SaladBadger

I vaguely wonder if there's ever been an attempt at a doom engine that's optimized for the original hardware specs, since with the release of the source code and further work done on it thorugh boom and the like, its been revealed there are a few things here and there that definitely could be optimized further.

I'm curious how much of a speed boost it would actually have on a period spec machine.

I want to write an article discussing Doom rendering pre-BSP, and I have basically all the 0.5 rendering code mapped out at this point and a pretty good idea of how it works, but I'd like to get it reimplemented to actually demonstrate and verify functionality, but that's uh, going well...

It's just rendering sector 0 (the map border in map 1) while spinning ATM, but there's some bugs causing weird clipping ATM. Ugh. Fixing decompiler artifacts is certainly a special kind of fun. No flats and recursion quite yet.

I've been curious if any emulator can run the Doom alpha's high color mode. The Dr. Dobbs overview on the Sierra High Color DAC mentions that the Tseng Labs ET4000 can do high color rendering, but trying it with a ET4000 emulated in pcem produces weird artifacts

I also tried DosBox-X, which also emulates the ET4000, but the effect is even worse, with the screen being divided into a bunch of small tiles and flickering heavily. I don't know if the emulation is wrong or if Doom's high color mode is just incompatible.

I've mentioned before I find Doom 2 to be close to mechanically perfect and I tend to play most mapsets vanilla style, but I'm also busy making making a 6DOF space shooter for GZDoom and want to work on a pretty different gameplay mod for it.

where do i fit on the purist scale this is so confusing.

It doesn't play amazingly in retrospect but Void still has a really great place in my mind. Such a surreal theme executed extremely well. Its the kind of thing I honestly wish I could do in Starlight Sanctuary or my other map but I just really can't pull it off.

fuck the more I think about it I just want to redo Starlight Sanctuary entirely. Make it more interesting and nice to look at.

it just struck me I could reuse the Starlight Sanctuary assets to gyp yet another concept from PAD: Legendary Sea of Stars. Would be a bit irrational, but imagine an aquatic themed level sitting at the bottom of a massive ocean full of coral, sea plants, and the like all shrouded by a huge field of stars.

would be pretty nice

its kind of hard to accept the SSG as unbalanced when the game has offered since the release of registered doom 3 options that do more damage.

I guess its unbalanced with the regular shotgun maybe since it uses ammo more efficiently? but overall it fits in just fine.

Just spent an hour mapping out the player_t structures in doom 0.5 in cheat engine by pulling the names and general layout of the symbol table embedded into the executable, and learned some fun things in the process like every weapon being "implemented" (this includes the chainsaw, the dark claw, and the bfg, but they just use shotgun sprites)

what am I actually doing with my life? why is this the kind of thing I do for "fun?"

Level design subtleties that went way over my head: I always kind of thought the babes in duke3d were just a gruesome little decoration with the kill them to spawn more stuff mechanic just added in because they felt it fit or something, and I kind of wondered why they didn't do a "rescue" thing like the n64 version. But it struck me when playing the game again recently that they were frequently used for one specific goal: to punish simply clearing slimer eggs with a single RPG or pipebomb. So frequently, the slimer eggs are placed in those areas covered in the green alien shit, with a couple of the captured babes in there to punish the easy way of clearing the eggs with a swarm of Octabrains.

Either I've been missing something kinda obvious for the past 20 years or I'm overthinking this. not sure which.

my new case sits on some racks I had alongside my desk unlike my last one which sat under the desk on the floor.

not having to worry about kicking my computer anymore is nice. Also makes it much easier to access usb ports, headphone jacks, and the like. Also, it has front headphone jacks which means alongside my ear surgery I can actually use headphones with my computer now, which is very nice.

seems mozilla's finally given up on supporting the old "tiles" new tab page in firefox and is now forcing you to use the shitty activity stream thing.

rip

Strange and pointless mysteries of the doom code: Here in the doom source is a lengthy description of mobj_t which does not appear in the Heretic, Hexen, or Jaguar Doom source, where mobj_t is defined in doomdef.h, so presumably p_mobj.h was created in a post 1.666 revision, or more likely it was added during Bernd's cleanup of the Doom source for release. But where did this writeup come from? Its extremely detailed, seems to get most details right (a lot of Bernd's comments to the source express some level of confusion, if I'm honest), refers to otherwise lost internal details such as stategen.exe and states.c and states.h (as opposed to info.c/info.h).

