Woolie Wool

I'll have to take your word about 140, because my monitor only goes up to 75, at least at 4K. It might be a bit higher at lower resolutions, but I don't use them for Doom or Wolfenstein anymore because all my favorite ports have resolution scaling nowadays. That said, I do admit my memory of DOSBox Doom is pretty fuzzy, because DOSBox is a pain in the ass and it seems like every one of the 30 gorillion builds available has something wrong with it or a feature missing that I want, and I can just turn on the Athlon and play on real DOS. For 15 minutes anyway, because I don't have a desk for it, only a coffee table, and my hips are too old for this sitting cross-legged on the floor shit. Need to do something about that.

In my experience, nothing looks like a CRT but a CRT. If you want a real CRT, get one. If you don't, an image filter is no substitute. This message should be displayed a tic or two after the screenshot is taken, so it doesn't appear in the screenshot itself.

Brutal Doom just strikes me as Doom for people who like the idea of Doom, but don't really like Doom itself. I used to occasionally play it, but never on a regular basis--there were no maps where it really felt nice to play. Come to think of it, I don't even play my own weapon mods anymore, not even Modes of Destruction which was my last and best, and was partially designed as a more balanced, software-friendly, less over the top (I used Nashgore as a base for the gore) alternative to Brutal Doom. Has anyone tracked how Doom 4 has affected the popularity of Brutal Doom? Doom 4 struck me the moment I first played it as being much, much better at being Brutal Doom than Brutal Doom.

I thought, under the original engine, a tic was a frame and a frame was a tic (unless you're running a very slow machine, where the entire game can slow down while it waits for each tic to be processed in the game sim), and each tic equalled two refreshes (IIRC Doom drew each frame twice). Doom could never draw faster than 35 fps without a source port (MBF and SMMU may have been able to do 70, but that's it as far as DOS engines go), and the maximum possible would have been 70, which was the refresh rate of VGA based cards. 70 / 2 = 35. I have a DOS computer, I have a CRT, and I've run v1.9 on it. It runs at 35 fps. Wolfenstein 3D runs at 70 fps, and has a tic rate of 70 Hz. One tic = one VGA refresh (and 1 tic = 1 frame is true under ECWolf too--the FN Minimi in my mod Operation Serpent would "skip" frames of animation at 60 fps but appear perfectly smooth and synchronized at 70. MBF and SMMU may have been able to do 70, but I don't recall. 60 fps refresh was not even possible under VGA mode 13h, X, or Y, to my knowledge, it was 70 and only 70. There was no adjustable refresh rate or adjustable anything. If you run MS-DOS or DOSBox with a 60 or 120 Hz LCD, your monitor is throwing frames out, creating an awful "micro-stuttering" effect that makes 35 fps look much, much choppier than it really is. The thing with uncapped frames is that they are incorrect. The game states seen in an uncapped Doom source port are not real, but are illusions created by the renderer by interpolating between two discrete game states. If you have a monitor with an adjustable refresh rate, create a custom video mode at 70 or 140 Hz (depending on how fast your monitor can refresh) and run Crispy Doom with a capped framerate under that video mode. It is absolutely buttery smooth and consistent, and nothing like most people think it is. So smooth, in fact, that I cannot believe it's desynced from the refresh. It's just too perfect not to be synced. E: And if you still don't believe me, run Alpha 0.5 and then run v1.9. Doom's ticrate and framerate were halved from 70 to 35 at around the time Tom Hall was fired and the original design was tossed out, and it's obvious if you compare them.

So does A_Chase still work somewhat normally under -fast, while skill 5 has some extra feature that makes monsters instantly go into their attack state when a line of sight is present? Is this also what the aggression features does in ZDoom difficulties?

