Modern port features you feel "justified" to use

[resle]

Come think about it, if one was a purist's purist, all runs using a resolution higher than 320x200 should be invalidated, shouldn't they?

Because one thing is awareness of your surroundings through a bunch of pixel blobs - think far away hitscanners and fireballs coming at you - and one is through crisp rendering of even the farthest imp.

 

But they aren't. And so I wonder, how far can one stretch this?

 

My personal take, the rule of thumb I use with myself and myself only, is that I like to play with those features whose lack in classic doom seem to be more due to hardware constraints and the need to optimize code, rather than by design choice.

 

Which in my opinion boils down to:

 

- high resolution

- not-infinitely tall monsters

- freelook

 

There might be more, but I think 3 is already my upper limits.

What are yours, if any?

[Nikku4211]

For relatively recent ZDoom WADs:

Truecolour software renderer, software dynamic lights, mouselook.

 

For PrBoom+/Woof/DSDA-Doom WADs:

No cap framerate.

[TasAcri]

- Native monitor resolution. There is no reason to play in the original 300 x 200 something anymore. And you don't lose anything in HD, the game still looks the same, just much cleaner (as long as you are still using Vanilla graphics settings with no bilinear filtering and such).

 

- high frame rate. Right now i have a 240hz monitor and playing at 240fps feels amazing. It's very responsive, very smooth, a feast for the senses. Again, not losing anything at all, unless you want to emulate the experience you had playing at low fps on a 386 or something.

 

- Dual analog. This is a bit underrated. Most people will use a mouse because it's faster and more precise. But playing with a dual analog gamepad is pretty legit too. As long as you don't play a competitive multiplayer match, a modern gamepad is still good enough for beating the game in UV without much issues. Plus, you get analog movement too, which can be useful in some situations where you have to walk on very thin surfaces such as in map 24 in DOOM II. You can also play comfortably on a couch. Obviously, vertical look is disabled at all times.

 

Other stuff outside the ports themselves:

 

- Smooth Animation mods. While i prefer the game looking close to the original, i think some more subtle visual improvements are essential. Adding some more animation frames to the weapons and reload animations, or the explosion/gib effects make the game feel much better for the eyes, without really changing anything artistic/graphics wise.

 

- Better sound quality mods. Again, you don't change anything, you are just improving the quality of the sound samples. You can also emulate the sound of a better audio card than the one you had back in the day (most likely an adlib or a 8bit soundblaster). Sure it's not "how you remember it" but if you could, you would buy a MT32 back then. It's still the real DOOM.

 

- Accurate HD texture mods. Ok, this isn't as important to me but it can look good on a modern display. As long as the textures are faithful enough to the original (DOOM's art direction was amazing either way) i will allow it. When i play the original 4 episodes or DOOM II/Final DOOM, i never use texture mods that change the original art, no matter how good they might look otherwise. But most of the time i don't use texture mods at all.

 

- Voxels. Now, i don't use a voxel pack for DOOM yet, but i do for Duke Nukem and Blood. Voxels are great because it's like magically turning the original sprites into 3D objects, without messing with their original look. Sprites are great and all but the way they rotate as you turn left/right always bothered me, even back then. Voxels completely fix that while looking authentic, unlike regular 3D models that look completely out of place in those games. There is an ongoing project of voxelised enemies in DOOM, with all their animations. I'm eager to use it when it's done. Though i might not use it all the time because even though the voxelised enemies look authentic, they will still look pretty out of place and unfamiliar in different perspectives. But decorative objects and ammo pickups are usually OK.

 

Edited May 7, 2022 by TasAcri

[RHhe82]

I don’t feel like I need to justify myself much anything. That said, some features (such as mouselook or jumping and such) I just don’t use.

 

There is one feature that I find myself constantly on the fence about: DSDA-Doom’s wonderful rewind feature. I love it, but somehow it feels a bit more ”cheap” to use rewind than regular, plain saving despite it being basically the same thing.

 

I’d be interested to hear what others think about it, especially people who use DSDA (and don’t refrain from any and all savegame mechanics).

 

I first used it so that I had set the savestate interval to something like 15-20 seconds and don’t extend too far, but somehow that’s frustrating, and lately I’ve been leaning towards using regular saves, where I have the total control on save points.

