What are the reasons to play other ports except GZDOOM?

[Graf Zahl]

1 hour ago, Andrea Rovenski said:

no, the fundamental physics of GZDoom is completely changed. It's more similar to something like quake 2 than doom, actually, in how the game feels, plays, and behaves.

 

That is actually utter nonsense. If it used Quake physics it wouldn't be able to play Doom anymore. It's still Doom physics code with all the poor design that gives it its unique quirks.

I think what you experience here is actually the input code being different, not the physics. Virtually all other ports use SDL, while GZDoom uses Windows directly and I have heard from several people that this shows in input responsiveness.

 

 

1 hour ago, Andrea Rovenski said:

what could possibly motivate someone to post such a thing? "lgbtq pandering"? Do you listen to yourself? This is a doom website.

 

Idiots being idiots, yes some people would do that. I couldn't care less.

 

1 minute ago, DRON12261 said:

- A huge number of settings that are completely unnecessary to Doom and which, moreover, break it (why the hell does Doom need Build-like sector lighting, which is also broken). And also absolutely idiotic default settings that discourage me from using UDMF in mapping. And also the utterly horrible OpenGL rendering, where the authors put a huge dick in making it not only look like Doom, but at least look like it. And yes, technically you can dig into the settings and make it look close to the original (OpenGL Renderer, software has even worse optimization, at least in my experience), but your players are unlikely to sweat about it since not many will read the README, I'm not talking about trying to bother adjusting the port to the needs of the map. As a result, I simply can't guarantee the player the proper quality they need to see on their screen that I intended. The map on Boom, etc. can easily and easily be run on other ports, where everything will go exactly as the author intended.  

 

 

 

Whatever you may like the next person may not, yet you assume that your preferences are what the majority wants. Things do not work like that and it is impossible to satisfy everyone.

 

You also cannot guarantee with ANY port that people will see what you intended. Not with Doom.exe, not with Boom and not with GZDoom.

Every monitor is different and whatever display you tweaked your visuals for will be different from the next display and what looks good on one will look like crap on the next one.

Some are brighter than others any you either need to amp up the gamma or change the lighting mode to make things look right, and the color temperature is also different between monitors.

I have seen maps that were designed for monitors so bright that the only way to play them was to change the light mode to 'bright' on my properly calibrated display.

 

(BTW, the Build lighting mode is there because the code exists. Remember: This is available as a map option if a mapper is so inclined to use it.)

 

1 minute ago, TasAcri said:

 

They should at least change OpenGL to Vulkan as the default. I only recently tried it because MyHouse performance was bad on my system and the difference was night and day. Vulkan was way faster, not just by a small percentage. In the big fights i'd say it was 2x faster. 

 

We'll probably do that for next version. The downside here is that some Vulkan drivers of early generation integrated GPUs are not that good on Vulkan, even if they support it.

2x faster is a bit unusual, what GPU was this?

 

1 minute ago, DRON12261 said:

And yes, in a way it makes sense, but I just don't have Vulkan support on one PC. And since when did doom start requiring HIGH-END PC?

 

It doesn't - but let's not forget that the most recent non-Vulkan compatible hardware is 12 years old by now. It is so far beyond the baseline of how a current system - even low end - looks, that it's not a good idea anymore to use it as the default, especially since even on NVidia's current hardware OpenGL is starting to show the first cracks in its support.

 

 

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

2 hours ago, Croaker said:

3. Optimization. GZDoom is a relatively "heavy" port, so some owners of potato PCs prefer to use ZDoom or LZDoom for better performance.

This is the main one for me.  Barring an actual good reason (by which I mean something that affects doing RL business, not "muh gaemz" which have mostly failed to impress me for a long time now) I'm done running the upgradism treadmill and am going to use my current computers until they die or I do.  They're good enough for anything sane.  But GZ devs have been crystal clear about not giving a shit about maintaining support on anything old, and I don't even blame them, programming is a pain in the ass and doing it to run across a broad spectrum of machines even more so.  That's not something worth arguing any more.  But it does mean that if I want to run GZ, I can either do it on a Linux box with often-times (depending on mod) crappy performance, or on a friend's machine that I have limited access time to.

 

Accuracy is kind of a moot point as I see the Z-ports as being mainly for making partial/total conversions with, not so much for standard playing or map making.  I do find it a bit unfortunate that the only accurate options for Heretic/Hexen are vanilla or plus, though.  (No, not even Chocolate & derivatives.  It may be fine and dandy for Doom but I keep finding edge cases that break in H+H and the devs don't seem in any hurry to fix them; as always they seem to be second-class citizens in the world of Doom ports).

