Thing Question?

is there a standing max for the amount of things that can be put in one map? this is for the latest Zdoom but i no on slower systems things can cause the game to crash if there is tomany. so i was wondering if there is like an unspoken rule or limit or somthing?

:)

Well, nuts.wad has like 13000 monsters in it, so I'm going to guess that
no, the system will break before the engine.

Just don't place 666 monsters in a map!

With some ports if there are too many things, some of them won't get drawn.

myk: Do you have any logical reason for saying not to place 666 things in a map?

Certainly, Ultraviolent, it is the Number of the Beast... as mentioned in the Holy Bible.

Re-read my name. It's a type of light the sun emits, not the fourth difficulty level...

Ultraviolet said:

Re-read my name. It's a type of light the sun emits, not the fourth difficulty level...

I think Mynk knows that, and he's just trying to rile you.

I recall that when nuts.wad came out, Boom was considered to run it far faster than Zdoom.

I just tried nuts.wad (which actually contains only 10,617 monsters) with the latest version of Zdoom, and it crashed after a while. It had been running fairly smoothly up to that point though. glboom was very slow, but didn't actually crash (at least up to the point where I got bored), while prboom was slow and did crash.

myk said:

Certainly, Ultraviolent, it is the Number of the Beast... as mentioned in the Holy Bible.

Never place 667 monsters either. That's even worse. The neighbour of the beast.

The other day my latin teacher mentioned something amusing about the number 666. Add up every number from 1 to 36, what do you get? Also, how many maps have we got in The ultimate DOOM? Apparently the roulette has 36 numbers for the same reason (333 and 666 were considered magical numbers in antiquity and during the middle ages.)

Indeed.

I LIVE AT 22 ARNOLD ST. DOES THAT MEAN ANYTHING? HEHE

The amount of things in a level doesn't really matter, I think, just how many things are visible at a time. For example, trying your best in level 30 of DooM II to stay alive but NOT killing the John Romero thingie, will result in dead bodies dis- and reappearing as you walk and turn.

I played a lot of large wads with great levels and even greater amounts of things, I think that as long as there's no smoke coming out of one end of your PC, everything's dandy.

Regards, SCORP

scorpion said:

trying your best in level 30 of DooM II to stay alive but NOT killing the John Romero thingie.

I got the game to crash once by doing that. (it was on a 386sx25, though)

Plyte said:

I LIVE AT 22 ARNOLD ST. DOES THAT MEAN ANYTHING? HEHE

All hail the Chosen One!

Indeed, I have heard more about that. My first 486 DX-IV/100MHz never had that problem, or, I never lived long enough in that level to find out ...!

Does ZDoom have a 'limit' to the number of things that can be displayed on the screen at any one time?

Yes, it does, and I suppose it can handle more than the original engine, but I'm not sure how many.

I don't think it has a carved-in-stone limit, though. It will hold out
longer than the actualy system resources will.

Hmm, well e1m1 has 3458 things so far and i'ts not crashing :) yet!

Just as long as they all aren't visable on the screen at the same time.

...none of which answers my question. :)

Russell_P said:

Does ZDoom have a 'limit' to the number of things that can be displayed on the screen at any one time?

I don't know (OK, so this isn't going to be definative either) but I have played a DM game with a dehacked patch loaded in Zdoom. The patch made blood splats permanent. After about 30-40 mins or so of playing, a 1GHz machine was slowed to a crawl because the main arena was totally covered in red blood splats, but there did not seem to be any limit on how many were being drawn at any one time. So I reckon there were thousands of items being drawn in that area without limit or error.

Grazza said:

I just tried nuts.wad (which actually contains only 10,617 monsters) with the latest version of Zdoom, and it crashed after a while. It had been running fairly smoothly up to that point though. glboom was very slow, but didn't actually crash (at least up to the point where I got bored), while prboom was slow and did crash.

Try increasing the zone heap size. Use the -heapsize xx parameter, where xx is some number of Megabytes between 8 and 255. This works for Eternity as well, and in fact I recommend running Eternity with:

-heapsize 16

all the time, no matter what you're playing, because 8 MB is just barely enough and the fragmentation caused by constantly reusing the same memory area causes the zone allocator to work harder and slows the game that much more.

I can kill all 10,617 monsters in nuts.wad with zdoom 1.18b and 1.23 beta 33 when using -heapsize 16. The default heapsize of 8 is not enough, and since zdoom (unlike eternity) will not resort to system ram when its zone heap is exhausted, it exits out.