[BGreener]

Ever since I was first exposed to them in Duke 3D, brightmaps! Seeing things like those red monster eyes light up in dark places just absolutely tickles me, it’s pretty bad how attached I’ve become to them.

 

I suppose higher resolutions is another one, but I’ve been increasing the resolution to Doom since Doom 95. Even the build games around the time let me bump up their resolution through their setup.exes.

[Frost-Core]

i prefer :

• Colored HUD and Colored Blood
• Widescreen assets support
• and of course widescreen

All of these are in crispy doom.

Edited May 7, 2022 by Frost-Core

[Codename_Delta]

5 minutes ago, Frost-Core said:

i prefer :

• Colored HUD
• Widescreen assets support
• and of course widescreen

All of these are in crispy doom.

Same but also obviously brightmaps, uncapped fps and the D2/1 sprite fix mod.

And I guess stat counters with the hud.

Edited May 7, 2022 by Codename_Delta

[Smouths]

Agreed on finite actor height.

 

Seriously, maps usually aren't designed with infinitely tall characters in mind, and even the stock-levels poorly accounted for them.

 

Still feel like I'm cheezing everytime I soar over a mass of imps or pinkies though.

Edited May 7, 2022 by Smouths

[Doomy__Doom]

27 minutes ago, RHhe82 said:

There is one feature that I find myself constantly on the fence about: DSDA-Doom’s wonderful rewind feature. I love it, but somehow it feels a bit more ”cheap” to use rewind than regular, plain saving despite it being basically the same thing.

 

I’d be interested to hear what others think about it, especially people who use DSDA (and don’t refrain from any and all savegame mechanics).

 

I first used it so that I had set the savestate interval to something like 15-20 seconds and don’t extend too far, but somehow that’s frustrating, and lately I’ve been leaning towards using regular saves, where I have the total control on save points.

I keep 120 seconds worth of rewind and use it as "organic save". In most cases, that lets me go back to the beginning of an encounter that killed me (or was otherwise completed unsatisfactory) without constantly thinking "I should save" or "when did I last save again?"

It does require a degree of self-discipline to not fall into undoing every random high-damage hit.

 

I still save manually if I'm playing something at or above the upper boundary of my skill level and expect to reset a lot at the button-that-starts-the-fight(tm).

Sometimes I rewind things like picking up a 20 shell box at 48 by accident, or stuff that I'd save for anyway like testing "does the blood hurt in this pwad?"

 

If I'm trying to git gud and learn how to beat a specific encounter/map single segment, then no rewinds at any point, that's where all mistakes must be accepted and learned from.

Edited May 7, 2022 by Doomy__Doom

[ReaperAA]

General things that are justified in my opinion irrespective of port:

• high + widescreen resolution and high framerate
• crosshair, kills/items/secrets stat and other HUD features
• autorun and horizontal mouselook with no vertical movement

 

Some DSDA features that I like to use:

• Rewind (for situations where I forgot to save for a long period but still prefer using regular saves)
• longtics (unless recording demo)
• Show health above monsters (actually I just recently started trying this and still on fence about it as it feels a little bit "cheaty")

 

GZDoom features that I prefer using irrespective of wad:

• Brightmaps and dynamic lights
• vertical mouselook for Heretic, Hexen, Strife or any GZDoom mod when it is allowed

[Obsidian Plague]

ACS, the ability to rescale textures via UDMF, DECORATE, really a whole bunch of things

[Maribo]

37 minutes ago, RHhe82 said:

I’d be interested to hear what others think about it, especially people who use DSDA (and don’t refrain from any and all savegame mechanics).

Most people either use it as an alternative to save spamming their way through something (nothing wrong with that), or they die and then rewind back to what they'd consider a "safe" point, and make a hard save to work off of.

 

12 minutes ago, Doomy__Doom said:

Sometimes I rewind things like picking up a 20 shell box at 48 by accident, or stuff that I'd save for anyway like testing "does the blood hurt in this pwad?"

This is a really good QOL usage of it too, I often do this as well.

