[GEC] Master Edition PSX Doom for the PlayStation. Beta 4 Released [11/16/2022]

[CoTeCiO]

7 minutes ago, Danfun64 said:

Not sure if this comment is serious or not. ePSXe is a fairly inaccurate PSX emulator, and aiming for compatibility with at least Mednafen and XEBRA would be a lot better.

It seems that this runs only on ePSXe and RetroArch at the moment, of course that's something that should be looked on and fixed, but that's for @Erick194 and @Gerardo194 to figure out, as they are the ones doing all the coding part of the project. I'm going to get CDs later today and try to run the mod on the console (which is the aim of the project, to have this to run on real hardware, I suppose). That should clear everything out.

Edited June 20, 2018 by CoTeCiO

[Danfun64]

Retroarch? What emulator on retroarch? Beetle PSX is a renamed Mednafen.

[Medis]

I have a real PS1, soon with PSIO so if anything I would be able to test those

[Dragonsbrethren]

I did eventually get the generated disk image loading past the BIOs in Beetle, but it still won't load my map.

[CoTeCiO]

So, Hell Keep was a breeze, it worked pretty much right out of the box. Warrens on the other hand has been a pain in the ass, particularly with stretching graphics, but now I encountered textures upside down! I got all of them fixed except for this one, I tried all combinations, upper unpegged, lower unpegged, not unpegged, positive values, negative values, it always look like this. If I leave it at 0 alignment it looks like crap, with the switch too high. Any advice in what should I do with this?

[marver0PS]

Do you mind if I do e4m6 and level 7 of plutonia?

[Dragonsbrethren]

Hmm, nothing works at all? For my switch-textured doors, I just had to use a -64 Y offset. Positive 64 gave me a scaled, vertically mirrored texture. (I feel like this renderer has nearly as much unintended potential as vanilla Doom. Assuming it behaves the same on hardware.)

 

Honestly, I’d give up and just raise that sector’s ceiling if I couldn’t get offsetting to work, but that might cause issues with flats being visible in the sky. (The “3D effect” is definitely a double-edged sword.)

Edited June 20, 2018 by Dragonsbrethren

[Saint_Guy]

I would like to sign up for E4M7. I have been recreate the map with no problems until I created the out door area.

Now textures are just vanishing and you can completely see through some walls.

It doesn't seem to be an issue of to many different types of textures or seeing to much at one time.

So i am currently at a loss of what to do to fix it.

[Dragonsbrethren]

Got Caged loading. Monster variety really suffers here, I assumed the Mancubi could stay for Lost Levels if I replaced the Barons and Revenants, but they had to go anyway (and yes, I tried cutting them and keeping Revenants... MAPSPR was still too large). The level itself seems to be playing fine so far outside of an extreme frame drop in the central area, and more self-referencing sector nonsense.

 

Obviously this is very early, no work has been done to adjust sector heights or optimize for framerates yet, no lighting has been done, etc.

[Tristan]

8 hours ago, Gerardo194 said:

@Eris Falling if you someday have the chance to participate in this project. Let us know, please! We can keep Pharaoh and Neurosphere slots for you!

 

I'm mainly concerned about the prospect of the work we did on the original LL being forgotten depending on how this turns out. If there's not a hard deadline or anything yet, please put me in for those slots tentatively (and I guess maybe TWM01 too if we're doing that since I did it last time)

Edited June 21, 2018 by Eris Falling

[CoTeCiO]

So, I got CDs, tried it and well... I couldn't make it work. Now, don't blame it on the mod right away because I don't have a modded console, so I have to resort to the double swap method and that might be failing, or the CDs might be too crappy. I had to modify the CUE file and add extra audio tracks because the console reads the table of contents from the original CD anyway and failed to start because it started looking for an audio track beyond the end of the modded CD's data. My second CD with extra tracks worked until I tried to start a game, where it stayed trying to read something that couldn't. I tried multiple times but the same thing happened, in the end, I gave up because I was starting to scratch my original copy of Doom and I don't want to risk damaging the console or the CD.

 

I'm assuming the map can't load correctly because the console thinks the modded CD has the data in the same way as the original and it doesn't. So, that is as far as I can get with my tests, anyone with a modded console is welcome to try. If they don't get it to work, then the whole hacking aspect of the mod will have to be checked and fixed.

