crazy source port features that will never get added

[Wadmodder Shalton]

Having PWADs in development hell being funded on Patreon or Ko-Fi, in other words, by getting rid of the crunch time trend and giving PWADs in development hell the Patreon or Ko-Fi treatment is an attempt to get out of the "Feature Creep Curse"; looking at you "Mordeth Episodes 2 & 3" by @Mordeth.

Edited May 20, 2023 by Wadmodder Shalton

[Professor Hastig]

On 5/15/2023 at 11:35 AM, Individualised said:

JPEG textures? Really?

 

It makes sense for hi-res content to reduce final file size. A JPEG of a large texture can be up to 10x smaller than a PNG sometimes.

For example, it would make a difference if a hi-res Quake2-style skybox takes up 1 MB or 10 MB in graphics size and with these images the compression artifacts won't really be visible. We're using JPEG for photos, after all.

 

On 5/15/2023 at 5:30 PM, RataUnderground said:

I may be a little ignorant of what goes on behind the curtain, but I just think the future versions of GZDoom should ditch doom compatibility and became an streamlined engine for standalone games that doesn't have to struggle with Doom's obsolete idiosyncrasies, while maintaining the ease of creating  maps under a new standard.

 

Hey, that would take away my favourite port for playing Doom! I don't really care much about most of the games using it as a general game engine.

Just because GZDoom has evolved far beyond the limits of 1993's Doom does not mean that its primary use is still playing those old games with it.

 

Such an engine should rather be a fork that then is free to clean up some of the crappier parts of Doom's game physics code and replace it with something better.

 

 

[RataUnderground]

1 minute ago, Professor Hastig said:

Hey, that would take away my favourite port for playing Doom! I don't really care much about most of the games using it as a general game engine.

Just because GZDoom has evolved far beyond the limits of 1993's Doom does not mean that its primary use is still playing those old games with it.

 

Such an engine should rather be a fork that then is free to clean up some of the crappier parts of Doom's game physics code and replace it with something better.

But what else can you ask from a new version of GzDoom to play Doom? You will always have the current version!

[Professor Hastig]

17 minutes ago, RataUnderground said:

But what else can you ask from a new version of GzDoom to play Doom? You will always have the current version!

 

How about bugfixes, new rendering features, new operating systems and generally dealing with the evolution of computing hardware?

Software that stands still will fall behind eventually.

[RataUnderground]

 

1 minute ago, Professor Hastig said:

 

How about bugfixes, new rendering features, new operating systems and generally dealing with the evolution of computing hardware?

Software that stands still will fall behind eventually.

Fair enough 😆 . But a fork of the engine dedicated to game creation could be very cool.

[DRON12261]

Full sector color lighting, as it was in Doom PSX and Doom 64 (not via colormaps) in ports like DSDA, Woof! and Doom Retro.

[Amiga Angel]

chatgpt or other ai build-in for a multitude of ingame tasks like dynamic map geometry changes, conversations, path finding, enemy ai etc...

 

 

Edited May 17, 2023 by Amiga Angel

[IDDQD_1337]

Nvidia DLSS (versions 2 and 3)/AMD FSR (1.0 and 2.0)/Intel XeSS, Raytracing, Depth of Field and Cel-Shading on GZDoom

[Graf Zahl]

5 hours ago, RataUnderground said:

 

Fair enough 😆 . But a fork of the engine dedicated to game creation could be very cool.

 

 

Good luck finding a developer willing to do that. It sounds easier on paper than it really is and skilled people are a rare commodity.

 

[RataUnderground]

2 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

 

 

Good luck finding a developer willing to do that. It sounds easier on paper than it really is and skilled people are a rare commodity.

 

Oh, but I believe in you Zahl, don't be humble, I believe you are skilled enough :p 

(Just kidding, but the thread is called "crazy source port features that will never get added" and the truth is that posting here I admit that although it is something I would like, I don't think it will happen.)

[Scypek2]

12 hours ago, RataUnderground said:

Fair enough 😆 . But a fork of the engine dedicated to game creation could be very cool.

