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Elaxter

Question about Complevels on ZDOOM

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For the complevels that some maps require, is there any conversion table of a sort that lets me know what complevel matches to the compatibility options that zdoom has?

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I'm not sure I fully understand the question. I guess you're wondering about PrBoom complevel settings, and what the equivalent ZDoom compatibility modes would be?

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Most of the complevels in PrBoom have no directly equivalent ZDoom compatibility modes. In broad terms, the "Doom (Strict)" compatibility mode is similar to PrBoom's complevel 2 (Doom 2 v1.9), and "Boom (Strict)" is similar to PrBoom's complevel 9 (Boom v2.02).

PrBoom has very strict emulation of old Doom engines because it's used to play old demos: Any major deviations from the old engines' behaviors would result in demo desynchronization. ZDoom has virtually no demo compatibility whatsoever (even with other ZDoom versions), so its compatibility modes aren't as accurate, and therefore don't match up to PrBoom's complevels very well.

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A couple of excerpts from the Wiki, hoping they'll be useful:

From here:

PrBoom supports various of compatibility settings to adjust its behavior, much like those initially implemented for MBF. In addition to individual settings for each difference in behavior, it allows the user to set compatibility levels to behave like earlier versions and modifications of the Doom engine. With the compatibility levels PrBoom may provide almost flawless compatibility with regular demos, as well as those recorded with Boom engines.

...and here:

For some players, it is not practical or even possible to use the original Doom executables to play demos. The original executables were written for DOS, and require DOS or a DOS-like OS environment to function properly. While this has been made easier with the development of the multi-platform DOSBox emulator, there are also alternatives among the source ports, as most, though not all, demos recorded with id Software's DOS executables will play properly in PrBoom, the Eternity Engine, or Chocolate Doom because these ports are specifically designed to emulate vanilla Doom as closely as possible. On the other hand, an assortment of modern source ports, such as Doomsday or ZDoom, do not record demos in Doom's original demo format, because their movement code requires the recording of extra data (such as Y-axis viewpoints and trajectories, jumping, or even flat heights and thing dispositions as in a savegame) even if the associated features are not being utilised.

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Maps should generally work out of the box in ZDoom, without having to set up specific compatibility modes.

Also maps generally do not require complevels. Playing a vanilla map with Boom complevel is usually perfectly fine. The insistence on using the proper complevel for a map is because of PrBoom's demo focus, not because a Doom map will stop working if you play it as a Boom map. (There are some maps that won't work fine with "newer" code, but they're the exception, not the rule.)

Since ZDoom does not bother with keeping demo compatibility with older version or with other ports, the complevel stuff is less important. Using the default compatibility settings should let you play all maps normally, since maps with known problems are handled by automatically applied compatibility settings.

On the other hand, setting compatibility to "Doom (Strict)", forgetting about it, and then playing a Boom map will probably result in you going "why can't I activate this door?"

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Gez said:

Also maps generally do not require complevels. Playing a vanilla map with Boom complevel is usually perfectly fine


Not always.

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Gez said:

(There are some maps that won't work fine with "newer" code, but they're the exception, not the rule.)

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Knocking live monsters off high ledges and platforms (sometimes into unreachable areas where they can't be killed) is not fine, neither usually nor perfectly. That's the dumbest thing Boom did to the source code and the major reason for me to avoid any WAD that requires -complevel 9.

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Never_Again said:

Knocking live monsters off high ledges and platforms (sometimes into unreachable areas where they can't be killed) is not fine, neither usually nor perfectly. That's the dumbest thing Boom did to the source code and the major reason for me to avoid any WAD that requires -complevel 9.


That thing wasn't 'dumb' but necessary for conveyor belts. I'd agree that the implementation could have been better, though.

But boycotting maps that may use such a feature, that's certainly a new one. Don't you think that's a bit extreme?

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Graf Zahl said:

But boycotting maps that may use such a feature, that's certainly a new one. Don't you think that's a bit extreme?


Is he really worse than Brandon D. Lade? :-p

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Never_Again said:

Knocking live monsters off high ledges and platforms (sometimes into unreachable areas where they can't be killed) is not fine, neither usually nor perfectly. That's the dumbest thing Boom did to the source code and the major reason for me to avoid any WAD that requires -complevel 9.

I always thought that was kinda neat (unless you can't get to the monster - that sucks). I always hated when a corpse was hanging completely off the ledge, except for one little sliver of gibs keeping it stuck. Granted, not the same thing.

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