I'd be interested in seeing this refresh rate video you mentioned. I would have figured the computer or the Doom engine would do "syncing" automatically if, like me, you have your refresh rate set to a multiple of 70 Hz. So does this mean MS-DOS with a CRT and VGA compatible card, where the refresh rate is naturally 70 Hz, would be better for capped framerates than even my Windows/DOSBox setup, because everything is done at such a "raw" level? I have a DOS computer too and performance-wise I never noticed much difference between 35 fps under DOSBox or a source port and 35 fps under MS-DOS.

Actually, it is possible to run Doom at "native" resolution with nearest-neighbor scaling, but DOSBox does not do this by default and it it has to be set up (I've never used Steam guides, I instead configure DOSBox through a launcher). Decent software for those who play with a mouse? Novert. Edit your config to raise the mouse sensitivity to 18 or so. There's your good mouse control. And doom2-plus will run limit removing wads as long as they don't require more than about 64 MB of RAM (which applies to both DOSBox and real DOS). And 35 fps is fine because the game engine runs at 35 fps. Raising the framerate will not give you any new information, and I've set my monitor to refresh at 70 Hz so there is no micro-stuttering like there is for most people running 60 or 120 Hz. There's nothing it does that some port can't do technically "better" (I generally use Crispy Doom for vanilla/limit removing and GZDoom for everything else) but I played Doom when it was new, when source ports were unimaginable, and occasionally I like to revisit that, and classic Doom at least works properly, unlike DOS Boom and MBF where the sound and especially music are incorrect and may not work at all on many hardware configurations. E: and even in source ports I cap the framerate to 35 fps. I'm used to it now.

Is it because of some drawback of the emulator, or are you talking about the original executable in general?

A factoid is a trivial or irrelevant fact. The word for the Nirvana story is "bullshit".

I'd say software Quake was much more of a "Crysis" than Doom was. Without GL, Quake was not playable at all on most computers, and all those high resolutions were completely useless for 2-3 years after Quake came out because the CPUs available were just not powerful enough. GLQuake was clunky, ugly, and generally shitty compared to modern Quake ports and looked a whole lot worse than DOS Quake, but it didn't matter because it was playable on normal people's machines and DOS Quake was not. They called the Voodoo and friends accelerators back then for a reason, they made games fast, not pretty.

I think what made the later MS-DOS era so great was the fact that you had these monstrously powerful 60+ MHz computers that weren't particularly good at anything, but it didn't matter because they could just throw cycles at things a SNES needed special hardware to deal with, so you got all sorts of weird and wonderful game engines with bizarre rendering techniques. PC games were way more varied and unpredictable around 1992-96 than equivalent console games.

On Adam Neely's excellent youtube channel, he once advised people getting into music composition/songwriting to always ask themselves one question: "Do I like this?". This is the One Rule to which all others are strictly secondary. The same applies to level design. Do whatever, play it, then ask yourself, "Do I like this?". Then make something else, play it, and ask that question again. Repeat for every map you make. Trying to adhere to Correct Doom Level Design Theory all the time will lead to you making maps that look like Esselfortium or Skillsaw maps with all the soul and fun sucked out of them. Play through mapsets you are familiar with, and pay attention to architecture, encounter setups, recurring themes or motifs, etc. "Forlorn Fortress" from Eternal Doom and "Resistance is Futile" from Hell Revealed are both esteemed, iconic Doom levels from 1997 but are diametrically opposed in terms of design philosophy. Either map could be "right" or "wrong" or a mixture of both according to a certain mapper's approach to level design. Play some of "the classics" with an open mind, but not so open your brain falls out. Which ones? I'unno. Pick a few. If you keep sweating the details you'll just be a chronic procrastinator like me with my Wolf3D project I should have finished over a year ago!

But those exist as mods too. Stronghold and Skulldash come to mind immediately, as do all sorts of puzzle and gimmick wads (Cyberdreams, anyone?). E: Also Descent is nothing at all like Doom. In many ways it is closer to Wolf3D, except that its tiles are cubes, can connect vertically as well as horizontally, and can be deformed and transformed in a number of ways.

