Hell Theatre

The invisibility behavior originates in Heretic and the reason it defaults to that is, if I remember correctly, the majority opinion of forum users at the time when it was decided to restore the original. Don't forget that long ago ZDoom completely eliminated that option! But why are you picking out ZDoom here? Playing Boom (the original) and MBF on default settings is exhibiting the same amount, if not even more of gameplay related issues. This has been standard operating procedure for ports when the source was freshly released. The main difference is that those two ports are dead and replaced by now but GZDoom still has to work with that 20 year legacy of mods for different default setups. What are Eternity's defaults anyway? Boom or vanilla? If it's Boom, welcome to the club! Agreed. But I guess that's the difference between a full feature implementation and making the things work that could be made to work. If you look at the changes that were made, it was all relatively superficial, but the remaining things require far deeper investigation of the existing implementation and how to translate it to another port. At least that's what I got from the discussion when it was hot. On the other hand, does any other port out there even support Strife?

Yopu know that most other ports have NO working multiplayer at all, right? It does have demo support - just not vanilla compatible demo support. The engine wouldn't even exist in its current form if it had to keep all the stuff that is needed for vanilla compatible demo support. I think it's entirely reasonable to use a separate engine that specializes in demo playback if demos are of interest, instead of insisting that every engine gets bogged down by the restrictions this imposes. If you want both at the same time you most likely end up with some ugly compromises along the way - or get held up for far too long by blending the new features with the needs of playing back vanilla demos. Have you ever looked at Eternity and all the code duplication it needs to support both its features and demo playback? You are aware that the complexity of those two engines cannot be compared, do you? If you want to get the same performance out of a feature rich port as you get out of a basic-level port, you would have to strip it down to that basic level. And what for? That I actually can run NUTS.wad at full frame rate? So what? You are the "real" Doomer because you have "seen the light" and only use those ports which reenact what Doom would have been 20 years ago? And those who use GZDoom, its hardware renderer and possibly its fancy effects are yet to be converted? Correct me if I am wrong, but that's the vibe I get from that statement.

GZDoom for me. It really is the only one delivering the whole package - modernized visuals, good editing features and overall the best content support. As for the rest, some quick notes: Doomsday looks nice but performance is far, far too bad to even be considered. Also, still no Boom support which is a big minus. Chocolate, Retro, Crispy: No, I have no interest in stuff that pretends it's 1998. Prboom+: Good for demos, but for actual playing I don't need it. EDGE: It's getting good again. Here's some hope. At its current state I'd pass, though because it still seems a bit buggy. ZDoom: Do people really still care? It's been abandoned and GZDoom has already made some significant improvements over it in the software rendering department. Eternity: Two issues strike me: A) It's about features but makes absolutely no effort to run feature-rich maps made for other ports. As a result the offering of content is so limited that its advantage over PrBoom is entirely nullified. Over the last 5 years I have pulled it out twice to play some maps, to be immediately retired afterward. B) Of the feature centric ports it is the only one without a hardware renderer, and I think this limits its appeal even further. Which is sad because it actually could be so much more popular if it tried to step out of its sandbox.

WTF? Do you even know how much nonsense your post contains? Try any 320x200 Windows game on a driver from the last 10 years and let's talk again. Yes, they require "Programs and hacks". The main problem being that modern Windows's drivers have problems with palettes. That's why, for example, all modern Doom ports have dumped native paletted support by now. Yes, new ports suppress them, but you clearly did not read what I said, namely that the ORIGINAL games from 20 years ago suffer from this problem. And not all have source ports to offer. To get around this you need a graphics driver-side workaround to give them a shorter extension string. Yes, a lot of APIS were deprecated. But very few were REMOVED! Even DirectDraw still exists in modern Windows - even the 64 bit version! The 16 bit installer problem was acknowledged but you conveniently ignore that acknowledgement - and if you get a working installation you normally can make it work on a modern system. Been there, done that a few times. Wrong! Most old software fails for a relatively small number of reasons: 1. Underestimating the maximum size of a resource and not being able to handle the case if the assumed maximum gets exceeded. 2. Underestimating the maximum performance of a modern system and getting into problems when a too coarse counter gets set to a value that's too low or too high to be handled reliably. 3. Depending on certain hardware quirks - the most prominent example being some CD checks that abused system bugs. 4. Depending on undefined behavior of the system's API or not using it properly. All of these were extremely common in games programming 20 years ago, and they all lead to stuff not working any lionger today. It is very rare that a clean program will break and many games of that vintage still work fine today - at least those that use hardware accelerated 3D, because those APIs haven't changed much.

And back to topic: No, I don't use Linux. Why should I? Yes, it's surely a free operating system but it also shows all the drawbacks of that. Unlike Windows and macOS which are mostly homogenous systems where components cleanly interact, Linux often strikes me as an unpolished hodgepodge, where for every task some free library was chosen but nobody saw any need to polish the whole thing and make it a consistent experience.

@kb1: What are you trying to say here? Edward850 countered your point that Microsoft "intentionally" broke backwards compatibility with old software when this is clearly not true, save for the 16 bit issue. Unlike on Macs, where stuff regularly breaks, any cleanly programmed software from the Windows 95 days will still work. The only exception I experienced is that 8 bit DirectDraw games show issues on modern systems, crashes on overlong OpenGL extension strings by Quake engine games and that they cannot use 320x200 video modes anymore. But these are both issues mainly caused by removed support in modern video drivers, not the operating system itself. The main roadblock with older software is not system incompatibilities but bad assumptions by that software's programmers.

