Petition to all developers of demo compatible ports about .lmp footer

[Hitherto]

Please make addition of footer lump (strictly in prboom+ format) to .lmp file while recording mandatory and default option.

 

Without it, considering modern chaos in naming conventions among speedrunners, automated watching even iwad demos becomes impossible and manual -playdemo'ing is too much pain considering amount of demos producing nowadays.

 

Thanks for your attention.

Edited February 25, 2023 by Hitherto

[rfomin]

We have added a demo footer to Woof and Crispy Doom (also in the current dev version of Crispy Heretic). I'm assuming you want to autoplay the demo using the information from the footer?

[Shepardus]

I'm pretty sure all the major source ports people use to record demos for DSDA already write the footer, at least in dev builds if not in stable releases yet.

[Hitherto]

4 hours ago, rfomin said:

We have added a demo footer to Woof and Crispy Doom (also in the current dev version of Crispy Heretic). I'm assuming you want to autoplay the demo using the information from the footer?

 

Exactly, using prboom 2.5.1.4. And yes, these two engines are brings majority of trouble now. Though Woof produced demos have some sort of such footer but it is incompatible with prboom/dsda-doom.

[rfomin]

The footers in Crispy and Woof are in the PrBoom+ format, the only difference is the port name/version and command line options. We have added these footers for information and not for demo autoplay. It's a little tricky to make compatible demo autoplay due to differences in command line options.

[Hitherto]

Excuse me, but I see quite difference in format:

Woof 10.5.1
-iwad "doom2.wad" -file "cchest2.wad"

PWAD   L   

2

PrBoom-Plus 2.5.1.4
-iwad "doom2.wad" -file "cchest2.wad" 
      VERSION       PORTNAME%   &   CMDLINE 

PWAD   I   

2

dsda-doom 0.24.1
-iwad "doom2.wad" -file "cchest2.wad" 
      VERSION       PORTNAME"   &   CMDLINE 

Take note: prb+ recognize footer produced by much newer dsda, so <portname> string definitely isn't hardcoded by content and length.

Edited February 26, 2023 by Hitherto

[rfomin]

I just checked newest DSDA-Doom with DSDA-Launcher, it successfully recognized the footer of the Woof demo. I suggest moving to DSDA-Doom, PrBoom+ 2.5.1.4 is not supported.

[Hitherto]

 

1 hour ago, rfomin said:

it successfully recognized the footer of the Woof demo

Are you sure? I hardly believe what that launcher can do something what port (dsda 0.25.6) himself can't. Probably it is just launcher "memory" or your dsda-doom still have some patterns in .cfg (another old prb+ feature for automated playback via strict .lmp naming convention). Try to rename your test pwad demo to something generic and launch it as "dsda-doom.exe generic.lmp"

 

[rfomin]

I think the footer reader was in the old launcher code in PrBoom+ that Kraflab removed. I'm not sure because this code is not very fun to read.

 

Anyway, I tried renaming the demo, DSDA-Launcher still recognizes the footer. Are you sure you have the latest version? Also in the launcher settings there are paths for IWAD/PWAD.

[Hitherto]

30 minutes ago, rfomin said:

I tried renaming the demo, DSDA-Launcher still recognizes the footer.

Probably @Never_Again taught author of launcher and it uses direct reading of footer cmdline section now.

 

Anyway it is useless for me - I have 32 bit system and I simply dislike any type of launchers.

 

For sure @dsda-devcan "repair" autoplay feature in similar way. But honestly I don't think what that prb+ footer format is hard to implement as cross-port standart. At least because current DSDA have absolute majority of demos produced with it.

Edited February 26, 2023 by Hitherto

[dsda-dev]

The pr+ / dsda-doom footer is not truly plain text but actually an embedded wad file. So the automated playback in the port is actually accessing lumps rather than searching for text that looks like a command line. But as rfomin said, the launcher handles this just fine. I'm not sure about the current version of the launcher but there is a new one coming with some usability updates, and it's suggested to associate demos with the launcher rather than the port so that it can proxy the playback and prompt you if files are missing, which the port will not do for you.