[CoTeCiO]

15 minutes ago, Eris Falling said:

 

I'm mainly concerned about the prospect of the work we did on the original LL being forgotten depending on how this turns out. If there's not a hard deadline or anything yet, please put me in for those slots tentatively (and I guess maybe TWM01 too if we're doing that since I did it last time)

Why forgotten? I think it's a pretty smart idea to use the LL versions as starting points instead of redoing the whole thing, right? At least there should be the choice of either starting from scratch or using the LL versions, depending on what the mapper decides.

[Dragonsbrethren]

Yeah, using my Lost Levels conversions as a reference for this has saved so much time. I'm still starting from the PC maps, just because I'm really curious if I needed to make the changes I did, but once it comes time to light the maps, my earlier work on that is a godsend. I suspect the biggest issue will be conversions that didn't really stick close enough to the PSX limitations on flat/texture/sprite counts, like the Mancubi in Caged.

 

Plus, this is just the authentic version of what Lost Levels set out to do. I guess if you view it as a PSX-inspired levels project, you might lose something with these conversions, but they're what I always wanted to see with that project: Levels that could run well on the actual PSX engine.

 

Also @CoTeCiO, that's the same behavior I'm seeing in Beetle. The map just keeps trying to load. Hopefully whatever the problem is can be easily fixed.

Edited June 21, 2018 by Dragonsbrethren

[Job]

Does this format limit the number of levels in any way? Or can we have an additional, community-made episode, "Into the Darkness" or at least some secret levels? 

[Saint_Guy]

So I have since realized that the missing textures are not random.

They are 

MARBLE04

MARBLE2

SW1NEW69

DOOR06

TVSNOW02

REDBR01

BLUE01

These were not even the last of the textures I placed in the map, but for some reason none are appearing.

Other than my map being visually broken it is 100% finished.

[CoTeCiO]

8 minutes ago, Saint_Guy said:

So I have since realized that the missing textures are not random.

They are 

MARBLE04

MARBLE2

SW1NEW69

DOOR06

TVSNOW02

REDBR01

BLUE01

These were not even the last of the textures I placed in the map, but for some reason none are appearing.

Other than my map being visually broken it is 100% finished.

You might have too many textures on your map. Post a screenshot to see if it looks like the glitches that happens when there's too much stuff going on.

[Dragonsbrethren]

Post a screenshot of VRAM Viewer Mode in GZDoom Builder. Textures should be highlighted in light blue. If any of them are extending into the green section, you've used too many. The level will run, but will display some corrupted textures. Also flats should be constrained to the red highlighted section, 16 total. I'm actually not sure what happens if you go over this limit, but in the VRAM viewer it will waste texture space.

Edited June 21, 2018 by Dragonsbrethren

[CoTeCiO]

26 minutes ago, Dragonsbrethren said:

Post a screenshot of VRAM Viewer Mode in GZDoom Builder. Textures should be highlighted in light blue. If any of them are extending into the green section, you've used too many. The level will run, but will display some corrupted textures. Also flats should be constrained to the red highlighted section, 16 total. I'm actually not sure what happens if you go over this limit, but in the VRAM viewer it will waste texture space.

If you have more than 16 flats, they appear in the sky! So you get the sky graphic and the flats after the red section over it. If you are using the fire sky, apparently the animation freezes. I assume it corrupts whatever graphics are first in the blue section.

[Gerardo194]

@DynamiteKaitorn @Eris Falling @marver0PS @Saint_Guy @CoTeCiO

Your requested slots are yours now. Regarding the deadline, with GEC deadlines don't exist. You can take your time to do your work.

@Job about an additional community episode or secret levels... We will be thinking about it. 

 

 

[Dragonsbrethren]

Found another rendering quirk: Midtextures tile vertically in sectors taller than 128. I haven’t had a chance to play around with the unpegged flags or Y offset to see if this can be manipulated in any way, but I’ve got a tiling issue in Caged right now.

 

Edit: Ok, this is strange, I looked at the start area of Ballistyx, since I knew it had a fence in a sector taller than 128 without tiling, and the line flags and offsetting are identical to the ones on my gate line. I'm not sure why I'm getting tiling, but I think I can work around it easily enough.

Edited June 21, 2018 by Dragonsbrethren

[DynamiteKaitorn]

 

A few things, first: was I meant to install all the files and extract everything into 1 folder or is separating the downloads fine? and secondly, any idea what this error is? (I don't know what language it's in... possibly spanish?)