 

I'll just post my whole setup for playing Doom, since I'm totally justified in playing however I want :^), though I do play within the limits of what's allowed for DSDA submissions:

1080p Software rendering default (use OpenGL with glboom or shaders settings when necessary), capped at 150 FPS, no vsync, in 16:9 aspect ratio. I change to 4:3 when I'm doing north/east glides, because it's a lot easier to line those up in 4:3. View bobbing and weapon bobbing both turned on. -shorttics is set to default, vertical mouse movement is off by default, but I toggle it when needed with Alt. Extended HUD is almost always turned on. No mouselook, of course.

[Obsidian Plague]

1 minute ago, Maribo said:

1080p Software rendering default (use OpenGL with glboom or shaders settings when necessary), capped at 150 FPS, no vsync, in 16:9 aspect ratio. I change to 4:3 when I'm doing north/east glides, because it's a lot easier to line those up in 4:3. View bobbing and weapon bobbing both turned on. -shorttics is set to default, vertical mouse movement is off by default, but I toggle it when needed with Alt. Extended HUD is almost always turned on. No mouselook, of course.

"I'll take a double triple bossy deluxe, on a raft, four by four, animal style, extra shingles with a shimmy and a squeeze, light axle grease. Make it cry, burn it and let it swim."

[Gez]

1 hour ago, resle said:

My personal take, the rule of thumb I use with myself and myself only, is that I like to play with those features whose lack in classic doom seem to be more due to hardware constraints and the need to optimize code, rather than by design choice.

Thing is, this is a very broad category because one could argue that without hardware constraints, Doom would have been Quake. Or Doom 3. Or Rage. Or Doom Eternal. Obviously they were trying to make the best game they could, the most impressive one, so if they had unlimited development time and the hardware had unlimited processing power, Doom would have ended up very, very different from what it is.

 

One example of a thing that was originally advertised as being in the game and then actually missing was dynamic bullet hole graphics to let the player see the effect of their weapons and leave "violent bread crumbs" to mark their path of destruction. So, you can add decals to your list.

 

Other things we can add to the list are the stuff John Carmack himself suggests doing with the code, in the text file accompanying the source release. If we ignore the technical mumbo jumbo about further optimizations and only focus on the player-side changes, we get this list:

Quote

Add some rendering features -- transparency, look up / down, slopes, etc.

Add some game features -- weapons, jumping, ducking, flying, etc.

Create a packet server based internet game.

Create a client / server based internet game.

Do a 3D accelerated version.

 

All of these things have the Official Carmack Seal of Approval.

Edited May 7, 2022 by Gez

[RHhe82]

19 minutes ago, Doomy__Doom said:

I keep 120 seconds worth of rewind and use it as "organic save". In most cases, that lets me go back to the beginning of an encounter that killed me (or was otherwise completed unsatisfactory) without constantly thinking "I should save" or "when did I last save again?"

It does require a degree of self-discipline to not fall into undoing every random high-damage hit.

 

I still save manually if I'm playing something at or above the upper boundary of my skill level and expect to reset a lot at the button-that-starts-the-fight(tm).

Sometimes I rewind things like picking up a 20 shell box at 48 by accident, or stuff that I'd save for anyway like testing "does the blood hurt in this pwad?"

 

This sounds very sensible to me, more or less the way I try or would like to use the feature. Add to the "does the blood hurt" to see "if this pit that looks inescapable is really inescapable".

[Sleep Deprivation]

The game actually matching my monitor's resolution. Brightmaps as well.

[liPillON]

comperr_hangsolid in prboom/dsda

 

I wish other ports had this implemented, enabling users to avoid annoying low-hanging decorations without disabling infinitely tall monsters..

It would also be ideal to have a different option to enable z-clipping for monsters only

This way we could mix & match both settings at our leisure

 

Right now the situation is this, iirc:

- crispy: infinite height on/off switch available, has effect on everything (monsters and low-hanging decorations)

- woof: no option available, everything is always infinitely tall at every complevel

- gzdoom: z-clipping available in compatmode 0, everything is always infinitely tall when using compatmode 2,6,7

- dsda/prboom: monsters are always infinitely tall at every complevel, comperr_hangsolid has effects on decorations

 

 

[SilentD00mer]

Maybe I'm not as "purist" as I thought, but most of the modern ports features I don't use because I don't feel so comfortable to play with, but I don't really hate them, like OGL render with filtering or uncapped frame rate. I don't turn off the infinite tall monsters because I kinda like this as part of the game(yeah, I'm weird). I prefer to play Chocolate-doom/Vanilla, but I use DSDA-Doom too, it brings many QOL features I like:

-higher resolution

-the restart level key

-extended hud

-'shorttics' parameter

-the save features

- widescreen changes the perception of the level, I use it even if I prefer the black lateral bars

[tomas7777]

I play on high resolution widescreen with uncapped framerate most of the time and I don't feel like I'm cheating. Autorun is a must-have unless you're masochistic or you enjoy holding a button 99% of the time, and other minor enhancements that could be considered "cheating" like no-vert, kills/items/secrets counter, even vertical mouselook (not manual vertical aim though) are fine to me as well.

