Chocolate Doom version 2 beta

Hi,

If you're a user of Chocolate Doom then I can do with your help! I've just released the first beta of Chocolate Doom version 2. I need beta testers who can try out the new version and report any bugs that they encounter. Download links can be found in the page linked above; please check it out.

Thanks!

YES! I've downloaded the Doom version, and I'll try to check out Heretic at some point as well. I don't have Hexen or Strife.

I notice that there are different downloads for each game. Will there eventually be a single executable version, or will it stay as separate programs?

My plan is to keep it as separate executables, although the Mac OS X package conveniently unifies them into a single package.

Is it cool to extract all of the executables to the same folder in Windows for testing or should we keep them separate?

First thing I've noticed is that the text screen windows for Chocolate Setup and ENDOOM are almost twice as large as they were in v1.7.0:

1.7.0
v2.0.0-beta1

Is this intentional? Does it scale based on resolution? (I run 1920x1440 on Windows 7 x64 with the default 100% text DPI setting.) It's unnecessarily big, IMO.

That's intentional, yes. Modern monitors are getting quite large (Macs in particular with the recent "retina display" development), and there's the danger that the textscreen windows can end up getting too small (relative to the screen size) to be legible. So if you have a high resolution screen (>= 1920x1080) it doubles the size.

The threshold might be set too low. I know some people like having things small because it gives them extra space. I wonder if there's something "smarter" than screen size that I can use to make the decision? For Macs I guess I can detect whether a retina display is present; for Windows, perhaps something like the system font size? I don't know.

I filed a bug report regarding the V2 branch but I'm unsure if the regular Chocolate Doom bug tracker was the right place to post it.

Downloading...

I'll see what I can break over the next few days.

Excellent.

For chocolate-heretic:

  The demo h5f3-803.zip desyncs at approx. 6m 30s.
  The demo h5s2-344.zip desyncs at approx. 3m 40s.

Both these demos playback with vanilla.

I booted up Heretic this morning before I went to work. For some reason the screen flickers constantly like I'm blinking my eyes super quick (if that makes sense!).

I have an Alienware M11x R3 with Geforce 540m and Windows 7 Pro.

Other than that the game seems to run fine (so far).

fraggle said:

That's intentional, yes. Modern monitors are getting quite large (Macs in particular with the recent "retina display" development), and there's the danger that the textscreen windows can end up getting too small (relative to the screen size) to be legible. So if you have a high resolution screen (>= 1920x1080) it doubles the size.

The threshold might be set too low. I know some people like having things small because it gives them extra space. I wonder if there's something "smarter" than screen size that I can use to make the decision? For Macs I guess I can detect whether a retina display is present; for Windows, perhaps something like the system font size? I don't know.

I kind of figured it was intentional. While I'd prefer it go back to its previous size on 1920x1440, I do think increasing its size on high resolutions is a good idea.

Average said:

I booted up Heretic this morning before I went to work. For some reason the screen flickers constantly like I'm blinking my eyes super quick (if that makes sense!).

I have an Alienware M11x R3 with Geforce 540m and Windows 7 Pro.

Other than that the game seems to run fine (so far).

Do the other games experience the same symptoms? Does the problem go away if you change the SDL video driver? (Go to display settings->advanced, change to Windows DIB instead of DirectX)

Yeah, the other games did it too. It does work okay if I switch to Windows GDI.

SDL uses Windows GDI as the default; Chocolate Doom overrides that to use DirectX as the default instead. I'm quite tempted to just go with the SDL default. Quite a few people seem to have problems with the DirectX mode.

fraggle said:

SDL uses Windows GDI as the default; Chocolate Doom overrides that to use DirectX as the default instead. I'm quite tempted to just go with the SDL default. Quite a few people seem to have problems with the DirectX mode.

EE has been using that as the default for years. The "DirectX" backend in SDL is about 10 years out of date - it uses DirectDraw 5. DirectDraw has been deprecated for years. It's a wonder it even works at all at this point.

I have to stress again how much of a good idea it would be at this point to add a GL 2D-in-3D backend, like the ones EE and PrBoom-Plus have.

Yeah, the Direct X is definitely the issue. I have been messing around with lots of Wolf 3D SDL mods and quite a lot of them have the same issue (though, strangely, not all of them). If I run then using the onboard Intel GPU instead of the Geforce they and Chocolate Doom seem to run okay. Not sure what that's about as they're both DX compatible...