 

I've thought about the "ZDoom for new games specifically" idea a lot. I like ZDoom features, but I'm also drawn to vanilla dehacked, because that's where every function has been created with exactly one purpose, so I can easily understand its exact workings and also keep my expectations low. In ZDoom, you can do a lot of things very easily, but also every aspect of the game is torn between emulating classic doom, working the way the modern player wants it to, working the way the modern modder wants it to, and being backwards-compatible with 10 different 10 year old zdoom mods made when half of the current features haven't been implemented yet. All in all, "ZDoom for new games" could certainly be a huge undertaking, depending on the scope... but the obvious first step for such a project seems to be "add nothing, remove a lot".

[dpJudas]

You also have to keep in mind that anyone volunteering for this task is essentially signing themselves up to work for free for a bunch of game developers.

 

Unlike Doom modding where everyone is doing it for the love of the hobby, with new games a lot of them will be putting the end result on Steam. If the game succeeds they become rich and you get nothing. Very few developers can accept such a deal.

[Redneckerz]

On 5/17/2023 at 10:59 AM, RataUnderground said:

 

Fair enough 😆 . But a fork of the engine dedicated to game creation could be very cool.

GLOOME used to do this. There has been a 64 bit version of this, but its on a outdated codebase.

 

GLOOME has some specific features GZ does not have, however they aren't required in GZ  as it has far better scripting capabilities.

[Lucius Wooding]

Isn't the whole point of a source port to bring Doom to additional platforms? Not to add a ton of features and bloat, although a lot of the stuff that's been added over the years has often been very useful. If you're not primarily interested in supporting Doom then just make a completely different engine and call it a day. Or better yet use one of several very well developed ones that already exist which are used commercially by a wide range of developers. GZDoom is already a bastard offspring (I say this lovingly) as it is, so why begin there for such a project? 

 

By basing everything off an existing source port that's centered around Doom you're really just keeping a lot of code and a mapping format that doesn't work well for a generalized engine necessarily. Keeping existing code intact seems like it will save a lot of work but that's not always the case when you desire to add all kinds of unintended features. If you want proof of this, read every feature listed in this thread and consider that nobody has made most of them for various reasons even though many would be fairly standard in a more modern engine. Well integrated multicore support would be a big one right off the bat, and a lot of performance problems and modern graphics support features are limited in how they can be addressed while still conforming to Doom's gameplay. All Doom source ports have one foot firmly in 1993 by necessity.

 

The more things you want to change, the more work it is and the further astray of this community you're going to get. And if you really want it fully tailored then you're better off building it yourself from scratch which is a huge undertaking that it isn't fair to put on poor Graf just because he made something cool already.

 

[The Nate]

Automatic coffee maker

[houston]

On 5/16/2023 at 7:10 AM, Kevansevans said:

Since then, I've always used this feature for every PNG asset I use.

Just in case you want to know, there's a nifty program called OptiPNG which can do this for you before that step (don't know if it's better or worse than whatever library's built into Slade), and even a lossy PNG compression program called pngquant which in a manner of speaking, optimises PNGs to be optimised.

[Shakariki Heisenberg]

make demos that say were on DSDA doom be able to watch on GZdoom

[Wadmodder Shalton]

Funding future developments of source ports via Patreon or Ko-Fi.

[Individualised]

Chocolate Doom 64. I can get pretty close feel and gameplay-wise with Doom CE but it would be nice to have fully vanilla game logic and behaviour. Doom 64 EX just doesn't cut it unfortunately. I understand it wouldn't be as easy to get it as "chocolate" as Chocolate Doom is due to Doom 64 being originally written for a non-PC platform though.

Edited June 23, 2023 by Individualised

[Scypek2]

Multiplayer sourceport with skill levels for deathmatch. If you select I'm Too Young To Die, you (and only you) get double ammo and half damage. If you select Nightmare, you have to fight players who selected I'm Too Young To Die.

[Fluuschoen]

The return of 

 

armor_red                         
armor_yellow                      
armor_green             

 

in DSDA-Doom, so I can make the the armor value on the status bar yellow, like the rest of the numbers. I mean seriously. It was present up until 0.24.3, but got removed from 0.25 and onwards, and when I mentioned this (twice) in its topic, afaik the comment(s) got ignored.

And a sound effect for toggling vertical mouse, like in Crispy. That would be sweet too.         

Edited July 13, 2023 by Fluuschoen