular port would ignore but jump-and-crouch-implementing ports would use as they would in their own MAPINFO implementations; maybe intermission definitions a la Doom [1] as well, though that's super low-priority for me). Anything else would be more in the purview of kb1's proposed enhanced-port standard, and the place to discuss that is over here.

PrBoom💊?

As far as the name goes, I was thinking, IDK, UMBoom or something. I know GZBoom was already suggested but that's too close to GZDoom for comfort, as was already noted in response. UMBoom is pretty simple: it's PrBoom+, but with UMAPINFO. (EDIT: removing the rest of this post because it doesn't belong in a thread about naming)

Ah, yes, you're encountering the same roadblock I am. I was gonna post an example WAD when I was at home and thus in a position to do so, but due to Father's Day I am presently not. My own observations: Episode selection appears to work correctly for Ultimate Doom, so SIGIL should work correctly. Episode selection does not work for Doom 2 (and presumably Final Doom as such but I didn't try those). If you define new episodes, the episode selection screen will not appear at all, only the skill selection screen. It does, however, load MAP01 just fine at the selected skill. The above is true if you do not use "episode = clear". If you do use "episode = clear", you still won't get the episode selection screen in Doom 2, but now the issue TheMightyHeracross encounters appears: the skill selections do not work at all, except for Nightmare!, which will progress into MAP01 as expected. I'll see if I can't still get my example WAD uploaded later today, because I have some bug reports with GZDoom's implementation as well so it'll cover those as well as this.

Oh, hot damn, an official release. I guess I should hurry up and post a demo of the WAD I was making for this feature so people have something to play with, then. Maybe I'll look into getting that out by next week? Art assets wouldn't be particularly ready and regrettably I'd be getting feedback from other players on map balancing for the first time, but it's something.

Yeah, sorry, all the testing I've done with UMAPINFO's been for Doom 2 to this point, and I never thought to add episode definitions to my mapset so I never got around to testing it there either. For what it's worth the other features defined in umapinfo.txt seem to work flawlessly. EDIT: Also it just dawned on me that I should be using "SkyTexture" instead of "Sky" in the map defintions, but I'm not sure what the result of that error will be since I can't even get into E5M1 at the moment. I'll correct the above UMAPINFO accordingly; this post shall mark that I did "Sky = "SKY5"" instead of "SkyTexture = "SKY5"" for posterity I guess.