This is one of those things that are kinda pointless, but just the verbosity of the description and the fact that it seems fairly accurate seems pretty unusual for the doom source overall.

the latest H_G thread had a picture of kdizd e1m2. I happen to have a collection of extremely early KDIZD maps and I'm a little confused on one thing:

Is this courtyard more detailed than the final game's one? (I need to dig out the missing textures, since the final kdizd archive was pruned) Floor detail is pretty annoying though.

tomorrow I will lose another bone in my body and get another piece of metal in its place.

this brings the running total to 204 bones and 2 pieces of metal in my body

was exploring the avenue of reversing doom 0.2 to figure out what state it truly is in after just 2 months of dev, found myself falling down a rabbit hole of incredibly obscure dos extenders and compilers. I'm assuming that the executable was made with "xmgcc", an incredibly obscure dos port of gcc made in 1990, including its own dos extender that uses an executable format I'm assuming's too obscure to have a ghidra plugin or any usable documentation.

But why would it be made with an incredibly obscure gcc port from 1990? I know it took a while for Carmack to start using Watcom, but was Borland C (used for earlier id projects) completely unworkable with regards to doom that he'd be seeking out incredibly obscure compilers?

was having trouble finding what shows to watch over a upcoming vacation on my tablet, guess I'm gonna load some of the kyoani stuff I've missed in there (how the hell have I not watched Violet Evergarden in 2019???)

honestly despite being strapped for cash ATM I probably will toss something at the studio. At this point, I'm not even sure how the studio can recover, but I really would like to support the livelihoods and future creative careers for those who have survived.

We've seen things that flip maps upside down, but being able to navigate Doom maps upside down with 6DOF controls is quite a trippy experience

while i'm busy trying to kick my p&d obsession i'm starting to get that desire to make doom maps inspired by some of the dungeons again.

the dungeons in game are very basic visually, usually just a straight stretch or a basic hallway, but some carry some character to them and it would be nice to see them expanded into a more fleshed out environment. Like the devilish swamp theme:

While replaying scythe 2 I kept on seeing jumps and other skips while playing, and I'm noticing them enough now that I'm starting to consider giving some speedrunning a try.

Granted half my experience with things like straferun jumps and grabs is that I attempt them 20 times, all fail, then as a last resort I just casually bump myself against the surface and snag it immediately. Lots of practice still needed...

A minor frustration I've run into with Chocolate Descent: I've encountered a bug where the game can go into an infinite loop if certain strange conditions are met when killing the level 7 boss. Unlike an algorithm bug, where something doesn't work 100% as expected in the game world, or a static limit or similar where the game exits with a given error message (like visplane overflows in doom), this kinda bug seems like a frustrating screw to the user, requiring them to mess around with the Task Manager or similar process management tools. With most bugs I can keep them as is, but this kind of bug makes me wonder what I should do. Should I fix it? Should I change it to an explicit game-ending error? Or should I just have the player muck about with task manager? I mean I guess that last option is comparable to what people would have to do if they encountered said bug back in the day...

ah crap, EE defaults the skill to ITYTD if you simply go into the console after starting EE and using the map command. Was wondering why BTSX MAP12 was remarkably easy...

Anyone around here done proper monitor calibration? My monitor looks like shit, and while a lot of that's because its a crappy acer branded monitor from 2007, I'd like to beat out at least the best images I can get from it. I found this set of images but I don't know if I can actually trust it. The first contrast test mentions a set of boxes with linearly increasing brightness, mentioning the jump in brightness should be equal across all of them. But that doesn't make any sense, the monitor should be displaying in sRGB which by nature is not linear! Other sources mentioned a program "QuickGamma" which seemed to be somewhat useful but I couldn't get any good results out of it. The rest of the guides at the top of googling looked pretty terrible, honestly.

At the convention are these large Battletech tesla pods which fully simulate a mech cockpit and have all sorts of really fun features. This was among one of the most fun things I've gotten to play with in a long time, I kind of wish there was still more demand for this sort of thing. It's really lovely.

Extended doom mechanics do occasionally lend to fun moments, sometimes. Playing a map in a port where live monsters can be pushed off dropoffs, a chaingunner pissed off a rev and the rev proceeds to run up to him and punch him off the ledge. heh

For whatever reason, i've found that Doom with all monster state durations reduced to 1 is a really ridiculous but also strangely fun challenge. it's sorta like nightmare, and is in ways both more and less ridiculous than Doom's normal nightmare. It's also really amusing watching every monster just go around like they're completely jacked up on caffeine or something.