Fire animation switches target and the countdown timer restarts. That's 99% of bullshit archvile deaths solved with two tiny changes that do not affect the archvile's combat role or threat level. Everything else should be left as it is.

What does "game modes" even mean in the context of a single player game with a very limited set of mechanics? There are already plenty of (G)ZDoom gameplay mods, why do we need to bring in a concept from competitive multiplayer when "Doom but with different rules" already has hundreds of different implementations, a few of which I actually made myself back when I was into gameplay mods?

Everybody except the OP was having too much fun playing the original instead.

Will vanilla-style software fading (in software mode itself) ever return to ZDoom? The excessively bright light around the player is something I've noticed in ZDoom for well over a decade.

Who knew One Weird Trick I discovered to make a particular GL-only wad look softwarey would have such legs! I never used bloom though, the idea of the sky and other bright things bleeding into the level architecture is un-Doomy to me.

Cynical show us your video of Valiant map08 *evil laughter*

I just played the first map of this wad. My first reaction: I should have been paying more attention this year because this is like, everything I want from Doom right now. A comprehensive set of new assets that leave the original gameplay untouched and legible to the long-time Doom player? Check. Ancient ruins theme? Check. Huge, sprawling, beautiful maps that alternate extended periods of calm reflection with violent, frantic battles that give these gigantic Eternal Doom-like ruinscapes teeth to match their grand vistas? Check. Software friendly with no GL bullshit, ridiculously dark lighting, or truecolor textures? Check. I think I'm going to play more of this right now. My only wishes are that it had a matching custom smallfont and bigfont that were used consistently across all the menu assets, and a new palette that has some wacky modified color ranges to make the visuals really pop in software. Otherwise, this is amazing!

What a cute little map! It feels like something from 1996-97, perhaps a lost entry in Malcolm Sailor's CHORD series. The texturing is '90s slapdash but still thoughtful about color and contrasts. It is very short, and only took me about ten minutes including several deaths and reloads. It is hard for a '90s style map, and like CHORD, loves to box you in close quarters with revenants or hell knights. Ammo is scarce, requiring you to count every shell, and health is scarcer. The stakes steadily ratchet up as you progress, culminating in a deadly pincer where a genuine horde of imps, revenants, and pain elementals drive you back the way you came...where an archvile is waiting along with several resurrected monsters. I just killed the archvile and dashed for the exit; only Tyson fans who find the secret berserk and know how to use it properly will be able to get 100% kills. Architecture? Who cares. I was too busy getting bony fists rammed up my asshole to care about the detail or lack of it. It was a good quick fight and makes me eager to see what sort of levels you might make on a larger scale.

Personally the fast imps were my favorite part of Valiant, because it meant that you couldn't just ignore imps like you often can in OG Doom. They're always a threat and you have to keep an eye on them.

You mean one of the hardest map from the '90s hardest megawad, and a chief codifier of slaughtermaps, that is not only full of imps but jammed with pinkies, mancs, archviles, and more? As opposed to Valiant map08 where you can very quickly die to the relative handful of imps at the start if you don't know what you're doing. Valiant was an excellent megawad and your take is garbage. I didn't camp my way through Valiant and from my experience of the megawad, such a thing isn't even possible. I had made multiple attempts years ago when I was a much more campy player and camping was never a viable strategy in many of those maps. It was only when I learned to play aggressively, by playing entry-level slaughtermaps ("Luxor" and "Mortuary" from Epic 2, Skillsaw's own Vanguard, etc.) that I completed Valiant.

All three, plus the palette, plus the fact that the author went light on out-of-palette colors so most maps retain most of their original colors. The Void map has a lot of psychedelic colored lighting and it looks utterly horrendous with these settings. Basically what I'm doing is: Resolution scale: 640x400, actual resolution 3840x2160 @ 70 Hz cl_capfps 1 vid_vsync 1 NO anti-aliasing or texture filtering No mipmaps Distance fog: vanilla Software-style banding enabled Ambient occlusion set to maximum Tonemap setting: palette