So, they revert some regulations from 2015. I can't remember that the internet in the USA was in trouble before that date. That highly depends on how such regulations are set up. But as things stand, most other countries have a healthy internet structure where competition between ISPs will ensure that nobody can ever afford to meter traffic for selected sources and such.

As sad as this kind of incompetent "journalism" is, it still hides something far sadder: Looking at the various music downloads stores, most are, bluntly spoken, pure shit. That goes particularly for Amazon who only have MP3 on offer, but nothing modern. The only one that genuinely seems to care about quality is iTunes, where not only better compression formats are available, including lossless, but it also seems to be the only one which offers the CDs' bonus tracks. Again no such luck on Amazon which rarely have more than the base versions, and in inferior quality. So from a pure commercial standpoint, the sooner MP3 really dies, the better for the customers. Today bandwidth is high enough that any store not offering lossless formats should be boycotted!

So true. Ironically this goes for all ports that tried to build a 'Let's define everything through universal magic' format, i.e. Doomsday's DED, EDGE's DDF and Eternity's EDF. They all contain good ideas, do an ok job at exposing the engine's innards - but in the end are complicated, unwieldy clunkers that all fell into the same trap of making the defined data parsing friendly, not modding friendly, by lacking a crucial degree of abstraction in some departments And because these formats are the foundation on which the engines work, they are non-negotiable. Funny that ZDoom with its multitude of different different lumps, each with its own syntax, that are all being parsed separately was the only one that had success gaining traction among mappers and modders. Although Doomsday is a relatively successful engine, we cannot consider DED a success, because - where's the mods? I'm not sure what this should tell us, but one thing that's for sure is that the mappers should not really be bothered by engine internals if it can be avoided.

Me, too. But sadly, if you check the discussion, that one person who disagrees is shitting over the entire thread, essentially telling everybody "I am right and you are too blind to see my wisdom." This will more likely result in the other n-1 devs just giving up. Maybe that's the sinister master plan here because it should be clear by now that Ladna can not win this discussion. So much blabbering and not one single 'like' received for it... :P

I was just reading through all this lengthy stuff and I have to wonder: Why this heated discussion? I'm sorry, but I do not get what Ladna is up here. To me his counterexample for an INI-based DECORATE replacement looks like a perfect example of redundancy for the sake of doing it differently. It's not even proper INI because with INI I would assume that the value is just that - a value being stored somewhere, but here it ends up as some block of code that needs to be parsed again. Which is ironic because he's been rambling on about standard parsers endlessly but to crunch this stuff into engine-digestable data it needs to be processed by - guess what - a non-standard parser geared at parsing this particular chunk of data again. So where's the gain here? I have seen great parsing solutions that can be given a text and they return a stream of tokens - here's an identifier, next is a number, a string literal, a comma or whatever else needs to be isolated. These parsers are ridiculously easy to use, they help write short and concise code that gets directly to the point of the matter and allow to create data format that help present the data in the most adequate form possible. INI is the total antithesis of such an approach, here the formality of the defintion takes center stage above everything, even at the risk of misrepresenting the data or not being able to express it adequately. And what's so much better about first parsing the key/value pair and then cracking the values into several subvalues with such a tokenizing parser anyway? Why not define a format that uses the tokenizing parser from top to bottom? But wait - isn't that what DECORATE is, assuming people do not abuse the shenanigans that are allowed by Hexen's script parser?

That entirely depends on how the code is maintained and if its state of affairs is conductive to contribution. And here I see some issues. Let's first start with the ultimate negative example, Doom Legacy. Declaring this code a mess would be a gigantic understatement. It is utterly broken, unless using an old and long obsolete version of GCC to compile it. And don't even think about using anything else, it won't work. Been there, tried that, gave up, and I don't think I was the only one to see that happen. For obvious reasons such a port won't see any external contributors, nobody wants to work with such code. PrBoom is nowhere near this state but from looking at the project I see one potential issue: It only comes with project files for ancient Windows compilers. Never mind that the Visual Studio 8 (i.e. 2005) solution can be upgraded, but the implications lie deeper. The mere presence of the project files suggests that someone actively develops the port with some ancient compilers, one 12, the other 18(!) years old. What that means is that all those neat features that come bundled with modern C++ versions are out! Even though the code base is C, it could easily interoperate with some C++ code, but as things stand, if that code uses some more modern stuff from the STL the game is over, if one wants to get the feature back into the mainline. Again, progress is stalled by maintainers that are thoroughly living in the past. And what for? Presumably so that the compiled binary can run on Windows 95 - I really cannot see any other reason to stick to a broken compiler like MSVC 6 that doesn't even properly support C++. So who's up to working with a dinosaur language from another time than the fossil programmers that aged with it?

Presenting misinformation as fact needs to be clearly pointed out as such! If you want to let that stand, present the numbers that prove that PrBoom is so important that a mapper "would lose a lot of players" if it was not supported! A mapper saying he maps for vanilla Doom or Boom because he prefers the style of maps that allows to make is perfectly legitimate. But mapping for those engines to maximize audience is bollocks. To maximize audience you need an uncompromised product, and in this case that includes choosing the proper engine for what you want to make! Say what you want, but maps based on hacks and exploits do not feel like a polished product, they feel like the things they used: hackish!

This is flat out wrong. I think this has been said before, but what makes you people even THINK that PrBoom and other low end ports are the engine of choice for most players? This is what I wrote last year about the same thing and I believe everything I said back then still applies to the situation: In clear English: All you'd lose is the hard core of Doomworld, but very little beyond that. Last year PrBoom's and all other 'classic' engines' downloads were dwarfed by GZDoom's downloads, I cannot say what the state of things is now, because the counters are no longer available, but I don't think it has changed much since then.