 

Personally, where I draw the line is with features that change gameplay behavior, i.e. features that would also break demo compat. I don't mind using stuff like finite height monsters or vertical aim if I'm playing more casually, but if I want to play a vanilla WAD "as intended", these are out of the question for me.

[idbeholdME]

One that hasn't been mentioned yet:

 

Infinite Lost Souls. One of the most important things to me.

[OpenRift]

High-res, uncapped framerate, and widescreen. That's all I want in a modern source port. No changes to gameplay necessary.

 

If it's Heretic, Hexen or Strife, then mouselook as well because you can actually look up and down in those games, just normally not with the mouse. 

[Sneezy McGlassFace]

1 hour ago, idbeholdME said:

Infinite Lost Souls

Right? Objectively the best monster. The more the betterer

[Lippeth]

Oh god am I a purist? No, but while I experiment with settings and my tastes change from time to time, a few preferences usually stay pretty consistent if the port allows it.

Spoiler

4:3 resolution usually no higher than 640x400, vertically stretched to 480 (Eternity has a fun and interesting way of doing this, and most ports do it automatically). I realize there are distinct advantages to using widescreen, like peripheral vision, but if I do that too long I get motion sickness, plus 4:3 makes the action look faster. GZDoom has a weird way to do it, but on a 16:9 monitor I set it to the lowest 16:10 resolution and then type "vid_scale_custompixelaspect" to 1.2 which crops the sides and stretches the ui vertically. 320x200/240 never bothered me, I've done it enough to distinguish faraway blobs from the surroundings, but some ports look better than others, and native resolution feels like overkill for what's being displayed, so I split the difference and go for 640x400 unless I think it looks good at 320x200. I have a mild hangup with widescreen in general, but that's a whole different can o' ham.

 

Capped Framerate: Another contributor to motion sickness and uncanny feelings is high framerate with chunky, choppy sprites. Sprite interpolation also gives me a weird feeling, like monsters are ice skating, so that goes off as well. 3D models look great interpolated at high framerates, but doing this with 2D assets makes it look like a cheap mobile game.

 

No freelook: Again, because of motion sickness, freelook with 2D assets just makes me feel barfy, especially with the y shearing of software rendering. I can handle freelook in hardware rendering to a degree, but the vertical sensitivity needs to be at most half of the horizontal sensitivity, and even then, about half the time I prefer vertical mouse movement with strafe bound to right-click, forward to the mouse wheel and double click as use because I occasionally like to play mouse only just for kicks. Heretic and Hexen get special treatment because of flying, so I use a convoluted configuration which has now become second nature: T flies up, R flies down, G stops flying, V looks up, C looks down, B looks center.

 

Pitch shifted sounds: I love them. I know it's wrong, but I love them. Another thing I like regarding sound is when they're allowed to be interrupted by other sounds like with the silent bfg trick. There's something satisfying about shooting a zombie with a shotgun and having the shotgun start but be interrupted by a randomly pitched zombie death scream while picking up his ammo. It just feels like butter.

 

Flipped stereo OPL3: Eternity and GZDoom are the only ones that do this as far as I know, but it's a nice detail. I only use OPL half the time anyway, so it's whatever.

 

Infinitely tall monsters and autoaim are lame yes, but are so ingrained within me that I actually prefer them in most cases. I like wads with monsters on ledges with barrels down below to block shots against them. I also prefer monsters getting stuck in doors and on ledges.

 

Dynamic lights/Brightmaps/Decals: Are fun and make a dark scene really pop. One thing that bugged me in GZDoom is that the pistol, chaingun and shotgun shoot horizontally, while the ssg has a nice wide pattern. I know this is how it always has been, but Graf let me add a better looking spread pattern to the hitscan weapons in GZDoom which looks great with bullet decals and is consistent with the ssg, but so far has not been very popular which is strange to me because it's optional and off by default.