[LexiMax]

GZDoom as a codebase is very difficult to "fool around" with, from a code point of view.  Other ports are much easier to build, and much easier to make code changes to and actually see the results.  I think that lively ecosystem of Chocolate Doom and WinMBF forks is proof positive of this, compared to the relative dearth of ZDoom forks post-GZDoom 3.0.

 

Also, not only is modern GZDoom not a great multiplayer port, but it's also not a great port to base a modern multiplayer port on top of.  Too much is exposed to ZScript, which leaves not enough places for networked persistence to "hide" like they could in older ports like Zandronum and Odamex.

 

The last thing is kind of minor in that visually, I don't like GZDoom's defaults.  Doom's art was not designed for filtering, and it's beyond me why in TYOOL 2023 GZDoom still defaults to blurry textures, sprite filtering, and a flat lighting model that frankly looks pretty bad on original Doom content.

 

Edited June 4, 2023 by LexiMax

[TasAcri]

3 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

We'll probably do that for next version. The downside here is that some Vulkan drivers of early generation integrated GPUs are not that good on Vulkan, even if they support it.

2x faster is a bit unusual, what GPU was this?

 

A GTX 1060. Which is weird since it's Nvidia so it shouldn't have that much difference compared to OpenGL. But in GZDoom it really does.

 

2x may be hyperbole but that's how it felt in the last fight in MyHouse. With OpenGL the performance was almost unplayable, it would drop below 20fps depending where i turn camera. But with Vulkan i'm pretty sure it never dropped below 50fps in that part.

[DRON12261]

4 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

You also cannot guarantee with ANY port that people will see what you intended. Not with Doom.exe, not with Boom and not with GZDoom.

No. On any other port with a software renderer, I can guarantee exactly the visuals I had in mind. On DSDA, on Woof!, on the original ZDoom, on Crispy Doom, on Eternity Engine and on a huge number of other ports it will look exactly as I intended, maybe with some minimal minor deviations. On GZDoom and Zandronum with default settings it will look like a piece of shit. All the work with lighting can go down the drain when OpenGL for some reason highlights all the sectors. Why is sector lighting not on Software or Vanilla by default? Why is texture filtering turned on by default? I haven't seen a single person who thinks this soap is a good move. 

 

[PhoxFyre007]

26 minutes ago, AmethystViper said:

I generally try to play vanilla Doom in either Woof or the Unity port, and it especially irks me that fanboys of GZDoom on Steam who treat it as the "THE ONLY PORT WORTH USING" are also quick to throw the Unity port under the bus because it can't play Brutal Doom or some other crazy mod that's outside the realm of possibility that vanilla ports can do (that being said, I wish the Unity ports could be patch to fix issues of running certain vanilla mods that crashes it, among other things). At the same time, sadly, GZDoom is the only port that I know of lets me use WADsmoosh so I can play all of the classic Doom games and expansions under one roof, plus I use it for DOOM CE since I do like having the customization and flexibility that project has to offer for PS1 Doom and Doom 64 if I want something different from their vanilla versions.

There are quirks in the Unity port engine that make it slightly different from the vanilla compatibility mode of Woof!, so that is an aspect of it due to behavior changes present in that engine.

[AmethystViper]

8 minutes ago, TasAcri said:

 

A GTX 1060. Which is weird since it's Nvidia so it shouldn't have that much difference compared to OpenGL. But in GZDoom it really does.

 

2x may be hyperbole but that's how it felt in the last fight in MyHouse. With OpenGL the performance was almost unplayable, it would drop below 20fps depending where i turn camera. But with Vulkan i'm pretty sure it never dropped below 50fps in that part.

I can attest as well since I currently have a GTX 1060 as well, and while I haven't played MyHouse yet, some particle effects like gory gibbing in other mods like Beautiful Doom causes serious frame-rate crunch, then again it might be by obsolete CPU (AMD FX-4350) contributing to the problems as well.

[Graf Zahl]

2 minutes ago, TasAcri said:

 

A GTX 1060. Which is weird since it's Nvidia so it shouldn't have that much difference compared to OpenGL. But in GZDoom it really does.

 

NVidia's OpenGL drivers have seen some degradation recently. I noticed this myself just today whan I replaced my Geforce GTX 1060 with an RTX 3060.

