Elementalism, an ambitious new GZDoom mapset. Phase 1 out now!

[xvertigox]

This could be the best mapset for GMOTA ever. I'm trying it now, curious to see if anything will be broken. I picked up the staff at the beginning and can switch to it so I think it'll be all good.

Edited March 6, 2022 by xvertigox

[Graf Zahl]

Nice. This is really nice. :) I only sampled a few maps so far but what I saw looked great.

 

Out of curiosity - I noticed that this barely holds 60 fps on my brand new system with an Intel i7-12700 in lots of places - how does it fare on less powerful systems?

 

A technical note: While looking at the shaders I noticed that there's still several that use the broken and deprecated ProcessMaterial function instead of the future-proof SetupMaterial replacement.

I strongly recommend to rewrite those shaders to the new interface to ensure that they continue working in the future. ProcessMaterial has a serious design flaw that is not fixable, so it should be restricted to old mods that are done and not updated anymore.

 

 

[MFG38]

4 hours ago, Bridgeburner56 said:

While there are a few taxing maps if you're dipping into single digits then there's something not quite right in your set up.

 

Wouldn't be surprised, it is a pre-built. Just did some running around in E4, looking at the few places where the worst frame drops happened, and the lowest FPS I was able to record was as low as 10. But that's only in some select corners where a lot of stuff probably gets rendered at once. Other than that, the map maintains a very playable framerate. It does also make me wonder whether it's something that using the Vulkan renderer would alleviate - I've been playing with the OpenGL one thus far.

[exl]

Congratulations on an amazing release! And to think that this is only half of the complete set...

[Turin Turambar]

2 hours ago, MFG38 said:

 

Wouldn't be surprised, it is a pre-built. Just did some running around in E4, looking at the few places where the worst frame drops happened, and the lowest FPS I was able to record was as low as 10. But that's only in some select corners where a lot of stuff probably gets rendered at once. Other than that, the map maintains a very playable framerate. It does also make me wonder whether it's something that using the Vulkan renderer would alleviate - I've been playing with the OpenGL one thus far.

 

You comment your rtx 3060 and he comments his gtx 2070. But GZDoom is a cpu-bound single-thead application (when playing these huge maps). You should be specifying your cpu, not your gpu.

 

I checked E4 and this was the lowest I could see the framerate going, 35-45 fps, with my amd 3700x and gtx 1080. E1 and E2 ran better of course.

 

Edited March 6, 2022 by Turin Turambar

[Turin Turambar]

4 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

 

Out of curiosity - I noticed that this barely holds 60 fps on my brand new system with an Intel i7-12700 in lots of places - how does it fare on less powerful systems?

 

 

 

See above.

[Martin-CAI]

Been waiting for this release since the beginning. Playing it right away.

 

Congrats guys!!

[Graf Zahl]

2 hours ago, Turin Turambar said:

 

See above.

 

I tried to get as close to that spot as I could - which gives me 55 fps.

 

[CoolerDoomeR]

On 3/28/2018 at 11:42 PM, Bauul said:

 

GZDoom 4.7.1.  Other GZDoom versions may work, but mileage will vary.

Good job, i love this but i can run it on Zandronum?

GZDoom is laggy in OpenGL renderer for me.

[Major Arlene]

Just now, CoolerDoomeR said:

Good job, i love this but i can run it on Zandronum?

GZDoom is laggy in OpenGL renderer for me.

It will not run on Zandronum.

[CoolerDoomeR]

2 minutes ago, Major Arlene said:

It will not run on Zandronum.

Okay thank you dude but i can run it on GZDoom 4.7.0 with Software renderer enabled?

[Graf Zahl]

No. It uses features that are not fully supported by the software renderer.

If you have such an old computer it'd run at unplayable frame rates anyway.

 

[hakros]

I can only say one word, impressive.

 

I don't know how many times they would have killed me for having been stunned looking at the stage.... xD !!

 

If this weren't a mapset for DOOM, it would still be incredible simply for being able to go through all the scenaries that make up the mapset.

 

The architecture and design of the levels is incredible.

 

As well the music, lighting and the mix of original elements (2D) with 3D elements.

 

I'm looking forward to seeing all the levels but from what I've seen so far I'm freaking out.

 

Thank you so much for creating something so amazing.
 

@Bauul

[Bridgeburner56]

4 hours ago, Turin Turambar said:

 

You comment your rtx 3060 and he comments his gtx 2070. But GZDoom is a cpu-bound single-thead application (when playing these huge maps). You should be specifying your cpu, not your gpu.

 

I checked E4 and this was the lowest I could see the framerate going, 35-45 fps, with my amd 3700x and gtx 1080. E1 and E2 ran better of course.

 

If that were the case you could run elementalism in software mode with an integrated graphics card (hint: you cannot).

[Graf Zahl]

3 minutes ago, Bridgeburner56 said:

If that were the case you could run elementalism in software mode with an integrated graphics card (hint: you cannot).

 

Correct, but the engine is still heavily CPU bound. It doesn't really matter much if you have a Geforce 1060, 2070 or 3060 - the CPU just can't run fast enough to put these cards under full load.

 

[Bridgeburner56]

8 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

 

Correct, but the engine is still heavily CPU bound. It doesn't really matter much if you have a Geforce 1060, 2070 or 3060 - the CPU just can't run fast enough to put these cards under full load.

 

How much is offloaded to the gpu is heavily dependent on what's being rendered. I agree that cpu still does the bulk of the work in most cases but a bottle neck omin either cpu or gpu will affect fps. I had a fairly significant increase in fps when I upgraded from a1060 3gb to the 2070 super (30-40% in some parts of BoC). I also get better performance in gzdoom than in prboom+ for by boom maps, although that's probably less concerned with what gpu than just having any gpu offload at all.