 

Edited May 8, 2022 by Lippeth

[Sneezy McGlassFace]

"Justified"? It's my time with the game, so I can play it however I please without needing to justify it. But I guess the coolest feature I've seen is DSDA's rewind.

[rzh]

Most of what @Lippeth said also applies to me, 4:3 aspect ratio, capped framerate, resolution either 300x200 or 640x400, no freelook, infinitely tall monsters + autoaim, brightmaps on, colored blood on.

I disagree with random pitched sounds and sound cutoffs though, I hate both. I also use Windows' default soundfont for MIDIs in Doom, SC55 music packs for original OST, but I use OPL3 for Raven's games.

I also love Crispy's extended HUD, and I wish all ports had something like it, I play with it exclusively in both Crispy and Woof.

[Doomkid]

5 hours ago, Obsidian Plague said:

"I'll take a double triple bossy deluxe, on a raft, four by four, animal style, extra shingles with a shimmy and a squeeze, light axle grease. Make it cry, burn it and let it swim."

“...we serve Doom here, sir.”

 

For some reason, I’ve always had to play with the framerate capped at 35. Anything higher feels so “smooth” that I have trouble aiming and honestly start getting motion sickness. It’s really odd, because part of me does like the “smooth” look but I simply can’t use it.

 

I play in high res with widescreen when ports allow, but a lot of my personal Doom time is spent in DosBox with all old limits forced, and I like it like that too.

 

Oh, if deathmatch servers specifically allow it, I’ll use freelook. But If freelook is forced off, that’s no problem at all.

[nrofl]

I keep on no mouselook unless recommended, no jumping our crouching unless recommended, and ITA’s typically stay on. Otherwise I spoil myself with 1920x1080 and 60fps with the OG software renderer.

 

(P.S, if you use OpenGL your a madman)

[resle]

Generally speaking, I think none of the cosmetic improvements,  - be it higher resolution, smoother this, resampled that etc. conflict with the original game design, love them or hate them. (I don't mind high res and some translucency but that's as far as I go)

 

Jumping, "swimming" and the likes are an absolute no. There are maps that can be finshed in a second, sections that can be skipped entirely, by the mean of a tiny little jump. Jumping was never part of the original design. And it was a choice, not an engine limitation: vertical movement, collisions and "climbing" were well built into the engine already so if they wanted to let the player jump, it would have been easy to do so.

 

Now, about vertical look.. I don't think anyone at Id really designed maps around not being able to look up and down, or considered the absence of vertical looking a feature. Monsters can "look" up and down and target you accordingly after all. It was an engine constraint, and the only map that exploits that limitation as a game dynamic is at the veeeery end of the original run, with the *cough* universally loved  icon of sin. So, grey area I'd say. I keep it on, makes play more varied, less repetitive.

[BigBoy91]

7 hours ago, Doomkid said:

For some reason, I’ve always had to play with the framerate capped at 35. Anything higher feels so “smooth” that I have trouble aiming and honestly start getting motion sickness. It’s really odd, because part of me does like the “smooth” look but I simply can’t use it.

I'm with ya there. 35fps just feels right. Anything above that just feels like I'm ice skating around with little precision. I know the game logic is set at 35fps and it's all interpolation, but still. As a ^shitty speedrunner, the game just feels a bit more dialed in with that lower framerate too. Basically, I'm retarded.

 

EDIT: Three "just feels" in one post. Impressive!

Edited May 8, 2022 by BigBoy91

[Metal_Slayer]

I think that as long as it doesn't goes too far away from the game's design anything is okay, but my personal favorites are: HUD showing extra information, crosshair that changes when it's targeting something, Smooth Doom is something I kind of appreciate but I usually don't bother with it, higher resolutions but to a point where you can still see individual pixels on the image, fixing game breaking bugs(not the kind of bug that a map maker would want to trigger on purpose), other than that I wouldn't want to change anything related to the physics, Smooth Doom is something I kind of appreciate but I usually don't bother with it, and  I guess maybe I would want to use voxels once that new voxel pack gets released and ported to something other than GZDoom.