TeamTNT

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

Heh, my recollection is that back in the day, ZDoom was also a fairly "conservative" choice among the ports of the time.  Doom Legacy and DOSDoom/EDGE were more what you wanted for "super advanced" stuff in the directions that GZDoom would be more known for today.

[Doomkid]

3 hours ago, Bauul said:

 

Given their statuses today that PRBoom+ is the more "classic" choice and (G)ZDoom is the more "advanced" choice, it's one of those slightly unexpected tid-bits that ZDoom is actually the older port. I suspect most people who weren't around at the time would suspect the opposite is true.

 

Even more so that Chocolate Doom came years later, and Crispy Doom was only a few years ago. It seems an unexpected lineage given their proximity to vanilla Doom.

The lineage will seem pretty strange looking back but it does make sense - Choco and Crispy weren’t nearly as necessary back when the vanilla executable ran natively on most computers.

 

I want to take a close look at the earliest builds of ZDoom and Boom at some point. I’ll probably need to run a 16 bit VM to do so but I wonder how their earliest incarnations compare? I had no clue what Boom was but first played ZDoom in 2001. I remember being absolutely floored that you could make the player any colour combo you wanted. I wonder if that feature (which I’m sure most of us take totally for granted now) was in the earliest builds. Heck, I might even do another goofy layman’s video on it.

 

Heh, my recollection is that back in the day, ZDoom was also a fairly "conservative" choice among the ports of the time.  Doom Legacy and DOSDoom/EDGE were more what you wanted for "super advanced" stuff in the directions that GZDoom would be more known for today.

This fits pretty well into my memory as well. Doom Legacy was the GZdoom of the early-mid 00’s. I remember seeing a huge map by Mr.Rocket featuring loads of transparent 3D floors and it blew me away. I also remember some “serious” deathmatchers refusing to use anything but ZDoom back in the early days of Doom Connector, I assume because it was the most authentic at the time. It’s kind of hilarious now to think of ZDoom as “the vanilla doomer’s only real choice”, lol. 

Edited November 30, 2018 by Doomkid

[Bauul]

3 hours ago, ETTiNGRiNDER said:

Heh, my recollection is that back in the day, ZDoom was also a fairly "conservative" choice among the ports of the time.  Doom Legacy and DOSDoom/EDGE were more what you wanted for "super advanced" stuff in the directions that GZDoom would be more known for today.

 

That's a very good point!  Back in the early 2000s I recall that jDoom was the place to go for the most crash-bang-whiz advanced visuals, all massive over-the-top bloom and colored lighting.  ZDoom, with its lack of OpenGL renderer, always felt like a somewhat conservative port focused more on advanced modding functionality than improved visuals.  I remember donwloading The Adventures of MassMouth on ZDoom when it first came out and finding the graphics rather old-fashioned compared to playing jDoom.

 

It's easy to take for granted that something like the GZDoom of today is (arguably) the most graphically-advanced and the most mod-advanced source-port.  Back in the day it was one or the other.

[KVELLER]

2 hours ago, Bauul said:

It's easy to take for granted that something like the GZDoom of today is (arguably) the most graphically-advanced and the most mod-advanced source-port.

 

Isn't Doomsday more advanced graphically? GZDoom is super close though, no argument there.

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

Just now, KVELLER said:

Isn't Doomsday more advanced graphically? GZDoom is super close though, no argument there.

I'm pretty sure it isn't any more, unless they've kept up with the pace.  GZD has added some pretty modern rendering features lately.  Having packs that support said features is, of course, another matter.

[KVELLER]

1 hour ago, ETTiNGRiNDER said:

I'm pretty sure it isn't any more, unless they've kept up with the pace.  GZD has added some pretty modern rendering features lately.  Having packs that support said features is, of course, another matter.

 

TBH the only thing I remember is that it has a ridiculous amount of graphical settings, but I'm not informed enough to say much.

[kb1]

6 hours ago, Doomkid said:

...I want to take a close look at the earliest builds of ZDoom and Boom at some point. I’ll probably need to run a 16 bit VM to do so but I wonder how their earliest incarnations compare? I had no clue what Boom was but first played ZDoom in 2001. I remember being absolutely floored that you could make the player any colour combo you wanted. I wonder if that feature (which I’m sure most of us take totally for granted now) was in the earliest builds. Heck, I might even do another goofy layman’s video on it.

I don't know much about the earliest Boom versions, but ZDoom v1.11 (the first release) I know very well - it's the first source port I compiled. It is basically vanilla Doom running in Windows, with only very modest enhancements. This version saw the beginnings of the Quake-like console, with the console variable scheme that automated the saving and loading of those variables to the config file. I think the hard-coded sine/consine/tan tables were already dropped, in favor of runtime generation. This runtime code duplicated each and every value...except for one entry which was off by 1. I remember, because this off-by-one value caused UDoom's E4 demo to go out of sync.

 

I get the impression that, at this time, ZDoom was most concerned with hi-res support, good Windows integration, Quake-like console, and pulling in Boom limit-removal. The Boom guys were squashing engine bugs and limits, and DOS compatibility. (I'm sure I missed a lot of things, but that's the basic gist.) ZDoom's big push happened at v1.17, when tons of new features were released.

[kb1]

On 11/30/2018 at 2:35 PM, Doomkid said:

I want to take a close look at the earliest builds of ZDoom and Boom at some point. I’ll probably need to run a 16 bit VM to do so but I wonder how their earliest incarnations compare?

Sorry - dbl post:

Unless I'm missing something, the first ZDoom 1.11 runs in Windows as a 32-bit exe. But, yes, Boom was designed for DOS, so, yeah - you'd need: A DOS VM, DOSBox, or maybe even native MS-DOS, FreeDOS, or similar. Too bad PCs no longer come with a floppy drive, or you could boot via floppy :) I suppose you could set up DOS on a thumb drive, and set your BIOS to boot off of USB. There are tools that allow you to make a USB drive bootable, but I've never tried it for DOS. Might be an interesting experiment!

 

I think it's a real shame how Windows Explorer handles double-clicks on 16-bit executable files. Explorer should reroute such attempts to a default emulator, like DOSBox, or the emulator of your choosing. Similar to how Windows always asks: "Do you want to make Internet Explorer your default browser?". There should be a way to set up your default 16-bit emulator.

 

Instead, you have to create a batch file for DOSBox, and a custom config file, blah blah, if you want a desktop shortcut to your favorite 16-bit game. Tedious and annoying.

 

Back on point, Randy kept pretty detailed notes on ZDoom, and the TeamTNT members each had their own development logs for Boom. The biggest problem for me was trying to find the earliest Boom releases/versions. There's Boom 2.02 (I think that's the right number), but where is 2.01, not to mention 2.00? I can't find anything - logs, source code, executables - nothing.

 

If you can find earlier Boom stuff, please let me know, and give me links, if you would. Thanks! Good luck.

 

[Revenant100]

On 12/4/2018 at 9:45 PM, kb1 said:

 

not to mention 2.00

 

Boom 2.0 can be found here: https://securitronlinux.com/doomstuff/

[kb1]

2 hours ago, Revenant100 said:

Boom 2.0 can be found here: https://securitronlinux.com/doomstuff/

Wow, thanks! Unfortunately, no source, but the executable's there!

 

By the way, I haven't forgotten about you. I'm just too damn busy right now. Soon, I hope.