I'm pretty sure it's not the hardware but the driver causing the issues, though.

 

OpenGL is on the way out, and it is no surprise that driver support will get worse as time goes by.

 

1 minute ago, DRON12261 said:

No. On any other port with a software renderer, I can guarantee exactly the visuals I had in mind. On DSDA, on Woof!, on the original ZDoom, on Crispy Doom, on Eternity Engine and on a huge number of other ports it will look exactly as I intended, maybe with some minimal minor deviations.

 

You may think so, but I have seen so many badly calibrated monitors that this is just wishful thinking.

 

1 minute ago, DRON12261 said:

On GZDoom and Zandronum with default settings it will look like a piece of shit. All the work with lighting can go down the drain when OpenGL for some reason highlights all the sectors. Why is sector lighting not on Software or Vanilla by default? Why is texture filtering turned on by default?

 

The lighting mode is on a setting that ensures best performance. Software lighting can really affect the low end hardware with weak shader performance. We are only now slowly reaching the point where this hardware drops below the point where we don't have to care anymore.

Also, since this can be set through MAPINFO it surely can't be an issue, if you really need a specific lighting mode for your map.

 

[Master O]

For people who have speed issues in GZdoom, open the console by pressing the ` key (below Tab), then type the following and press enter.

 

vid_maxfps 60

and press enter.

 

Quote

vid_maxfps (integer)

 

Default: 200

If non-zero, this variable limits the frame rate to some arbitrary rate between 35 and 1000 FPS. Note that vid_maxfps 35 is not the same as cl_capfps 1: cl_capfps caps the frame rate by tying the video update directly to the game timer. With vid_maxfps 35, the video update and game timer are running on separate timers, and results will not be as good as with cl_capfps 1, which uses only one timer. You can use this in conjunction with vid_vsync to control whether or not the maximum frame rate is restricted to your monitor's refresh rate.

[DRON12261]

7 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

You may think so, but I have seen so many badly calibrated monitors that this is just wishful thinking.

I'm not even talking about the Software Renderer itself right now. It's not even about any uncalibrated monitors at all. I'm talking about the emulation of the original visuals through the Hardware Renderer. The same Sector light mode. I don't want to promote "my special cool settings", I just want it to look the way Doom should look, that's all, there's nothing special here. No one had any problems with it on any other port, but in GZDoom it suddenly appeared out of nowhere.

[LexiMax]

16 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

The lighting mode is on a setting that ensures best performance.

 

On a technical level, I can understand the lighting model.  But not texture filtering.  I'm sorry, but this does not look good.

 

 

It almost looks like I need to clean my glasses or monitor.

Edited June 4, 2023 by LexiMax

[Andrea Rovenski]

31 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

That is actually utter nonsense. If it used Quake physics it wouldn't be able to play Doom anymore. It's still Doom physics code with all the poor design that gives it its unique quirks.

I think what you experience here is actually the input code being different, not the physics. Virtually all other ports use SDL, while GZDoom uses Windows directly and I have heard from several people that this shows in input responsiveness.

I didn't say it used quake, just that it feels closer to quake than doom. big example is how all the things are redrawn as boxes instead of what the doom engine does, but yeah the input thing definitely makes sense on top of it, though.

[Jack9955]

GZDoom seems complicated to configure, I prefer chocolate or woof

[LuciferSam86]

For me, GZDoom is my main port, mainly because of the extended modding options and I admire the devs for what they did.

Otherwise, DSDA-Doom is my choice if I have to play something else, like WADs with multiple palettes.

[Graf Zahl]

13 minutes ago, Andrea Rovenski said:

big example is how all the things are redrawn as boxes instead of what the doom engine does,

 

What do you even mean by that?

 

[indigotyrian]

47 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

It doesn't - but let's not forget that the most recent non-Vulkan compatible hardware is 12 years old by now. It is so far beyond the baseline of how a current system - even low end - looks, that it's not a good idea anymore to use it as the default, especially since even on NVidia's current hardware OpenGL is starting to show the first cracks in its support.

 

I think this very thread has demonstrated pretty soundly that the kind of people who are playing Doom today might not necessarily have current hardware, even low-spec current hardware. I see "yeah I'm stuck on LZDoom/Zandronum because I can't run GZDoom" with enough regularity that IMO icing them out with this kind of attitude feels very odd and excluding. Doom is quite popular with people who, for whatever reason, simply don't have access to modern hardware. Not to put too fine a point on it but it's quite strange how the one big port that struggles with performance issues above all other ports has to keep making excuses about not supporting older hardware in order to play a 30 year old game.