 

That's probably enough of a thread derail from me 😝 

[MFG38]

Ran into this little oddity in W3 - guessing there's a slice of water missing here?

 

[Graf Zahl]

It looks like the water is supposed to intersect the slope. That's an invalid construct, the engine cannot handle intersecting planes in the same sector.

[Bauul]

45 minutes ago, MFG38 said:

Ran into this little oddity in W3 - guessing there's a slice of water missing here?

 

 

We noticed that just after launch!  Oops!  It'll be fixed for the next release, thanks for the heads-up!

 

33 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

It looks like the water is supposed to intersect the slope. That's an invalid construct, the engine cannot handle intersecting planes in the same sector.

 

Actually I just forgot to tag that sector with the water 3D floor! :D  All fixed and working as expected now.  The engine can handle a 3D floor over a slop just fine.

 

10 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

Out of curiosity - I noticed that this barely holds 60 fps on my brand new system with an Intel i7-12700 in lots of places - how does it fare on less powerful systems?

 

Based on the testing we've done, most people seem to feel it runs better than they thought it would.  On the low end, Jimmy played through on a 4 year old laptop with only an integrated GPU and got a reasonable 20-30fps throughout, with occasional drops below that.  I personally play on a 3-year old laptop with an i5-7300HQ and laptop version of a GTX 1060, and targeted an absolute minimum of 30fps, which 99.9% of the time we hit.  Mostly I hit 45fps-60fps.

 

10 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

A technical note: While looking at the shaders I noticed that there's still several that use the broken and deprecated ProcessMaterial function instead of the future-proof SetupMaterial replacement.

I strongly recommend to rewrite those shaders to the new interface to ensure that they continue working in the future. ProcessMaterial has a serious design flaw that is not fixable, so it should be restricted to old mods that are done and not updated anymore.

 

Thank you for the guidance!  To be transparent I barely know anything about shaders - the ones we use were mostly written a few years ago and then I never touched them again because shaders are dark and scary things.  I'll see if I can get some help rewriting them to be more future-proof.

[A.o.D.]

11 hours ago, Bauul said:

Thanks for the kind words everyone, I'm thrilled it's living up to expectations!

 

 

Just bug-fixing, there's no plan to add any more content to Phase 1.  Consider it a fully stand-alone release.

 

 

I'm not sure I'm afraid, I've not come across this before.  Presuming you're running GZDoom 4.7.1 it might be worth asking over at the ZDoom forums.

I couldn't figure out what the problem was, so I deleted everything in my GZDoom folder, to include configurations, and started fresh. That fixed the sound.

[CodeImp]

Amazing work gentlemen! This is a work of art. I'm enjoying every bit of it.

[A.o.D.]

I also found this busted sector.  Looks like the node builder was screaming in agony.

 

 

[Turin Turambar]

 

This is a small detail but... I would try to add a rain sound effect here, on a gap on map 3 where you can see it's raining.

 

edit: that said, this has been my favorite map until now. Good job Bauul.

Edited March 6, 2022 by Turin Turambar

[Graf Zahl]

57 minutes ago, Bauul said:

Actually I just forgot to tag that sector with the water 3D floor! :D  All fixed and working as expected now.  The engine can handle a 3D floor over a slop just fine.

 

Let's just say that behavior is undefined. It may work, then again, maybe not. It depends on how the planes get sorted. As long as the water plane is above the slope at the center point, all will look well. Just don't try to lower or raise the water in that sector - the results won't be nice. There may also be anomalies with game physics in such a sector.

 

[SyntherAugustus]

9 hours ago, Turin Turambar said:

 

I checked E4 and this was the lowest I could see the framerate going, 35-45 fps, with my amd 3700x and gtx 1080. E1 and E2 ran better of course.

That area dips to 45fps with my i7-8700k + RTX 3080 if it makes you feel any better. It looks wonderful, but I wish the engine could handle it better.

 

On a different topic, what's super about the Earth Elemental Wand? It suggests a big AoE blast, but I can only manage to get direct damage from the main projectile. The pebbles are kind of anti-climatic since they don't seem to do much. It would be far more exciting if they exploded at least.

 

Edit: In E5, it's possible to jump from a higher unlock switch to a lower one to bypass having to travel to it normally. Is this intentional?

 

Edited March 6, 2022 by SyntherAugustus

[KP_SapphireMK2]

Hi there Blue Yoshi :D

[Tristan]

1 hour ago, KP_SapphireMK2 said:

Hi there Blue Yoshi :D

 

hey

[Bridgeburner56]

53 minutes ago, Tristan said:

 

hey

How happy are you right now :D

[iUsuallyDie]

Loving this so far. E1 and E2 are giving me Serious Sam: The Second Encounter flashbacks.

[Shepardus]

Congrats on the release! I dabbled a little bit in each element and have enjoyed each one. So far I think Earth is my favorite theme but F1 was very impressive. Speaking of that map, I found a hole in the floor near the yellow skull key, similar to what A.o.D. shared but in a different location (look right where the crosshair is):

Spoiler

 

I have a pretty old CPU (Core i7 920), and framerate was definitely choppy, but not unplayably bad (which is more than I can say about some maps I've tried in GZDoom), usually around 30-60 FPS, dipping down into the 20s in busier areas. My GPU is a GTX 1070, but that's never been the bottleneck in anything I've tried in GZDoom. I've noticed that sometimes upon entering a new area (for example when the elevator at the beginning of W2 hits the bottom) the game freezes for a second, like it has to load something.

Edited March 7, 2022 by Shepardus