What are the reasons to play other ports except GZDOOM?

[LexiMax]

23 hours ago, segfault said:

Honest question: Are there any actual GPUs or APUs today that support Vulkan but not OpenGL? It occurs to me that a tradeoff was made where actual, real living users under thrown under the bus in favor of a hypothetical user in the future that is "stuck" with high-end hardware and no compatibility layer.

 

For a feature-rich hardware-rendered port like GZDoom, compatibility should not be the only concern.  Speed is also an important consideration, and to put it simply, OpenGL does not accurately reflect the way modern graphics cards render graphics anymore.  It is supported as a best-effort compatibility shim, but being limited to OpenGL means that there is performance being left on the table, not to mention opening yourself up to a myriad of a nightmarish compatibility matrix due to the spotty OpenGL conformance of various drivers and cards.

 

Besides, the future - and also quite frankly the present - is not OpenGL.  It's not even Vulkan, necessarily.  It's writing multiple platform-specific backends.

• nvidia has historically had the best OpenGL support.
• AMD has historically had less than stellar OpenGL performance.
• Intel OpenGL support has been dire for ages, both on their integrated and especially their discrete GPU's.
• The less said about OpenGL support on mobile the better, some of the implementations are just straight up broken and unusable for anything non-trivial.
• Apple never supported anything beyond OpenGL 4.1 and mothballed the API in 2018.
• Microsoft uses DirectX on their consoles, obviously.
• Sony uses their own proprietary API on their PlayStation consoles.
• Nintendo Switch uses whatever that Tegra X1 chips have on-die - which technically includes OpenGL, but also Vulkan and NVN.

If you only care about PC's, Vulkan and Metal through MoltenVK are probably the path of least resistance these days.  That will cover you for hardware going back a decade or so.

Edited June 5, 2023 by LexiMax

[Edward850]

13 hours ago, TasAcri said:

Another Con: The frame rare is not as smooth as in other engines. I have a 240hz monitor and Woof/GZDoom/DSDA can use those 240frames and run very smoothly. Eternity feels like there's a hidden cap or something or can't sync properly or use freesync. It just feels like it judders slightly, despite having the "uncapped frame rate" and "interpolation" ON in the settings. 

I'm running Eternity on a 155hz freesync monitor and it looks perfectly fine for me. What's your render thread count set to, and your CPU? Render threads should match the number of physical cores your CPU has, which is usually half of your logical processors.

Edited June 5, 2023 by Edward850

[indigotyrian]

45 minutes ago, LexiMax said:

For a feature-rich hardware-rendered port like GZDoom, compatibility should not be the only concern.  Speed is also an important consideration, and to put it simply, OpenGL does not accurately reflect the way modern graphics cards render graphics anymore.  It is supported as a best-effort compatibility shim, but being limited to OpenGL means that there is performance being left on the table, not to mention opening yourself up to a myriad of a nightmarish compatibility matrix due to the spotty OpenGL conformance of various drivers and cards.

 

Besides, the future - and also quite frankly the present - is not OpenGL.  It's not even Vulkan, necessarily.  It's writing multiple platform-specific backends.

• nvidia has historically had the best OpenGL support.
• AMD has historically had less than stellar OpenGL performance.
• Intel OpenGL support has been dire for ages, both on their integrated and especially their discrete GPU's.
• The less said about OpenGL support on mobile the better, some of the implementations are just straight up broken and unusable for anything non-trivial.
• Apple never supported anything beyond OpenGL 4.1 and mothballed the API in 2018.
• Microsoft uses DirectX on their consoles, obviously.
• Sony uses their own proprietary API on their PlayStation consoles.
• Nintendo Switch uses whatever that Tegra X1 chips have on-die - which technically includes OpenGL, but also Vulkan and NVN.

If you only care about PC's, Vulkan and Metal through MoltenVK are probably the path of least resistance these days.  That will cover you for hardware going back a decade or so.

 

That's all well and good but it's very strange how all of these decisions are being made about improving performance on modern systems and the result is a source port that generally has the worst performance.

Edited June 5, 2023 by segfault

[LexiMax]

16 minutes ago, segfault said:

That's all well and good but it's very strange how all of these decisions are being made about improving performance on modern systems and the result is a source port that generally has the worst performance. 

 

The current codebase is geared towards OpenGL and the development team hopes to claw back some GPU performance in the future by prioritizing Vulkan.  Makes sense to me. 🤷‍♀️

[houston]

(G)ZDoom, as of an update a few years back, can't do 320*200 or even 640*400. They're accepting PRs to fix this, however there don't appear to be any takers, or maybe no takers willing to rewrite all of the menu code. Personally I'd prefer the menu breaking than to not be able to play Doom in its own native resolution of Mode 13h, but I'm not invested enough in the project to have the right to criticise its decisions.

Spoiler

There's no texture filtering options enabled here, just the result of the engine force-rescaling the status bar and rest of the image to the (incorrect) minimum and incorrect aspect ratio of 640*480 before downsampling it to the correct one.

 

This feels like a massive failure of an engine designed to play Doom to me, but for that reason I simply don't treat it as an engine designed to play Doom. It's an engine for Doom-like games with its own feature set (freelook, jumping, the weird water thing from Boom) which also just happens to be able to play Doom levels.

