pantheon

Is there anything like a MIDI soundtrack replacement for RR? I imagine there's a good amount of fitting music available to use.

Sure, assuming you're on Windows, you download Reshade, run it to install on your woof.exe (pick DirectX 9, skip "select preset" or I think you can use mine here), then for effect package pick "RSRetroArch by Matsilagi". Basically it will put the Retroarch shaders and some other files into your Woof directory and when you run it you'll see a Reshade menu and tutorial pop up. That's where you can enable CRT-Easymode and tweak it. The HOME key is the Reshade default for opening the menu but it's also Woof's default for opening the menu. Sounds like that's interfering. I'd just temporarily change it in Woof, get to Reshade, and set Reshade to something else (on the settings tab)... I put it on my numpad. Really I just changed the resolution settings for my monitor and set gamma output to 2. It's easy enough to mess around with the settings and you can always set everything back to defaults. It's fun to mess around with the other shaders too since they're all generally in the ballpark of the Doom era. If you have a 1440p or 4k monitor you're in luck since you can get into more sophisticated shaders like Royale which I have little familiarity with.

Hah, it helps if I edit the right copy of woof.cfg, my bad. Everything seems to work nicely there. I like the way cubic sounds with 22khz specifically, but yeah most people probably won't want to mess with it. I'm not super well-versed in Reshade but I've been enjoying CRT-Easymode ported from Retroarch on my 1080p monitor. I copied settings from DOSBox Staging's Easymode-Tweaked shader, here's what I use for the preset INI. It's subtle but close enough to what I remember of CRT monitors, it's like an extra bit of visual texture and cuts down on some of the soupiness, it lowers brightness a bit but at 0 gamma adjust it's about the same as my preferred -0.8 gamma without the shader: Screenshot looks a bit odd and stripe-y when downscaled (full res) but it gives a general idea. I'd say it looks much nicer in motion. Not strictly Woof related but I wasn't aware this shader was available for Reshade/Woof until recently.

There is a feature for toggling some sort of WASAPI resampler final pass that sounds relevant for liPillON's case but I don't think anything has changed in the past week to bring that into play: If you want some more punch, try downloading alsoft-config and set "sample format" to 16 bit int and disable the gain limiter. Make sure you turn the volume down since it gets loud!

It depends on the hardware renderer somehow if I remember right. So, probably not happening any time soon.

Looks like it adds a subtle vertical bobbing to your view similar to v_idlescale in Quake if you're familiar with that. I actually like v_idlescale 0.5 in vkQuake so this is cute too.

It started with this post by Linguica suggesting a "bug" with the vanilla fuzz effect and proposing a "solution". Ceski tried it out in Woof, here's a video preview. I like it, it's a bit smoother and harder to see, a little closer to the cloaking in Predator which might have been an inspiration, who knows.

I played the IWADs a ton growing up but took a long break from playing Doom regularly, started again in the last couple years. My weakness coming back and being introduced to modern PWADs was a kind of overconfidence or fixation on "optimizing" certain gameplay aspects like ammo usage that, while easier/fun in IWADs, turned out to be counterproductive in more demanding custom maps. It was like a mental block... surely I know what to do, I've known how to dodge a mancubus longer than some very good players have been alive. Of course you kill the big enemies first, just avoid the weaker ones, or wait for infighting, etc. I think it was actually a baja blast rd. post generally saying it's OK to waste ammo sometimes that made it click and I have gotten much better at just reacting sensibly to things and can clear harder content much more consistently. And when it doesn't work it's easier to see the worthwhile lessons to learn. Who cares if I waste a fifth rocket on an AV? Not dying to chip damage and stupid things feels a lot more badass than doing unimportant things perfectly.

No luck sadly :( I'm going to keep digging and see what else might come up. I feel like it's getting closer to something though... maybe OpenAL is also doing some kind of clipping removal or volume something? They talk about it here on the ZDoom forums a little bit. Edit: Actually it DOES help with DSPOPAIN, but only if you're standing still!