[LuciferSam86]

IMHO I've always seen GZDoom as a base for making advanced levels and games like Selaco, and might become harder and harder to support older hardware, if not impossible, especially if this is a project supported by people who do not get paid for this, but only for passion.

 

[LexiMax]

Just now, LuciferSam86 said:

IMHO I've always seen GZDoom as a base for making advanced levels and games like Selaco

 

This is a definite strength of GZDoom, but there's a gigantic asterisk attached in the form of its netcode.  A missed opportunity, imho.

[Croaker]

15 minutes ago, segfault said:

 

I think this very thread has demonstrated pretty soundly that the kind of people who are playing Doom today might not necessarily have current hardware, even low-spec current hardware. I see "yeah I'm stuck on LZDoom/Zandronum because I can't run GZDoom" with enough regularity that IMO icing them out with this kind of attitude feels very odd and excluding. Doom is quite popular with people who, for whatever reason, simply don't have access to modern hardware. Not to put too fine a point on it but it's quite strange how the one big port that struggles with performance issues above all other ports has to keep making excuses about not supporting older hardware in order to play a 30 year old game.

To be fair, it also allows to create wads, impossible on any other port, so higher demands for hardware are understandable.

But the attitude "buy a new PC to play our amazing port of 30 years old game, OR PERISH" is, indeed, the funniest thing I saw on this thread

Edited June 4, 2023 by Croaker
Correcting misspellings

[DRON12261]

5 minutes ago, LuciferSam86 said:

IMHO I've always seen GZDoom as a base for making advanced levels and games like Selaco, and might become harder and harder to support older hardware, if not impossible, especially if this is a project supported by people who do not get paid for this, but only for passion.

 

But we are talking primarily about source-port, not about a game engine for creating new games. And the fact that GZDoom is trying to sit on two chairs is a HUGE mistake. Good, a long time ago it was necessary to divide the development into 2 parts, the first is exclusively source-port of Doom, cut the hell out of there everything unnecessary, and be kind to give me Doom, but not its parody, and the second is a full-fledged engine for creating games, where you can implement and experiment as only your soul desires.

[RataUnderground]

GzDoom is nice, Woof is nice, DSDA is nice, Crispy Doom is nice, even Chocolate Doom is nice, and every sourceport has its place : ) I love them all. 
(But I must admit that GzDoom is the only one that if I don't spend five minutes configuring it, I can't even start playing. It's a port that allows extreme customization, and that has its bad and good parts).

[Andrea Rovenski]

28 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

 

What do you even mean by that?

 

Try thingrunning against things in vanilla compat vs gzdoom and you'll understand :) 

[Graf Zahl]

41 minutes ago, segfault said:

 

I think this very thread has demonstrated pretty soundly that the kind of people who are playing Doom today might not necessarily have current hardware, even low-spec current hardware. I see "yeah I'm stuck on LZDoom/Zandronum because I can't run GZDoom" with enough regularity that IMO icing them out with this kind of attitude feels very odd and excluding. Doom is quite popular with people who, for whatever reason, simply don't have access to modern hardware.

 

Here's the deal about it:

 

We have reached the point where it is impossible to run Vulkan and OpenGL off the same renderer. If we do there is no way optimizing Vulksn, if we declared OpenGL the primary API that's considered the gold standard we'd lose the main contributor to the Vulkan backend. The only way to go forward is to completely separate them and then put OpenGL in low maintenance mode and feature freeze it. Otherwise either the low end or the high end gets compromised because the techniques needed to serve both are too different. It was for the same reason that 4 years ago OpenGL 2 support was ended. It also was far too different from what more modern hardware needs and when being faced with having Vulkan support or continued GL 2 support, Vulkan won. We currently have the GLES renderer for the low end and it surely works better than LZDoom, but that's merely a stopgap measure to ride out the rest of OpenGL's life.

 

 

Quote

Not to put too fine a point on it but it's quite strange how the one big port that struggles with performance issues above all other ports has to keep making excuses about not supporting older hardware in order to play a 30 year old game. 

 

Sigh, that stuff again. It's a simple case of being a lot more complex than all the other ports. I could get it back to the performance of simpler ports if I took out all the features again, but then nothing would be gained, wouldn't it?

 

 

17 minutes ago, Andrea Rovenski said:

Try thingrunning against things in vanilla compat vs gzdoom and you'll understand :) 

 

That's simply caused by fixing some broken math, not by changing the physics.

