Slowness/inconsistency running zDoom on Windows 8?

Anyone have any documentation concerning similar circumstances? I finally got around to reinstalling (v. 2.1.7.366) here on this new laptop I got back in the Spring, and something most certainly is not right.

Running in fullscreen mode is worthless, with the game sporadically getting choppy(visually is the equivalent to skipping a few frames) in parallel with the weapon bobbing in the middle. I can't account for it when I am standing still, but it seems to follow a rhythmic pattern, and overall it is very shaky.

So I switch to window and drag it to fill the screen, and the problem appears fixed, but I was playing TNT: Evilution for a while and by the time I got to uh...Metal I could tell something was still off! Did they change the friction/movement parameters or something lately? The game felt really floaty, and while I simply attributed it to not playing DooM for a few months, when I found myself unable to stay ahead of rev rockets even when strafe 50ing I threw in the towel.

Apologies for the ramble, but a cursory internet check brought nothing, and I got a directdraw error last night one of the times I tried to boot up. I tried running from the command line to no avail, and a restart fixed this.


EDIT: Sigh..I guess I posted this in the wrong section. Move if needed, thanks.

If you're getting a directdraw error, that tends to suggest that ZDoom is for some reason not actually running in DirectX, and thus is actually only using the direct 8bit surface. Windows8 prevents palette corruption by emulating 8/16bit surfaces, which while solves the problem and tends to work well, is not really optimal for ZDoom, and will be the cause of your inconsistent framerate.
The most obvious tell for this is text won't be able to render in cyan appropriately and the console won't appear with a transparent background.

Make sure vid_forceddraw is set to false, and that your system has its appropriate graphics drivers installed. Make sure vid_hw2d is true, as a double measure.

Diamhea said:

Did they change the friction/movement parameters or something lately?

Nothing has changed about ZDoom's physics model recently, or in several years. Infact, I'm not even sure if friction is treated differently at all from vanilla.

Diamhea said:

Anyone have any documentation concerning similar circumstances? I finally got around to reinstalling (v. 2.1.7.366)

What do you mean by v2.1.7.366? ZDoom? ZDoom version numbers have three parts, not four; and if you use the revision number as the fourth part ZDoom 2.1.7 was r524. 2.1.7 is also very old, latest official version is 2.7.1 and current devbuilds are much more recent.

Gez said:

ZDoom 2.1.7 was r524.

How did I miss that? This would explain why he has no DirectX rendering, either, as that was implemented in 2.2.0.

To clarify, it cited 2.1.7 (r366) in the command window, whatever that means.

Anyway, this has fixed it, I updated to the latest version. To be honest I don't even think I installed the right version initially, and I don't know why I had this outdated variant lying around. The date on the top of the bar when I was running it in the window said 2006, so who knows.

Thanks guys.

I had to install that old version recently as well - and also ran into problems with fullscreen display. The old DirectDraw code just won't work right anymore with modern graphics hardware.

Diamhea said:

I don't know why I had this outdated variant lying around.

Maybe in order to play this masterpiece, which notoriously depends on it?

It's not the only one though: there are a lot of prepackaged "Doom-based" games that include everything one needs to play, often including IWADs (sometimes legit, sometimes not) and a source port, usually some version of ZDoom.

[pedant]

Rampage is older than that. It't bundled with 2.0.47i.

[/pedant]

If Windows-8 has broken support for older Direct-Draw interfaces, that would explain problems with DoomLegacy.

Not going to have any Windows-8 here to test with. If any ever showed up I would have to drive a steak through its heart, just as a precaution. I have heard the horror stories...

It's not so much Windows 8 that broke it but the graphics drivers.
The support for these ancient technologies has been decreased significantly, one of the most important things is the lack of proper support for paletted surfaces with many modern drivers.


It's a real shame. I can easily play DOS games from the late 90's through DosBox, but any non-hardware accelerated Windows game from that time will crap out.

Ironically the ones that still work best are those not using Direct3D but OpenGL because not much has changed about how that is used under Windows.

It's sad that we can't take full advantage of the excellent Windows backwards compatibility.

Dosbox is absolutely awesome but there is a period of games (early Windows titles) that are hard to get working.

EDIT: The thread's OP really should have checked the version he's using before turning to others for help, version from 2006 ... haha :-)