Running new MBF wads with original MBF

[ReaperAA]

Hi folks. I was wondering if it is possible to play modern MBF wads like Valiant, Ancient Aliens or Eviternity with the original MBF 2.03 source port. Reason for asking is because I feel like hipster these wads are really impressive and I wonder how much people would have been impressed in 90's. This in-turn led me to try these wads out with the 90's port.

 

But the problem is that I can't get these wads to run with MBF. For example, I extracted the dehacked file data from Valiant and named it Valiant.deh. Then I went to MBF's config file and added "Valiant.wad" and "Valiant.deh" like this:

Spoiler

[("")] WAD file preloaded at program startup 
wadfile_1                 "Valiant.wad"

[("")] WAD file preloaded at program startup 
wadfile_2                 ""

[("")] DEH/BEX file preloaded at program startup 
dehfile_1                 "Valiant.deh"

[("")] DEH/BEX file preloaded at program startup 
dehfile_2                 ""

 

And it doesn't work (I get errors)

[skillsaw]

Couple comments.

 

• Valiant won't work because the maps use extended nodes, which aren't supported by MBF.exe. You'd have to rebuild all the nodes with a different nodes builder first. I don't believe any of the maps require extended nodes to function; however, I chose to use ZDBSP with extended nodes as it seems to result in the fewest slime trails. Once you rebuild the nodes, you may still encounter errors, however - absolutely no testing was done using MBF.exe, and the only ports supported officially by the idgames release are ZDoom, GZDoom, Zandronum, PrBoom-Plus, and Eternity. If you try to get it working, I'd be interested in hearing how it goes, but you're on your own :)
• Ancient Aliens is NOT -complevel 11 (MBF). It is -complevel 9 (Boom). I've heard this a few times before so I'm not sure where the misconception came from. I just double checked the release thread to confirm my sanity and it's got the correct complevel posted. That said, I wouldn't expect Aaliens to run on MBF.exe (or, say, boom.exe), since Ancient Aliens also uses extended nodes.

[Bauul]

Just to add, Eviternity is also built using extended nodes. Only a couple of maps actually strictly needed it, but it was done for the same robustness reasons as Valiant. So if MBF.exe doesn't support extended nodes then that won't work either.

[ReaperAA]

Thanks for the replies. Unfortunately I currently have zero experience with Map Editors, so I don't know how I would rebuild them with a different node builder(and which node builder to select). However I do plan to learn and try to use either DB2 or GZDB in future, so I may try it then.

[ketmar]

actually, you don't need map editor for that. just download ZokumBSP, for example, read the readme, and run it with the required args. ;-)

[Tristan]

The ZDaemon fix for Eviternity by @damo2k has rebuilt nodes for the maps that don't require the extended format, though I don't think it's quite finished yet. Such a fix also existed for Valiant but I don't remember how functional it was.

Edited February 20, 2019 by Eris Falling