Edited June 4, 2023 by Graf Zahl

[LuciferSam86]

19 minutes ago, DRON12261 said:

But we are talking primarily about source-port, not about a game engine for creating new games. And the fact that GZDoom is trying to sit on two chairs is a HUGE mistake. Good, a long time ago it was necessary to divide the development into 2 parts, the first is exclusively source-port of Doom, cut the hell out of there everything unnecessary, and be kind to give me Doom, but not its parody, and the second is a full-fledged engine for creating games, where you can implement and experiment as only your soul desires.

Well, development has a cost ( time and money ), and might not be in the plan, and it might not be as easy as you think.

Development is not magic :)

[banjiepixel]

I prefer minimalism heavily so it is very natural that I want to play vanilla/limit-removing wads with Crispy Doom instead of using more advanced source port. I do also get anxiety from too many options being available and prefer source ports that have minimalist, close to vanilla settings as their defaults. I also just think Doom looks better in crispy 640x400 resolution being upscaled to HD resolutions. In my opinion actual HD rendering resolutions do make Doom look visually too unnatural and give no valuable benefit to my playing experience.

 

There is obviously some overlap between minimalism and purism, but at their core they are different reasons to avoid using GZDoom as the only source port.

 

Outside of that, I am not a fan of GZDoom in general. It seems just pretty bloated and unfocused project to me at this point. I do play some gameplay mods like Complex Doom sometimes casually and Zandronum has generally everything I need for that gameplay experience.

 

I use Crispy Doom as my main source port, Woof if I want to play something more advanced (Boom/MBF) and Zandronum if I want some casual gameplay mod fun.

Edited June 4, 2023 by banjiepixel

[kevansevans]

People here are way too uppity about port differences, and there are too many armchair developers here thinking that someone could just make a source port that sits in the center of everything and does what we all want it to do. It's wishful thinking.

Edited June 4, 2023 by Kevansevans

[DRON12261]

9 minutes ago, LuciferSam86 said:

Well, development has a cost ( time and money ), and might not be in the plan, and it might not be as easy as you think.

Development is not magic :)

GZDoom is not a commercial project. And even if we consider it from this point of view, then why in the port of thought appear different minor things that are not really necessary? Is it a waste of "money and time"? This sounds more like dodging the problem and has nothing to do with trying to make the project better.

[Graf Zahl]

34 minutes ago, DRON12261 said:

But we are talking primarily about source-port, not about a game engine for creating new games. And the fact that GZDoom is trying to sit on two chairs is a HUGE mistake. Good, a long time ago it was necessary to divide the development into 2 parts, the first is exclusively source-port of Doom, cut the hell out of there everything unnecessary, and be kind to give me Doom, but not its parody, and the second is a full-fledged engine for creating games, where you can implement and experiment as only your soul desires.

 

You are forgetting something very important here:

 

Most mods made for GZDoom are not independent games but gameplay mods that are supposed to be run with Doom.

Why would you cut off these people from what they need to do their work?

 

There's also the - little - problem that this would pretty much kill developer contributions for good. If GZDoom loses the few people that actually do contribute code there won't be much left - and these people all come from the gameplay mod scene. They want Doom AND they want features, if one gets stripped they'd be gone.

 

 

[LuciferSam86]

Thinking those people like the GZDoom features to unlock their creative outlets, maybe even Graf and the other devs. Create something from the game they like, with their dream features.

Even Carmack wrote this when he released the Doom source code
 

Quote

Port it to your favorite operating system.

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. On modern hardware (fast pentium + 3DFX) you probably wouldn't even need to be clever -- you could just draw the entire level and get reasonable speed.

With a touch of effort, it should easily lock at 60 fps (well, there are some issues with DOOM's 35 hz timebase...).

The biggest issues would probably be the non-power of two texture sizes and the walls composed of multiple textures.

IMHO the beauty of Doom is everyone can create something he/she likes.

[PhoxFyre007]

The biggest aspect of jeezy doom is that it has a different developmental philosophy than most other Vanilla/Boom/MBF-related forks or ports in the fact that it is always wishing to have the most extensive featureset and capability of experiencing Doom and its modding community. The focus is also on cutting edge capabilities of software for rendering and expanding this featureset. Resultantly, a heavily vanilla or low-resource build is kind of out of the design. However there are concessions and general attempts to still have a general compatibility with those demands so long as they do not conflict with the initial philosophy.