[Gerardo194]

@DynamiteKaitorn it means "can't open PSXDOOM.WAD" possibly this is because it needs the WAD to process it. 

[riderr3]

@Gerardo194 @Erick194 I figured out how these tools worked. So sign me for Level 10: Redemption and Level 9: Abattoire

I've already have some tests and converted first three areas of Redemption (successful run), but still can not convert whole map because of error - CACHE MISS ON LUMP 703

Maybe I'll cut some parts to check what caused this error.

@DynamiteKaitorn this is even beginning, I've deal with those tools for one hour. So expect many troubles ahead, alot of mapping/building errors :)

P.S. Screens of MAP10 TNT (only first areas worked, also need to fix some awful texture stretches)





Using CRT shaders of ePSXe and also connected my old PS2 gamepad via USB converter.

Edited June 21, 2018 by riderr3

[Gerardo194]

@riderr3 those slots are yours now. I'm glad to read you also managed how to use them. Good job!!

 

Edit: @riderr3 the "cache miss error on lump 703" error is happening because a sprite hasn't been inserted at all. Leave it like that, my brother will fix it later when gets home. 

Edited June 21, 2018 by Gerardo194

[Dexiaz]

On 6/20/2018 at 3:04 PM, DeXiaZ said:

I'm having troubles with stretched textures. The most annoying is this:

I've tried many things, but it doesn't help.

 

Fixed it. For unknown reasons this door was BELOW the actual floor. That's why this texture was lagging.

[Saint_Guy]

Thanks CoTeCiO and Dragonsbrethren for the response yesterday. I was able to fix my map.

I was using too many textures.

 

There is a stair case that is totally misaligned and I cant seem to fix it.

Any tips?

[CoTeCiO]

So, I got curious and wondered if a modded map can be run on a stock copy of PSX Doom by replacing one of the maps and it's MAPSPR, MAPTEX and LCD files. It can't, it gives the "P_LOADBLOCKS: DATA FAILURE" error, so this mod is doing things quite a bit differently to the original. Mostly probably the way it handles textures, assuming from the obvious difference in size the original MAPTEXxx files has compared to the modded ones, or maybe the original EXE is hardcoded to read data from specific addresses on each file, and fails when it doesn't find anything.

 

That raises the question, though. Why are the modded MAPTEX files so small? Why don't they cache the textures like the originals?

 

EDIT: Now I realized that even swapping MAPSPR files around, for example put MAP17 files for MAP18 will give the LOADBLOCKS error. So I guess PSXDOOM.EXE is hardcoded to look for specific addresses in MAPSPR files, depending on the map. Actually, if you change just the WAD file and use the same items as the original map, it runs! If you use an item that is not on the MAPSPR file, the game will crash with a lump cache error or something like that whenever it tries to load the sprites. You can use any texture you want, apparently if the game doesn't find the texture in MAPTEX, it will look for it in the main IWAD, with the consequence that maps take longer to load, but they work fine once they start. If you happen to be able to insert a monster that is not supposed to be in that map and it works, it will be silent, as the sounds are not present in the LCD file. There's quite some limitations but it's possible to play custom maps in a stock PSX Doom.

Edited June 22, 2018 by CoTeCiO

[DynamiteKaitorn]

When doing the textures for MAP32 of plutonia (Go2It) I noticed a certain enemy is missing. Does PS1 Final DooM not include Arch-viles? If that's the case, what enemy should I replace them with? (I'm only thinking revenant since when I played PS1 Final doom through ePSXe, the arch-vile in congo was a revenant)

[Dragonsbrethren]

There are no Arch-Viles in PSX Doom. Also your MAPSPR file is limited to around 800kb of sprites, meaning you can't use nearly as much monster variety as you can on PC.

[CoTeCiO]

Just now, DynamiteKaitorn said:

When doing the textures for MAP32 of plutonia (Go2It) I noticed a certain enemy is missing. Does PS1 Final DooM not include Arch-viles? If that's the case, what enemy should I replace them with? (I'm only thinking revenant since when I played PS1 Final doom through ePSXe, the arch-vile in congo was a revenant)

Indeed the Arch-Vile is missing from both PSX Doom and PSX Final Doom (the only missing monster from the PC game! That, and the Spider Mastermind that while exists in PSX Final Doom, doesn't appear in any map). You should try checking with different monsters and see what fits best with the context of your map. Revenants move at pretty much half speed compared to the PC ones, though, bear that in mind.