Quasar said:

EE has been using that as the default for years. The "DirectX" backend in SDL is about 10 years out of date - it uses DirectDraw 5. DirectDraw has been deprecated for years. It's a wonder it even works at all at this point.

Okay, it's (finally) gone.

Quasar said:

I have to stress again how much of a good idea it would be at this point to add a GL 2D-in-3D backend, like the ones EE and PrBoom-Plus have.

I very much want this too, but for now I just want to get v2 out of the door.

-Setup is WAY TOO BIG on my meagre 1024x768 display. This also goes for Heretic's loading screen.
http://i.imgur.com/S96dEhA.png

-In Heretic, the player doesn't make any "unh" sound if you try to use a wall that has no function. He does make the sound if you try to open a door for which you don't have the key.

plums said:

-Setup is WAY TOO BIG on my meagre 1024x768 display. This also goes for Heretic's loading screen.
http://i.imgur.com/S96dEhA.png

Yeah, that's definitely not supposed to happen.

plums said:
[B-In Heretic, the player doesn't make any "unh" sound if you try to use a wall that has no function. He does make the sound if you try to open a door for which you don't have the key. [/B]

On all walls, or just some? I ask because the original Doom engine has a couple problems where you do not "unf" on certain types of linedefs. Boom fixed them, so, 99% of source ports have consistent behavior rather than the weirdness that vanilla Doom had.

I'm not aware of any change that Heretic made to the code that was in Doom with respect to that, either.

Quasar said:

On all walls, or just some? I ask because the original Doom engine has a couple problems where you do not "unf" on certain types of linedefs. Boom fixed them, so, 99% of source ports have consistent behavior rather than the weirdness that vanilla Doom had.

I'm not aware of any change that Heretic made to the code that was in Doom with respect to that, either.

On any. The starting area on E1M1 is full of regular one-sided linedefs that make no sound when you press on them, but the yellow key door works fine. GZDoom makes sound when you press use against any wall; I can't test Vanilla Heretic currently.

I just tried this in DosBox and I can confirm that the player indeed makes no sound when trying to use one-sided lines in vanilla Heretic registered version (I can't imagine the extended version is any different).

fraggle said:

Okay, it's (finally) gone.

I prefer to use DirectX, because it's independent from Window's pointer speed setting. Using GDI, if I need to change my mouse speed in control panel, I'll also need to change my mouse sensitivity in Chocolate-Doom the next time I'll want to play. DirectX never caused glitches on my PCs. I always thought GDI was worse, because it caused bugs on my older computer and I never reported them. I though it was normal because GDI was "inferior" to DirectX.

Apart from that, I guess it won't make any difference since I got rid of my XP computer and GDI seems to work well on Windows 7.

Wagi said:

I just tried this in DosBox and I can confirm that the player indeed makes no sound when trying to use one-sided lines in vanilla Heretic registered version (I can't imagine the extended version is any different).

Looks like I gotta do some investigation o_o

For clarification, trying to open the yellow door without the key still plays the "unf" sound.

axdoom1 said:

I prefer to use DirectX, because it's independent from Window's pointer speed setting. Using GDI, if I need to change my mouse speed in control panel, I'll also need to change my mouse sensitivity in Chocolate-Doom the next time I'll want to play. DirectX never caused glitches on my PCs. I always thought GDI was worse, because it caused bugs on my older computer and I never reported them. I though it was normal because GDI was "inferior" to DirectX.

Apart from that, I guess it won't make any difference since I got rid of my XP computer and GDI seems to work well on Windows 7.

Understood: you can still set the "video_driver" config variable to set it manually if you want. I suspect the people who care enough are the people who aren't going to be bothered by having to edit a text file: that's why I've just removed the control from the setup tool entirely.

Nice!

Downloading...

Are Chocolate-Strife savegames meant to be compatible with vanilla? I'm trying to find bugs in Strife and I want to see if it as something to do with savegames, except that I can't get savegames from chocolate to work with vanilla. It exits with an error:
P_UnarchiveSpecials:Unknown tclass 56 in savegame

EDIT: My DOS version of Strife is patched to v1.31

I believe they're supposed to be compatible. That sounds like a bug.

I thought they had been tested before and worked fine. I'm going to need some very specific examples and possibly the save files themselves or there will be zero chance of making progress against this before v2.0 can release. There's just too much code to go through, thousands of lines.

I create a bug report:
https://sourceforge.net/p/chocolate-doom/bugs/290/

I was testing a bug in area 7: castle. The sprinklers and the waterfall don't make sound. If I warped to this map directly using -warp 7, the sound was working.