TL;DR: Fix sound clicks by adding tiny fades in/out to sounds to dodge clipping in the original files and prevent interrupted sounds from clicking? I've still been thinking about the residual audio clicks in Woof and other SDL ports. This is my System Shock log of descending into madness. I recorded the clips below with 44.1khz set in Woof dev build and Windows playback settings, "best" resampling mode (other modes don't make a difference), cutoffs disabled, 32 max channels. I also tested with current desktop Fedora to see if maybe something's just weird in Windows but it made no difference. Here are some examples of the clicking: https://vocaroo.com/1oBMjQf0fxZg - Spamming use on a wall (not a usual gameplay event, but useful in that it doesn't click if played normally). https://vocaroo.com/1awFmsh12ZjD - Despite my Woof version having this commit to fix chaingunner clicking, it's still there. Where does this kind of thing not happen, or at least happens much less? DOSBox (I use DOSBox Staging with SB16 device/sbpro2 filter), in Woof when standing still listening to crushers after this commit, and in GZDoom. For DOSBox Staging, I asked in their Discord and @johnnovak was super helpful explaining some of what they do with emulating Sound Blaster sound. A noticeable part of it is a 3.2khz low pass filter which does indeed squelch the clicks in Woof via a Windows equalizer (sample), but this is overkill and wouldn't be popular. They have other tricks to address Sound Blaster issues like clicks/pops besides filtering and there's one potentially useful inventory of them here, and I wonder if something like this envelope technique in response to #3 "brickwall audio" would be relevant/possible... That gets to the next part, Woof's fixed crushers. I had an idea from reading those Sound Blaster issues that sounds getting interrupted instantly could cause clicks. I deleted "looping sounds don't interrupt each other" (lines 276-290 from s_sound.c) to maybe break the clicking crusher fix and sure enough, even when standing still the crushers at the start of DBP25 are back to clicking as the sounds cut off. More exciting, whatever that did at the same time stopped other sounds from getting interrupted, and now I can spam use on a wall despite those clicking crushers, no problem! Of course, this makes the game sound weird, and it doesn't fix some other clicks that sound about the same as the interruptions, for instance at the end of DSPOPAIN. https://vocaroo.com/13QYCelTfxRs - This is how the regular DSPOPAIN sounds in Woof, no interrupted sound involved and you can hear the click or "snap" at the end. https://i.imgur.com/w6lZN3U.png - This is the spectrogram of DSPOPAIN, from what I understand the bright line at the far right is some kind of clipping or a click distortion or something that gets amplified when upsampled from 11khz to 44khz or whatever. The Doom sounds are full of stuff like that, and that's probably why "high resolution" audio packs like Per Kristian or Sound Bulb have been recommended to fix clicks, and why running Woof at 11025hz doesn't noticeably click. Sure enough, I ran the de-clipper to fix just the bright line at the end of this sound and it sounds way better in Woof at 44.1khz, it doesn't really lose anything but the click. Of course, source ports won't include subjectively "restored" IWAD assets. But GZDoom doesn't click and doesn't have to do that either. My guess is this is because GZDoom uses OpenAL, and instead of OpenAL maybe having a better resampler than SDL, it allows sounds to fade in or out a tiny bit and avoid playing those very stark and visible clicks or clipping or whatever it is at the beginning or end of the Doom sound effects. Many, but not all, sounds have the same kind of sudden clipping at the end. DSPODTH2 for example does not have that clipping and I don't remember ever hearing it click. There's an issue on the OpenAL Github page that got a feature like this added for a Silent Hill 2 PC port project. There's got to be more useful info in there too. That is just my assumption though, I don't know what GZDoom or OpenAL are really doing. Ideally those fades would be hard or impossible to notice and might also be part of how GZDoom avoids clicking crushers, I don't know. So, I guess the question is whether fixing these clicks is worth all the effort and investigating, and if implementing this kind of subtle fading is possible with SDL or otherwise. As it is, you will probably get a click in your ear within the first minute of E1M1 in many ports. The Doom sounds will surely have all kinds of other clicks and clips and things in the middles somewhere, but the ones at the beginning or end of a sound really stand out in a bad way. Maybe there's a better and easier way to accomplish this, I am not knowledgeable enough. I think Woof has a lot of attention paid to having high quality and customizable sound, and if these clicks were fixed, there's really not much else to complain about. Change da world.

Hah, that might not be the best recommendation for a new user after all. It sort of fills a niche I guess. Can't speak to any of the decisions though. Staging, especially with a shader like crt-easymode, is still a neat way to experience the "authentic" game and isn't too painful to get running. It has MIDI at least.

Woof has a "level brightness" feature that sounds perfect for this. Essentially, when you crank it up all the way, it's like having the light amp powerup on. Of course there's intermediate levels too. It's not gamma, it won't make anything washed out. Worth a shot!

35fps only on my 144hz Gsync monitor. Otherwise it just feels slippery and wrong. 35 has that gritty, crisp, precise feel that plants crave.

Chocolate Doom is the simplest, or real vanilla Doom with DOSBox Staging if you want a bit extra. The original DOSBox takes some tweaking but the defaults for the Staging version are pretty solid. I was impressed when I tried it out recently. Smooth framerate, nice input with raw mouse, good sound and fancy Sound Blaster emulation. Can use that with the original EXEs or DOOM32/DOOM128 for "limit removing" WADs. Doomkid's sticky post on vanilla Doom has good resources for that. https://dosbox-staging.github.io/about/ There's also Sprinkled Doom for a limit removing Chocolate Doom type option: https://sourceforge.net/projects/sprinkled-doom/

Speaking of brightmaps, could the Crispy toggles for walls/items also be added to Woof? It feels a bit wrong to easily find cell ammo that the mapper meant to hide. Or is this something I can just do with the Doom Retro lump support?