 

To me, (G)ZDoom isn't even "Doom with frills", it's just a completely custom game engine which happens to be able to load Doom levels in a throw-back or tribute kind of way. With incorrect defaults, such as the weird nightvision effect, the completely made-up Blur Sphere behaviour, actor height downright changing the intended playstyle around edges, etc. And that's fine, because there's plenty of perfectly good games designed for the (G)ZDoom engine too, such as Knee-Deep In ZDoom or Brutal Doom.

 

When I want to play Doom or Doom mods, and not (G)ZDoom mods, I definitely go for Chocolate. It feels like the only honest and up-to-date Linux port of Doom, without having to fight with Dosbox config.

[Mr.Rocket]

Well, I think G(ZDoom) is still a good source engine and people tend to like it, but I totally agree, it depends on what you're trying to capture, if it's an original feel, Choco is the one. I've been digg'n the new Managed Doom port lately too!

DosBox Doom works pretty well too if you have some preconfigured confs and a quick way to launch them, created on launch time etc.

 

 Anyway, going back to OP.

 I think the main reason would be map development, aside of casual play, but that kind of goes for most source ports (I suppose).

I tend to play them all, but not all the time..

Edited June 6, 2023 by Mr.Rocket

[Grain of Salt]

2 hours ago, houston said:

for that reason I simply don't treat it as an engine designed to play Doom. It's an engine for Doom-like games with its own feature set (freelook, jumping, the weird water thing from Boom) which also just happens to be able to play Doom levels.

 

To me, (G)ZDoom isn't even "Doom with frills", it's just a completely custom game engine which happens to be able to load Doom levels in a throw-back or tribute kind of way. With incorrect defaults, such as the weird nightvision effect, the completely made-up Blur Sphere behaviour, actor height downright changing the intended playstyle around edges, etc.

 

Are you a parallel universe me or something

 

Quote

perfectly good games designed for the (G)ZDoom engine too, such as ... Brutal Doom.

 

Oh I guess not, heh.

 

To possibly add to your pretty good list of Core Gripes about gz: "fixing" various collision bits means the weapons are balanced completely differently. You can save ammo by chainsawing arachnotrons (lol), and pellets not disappearing midair means ssg does more damage and stuns archviles much more reliably. Luckily no one really makes levels featuring ssg or archviles.

 

Quote

throw-back or tribute kind of way

 

I would echo this but go slightly further, in that I think gz is kinda like those easter egg recreations of e1m1 in other games. It's the geometry of doom, and it looks pretty similar to doom, and it might even be fun and/or good, but it would be kinda silly to think you're playing doom when you play it.

 

Quote

(G)ZDoom, as of an update a few years back, can't do 320*200 or even 640*400. They're accepting PRs to fix this, however there don't appear to be any takers, or maybe no takers willing to rewrite all of the menu code

 

"i have to write new menu code to handle 320x200" is a pretty funny problem for a doom port maker imo.

 

Q: grain of salt why are you unnecessarily being mean about zdoom and drawing out this rehash argument thread

A: well you see, the truth will be heard, from ten or a thousand years since, through soil, wood or stone 👍

[Mr.Rocket]

11 minutes ago, Grain of Salt said:

A: well you see, the truth will be heard, from ten or a thousand years since, through soil, wood or stone 👍

Agreed.. :P

Edited June 6, 2023 by Mr.Rocket

[houston]

@Grain of Salt You get exactly what I'm saying. I thought the comment about Brutal Doom might be a little bit of a controversial opinion, but I really do think it's just one of many logical conclusions to what ZDoom appears to have been trying to do with Doom, and I think that the mechanics it introduces plays at least well enough with its own custom levels it introduced as PWADS. The 320*200 really does seem quite ridiculous now that you point it out like that, but I guess the developers just don't happen to own a CRT, or really be interested in using the base resolution. Not a hill I'd die on, screaming to everyone "PLAY IN 320*200!!", but it does seem just a bit sillier.

 

Comparing (G)ZDoom to things like fan recreations of E1M1 or Doom inside Doom Eternal seems a little too far, since somewhere inside all of that ZDoom lies code that used to be the actual Linux Doom source, but you're coming from more or less the same place my stance on that lies.

[ReaperAA]

5 hours ago, segfault said:

That's all well and good but it's very strange how all of these decisions are being made about improving performance on modern systems and the result is a source port that generally has the worst performance.

 

Well GZDoom is generally the most feature rich port after all. The extra modding features make the port slower than a more conservative port. The actor code is perfect example of this.

 

Also it's arguable if GZDoom has the worst performance, rendering wise. I have tried Doomsday and k8Vavoom and both generally had worse performance than GZDoom (k8V was only slightly worse on average than GZD, while Doomsday couldn't even keep 60 fps on iwad maps on my system). And those two are the only other ports afaik which compete with GZD in terms of rendering/graphical features.

 

 

12 minutes ago, Grain of Salt said:

To possibly add to your pretty good list of Core Gripes about gz: "fixing" various collision bits means the weapons are balanced completely differently. You can save ammo by chainsawing arachnotrons (lol), and pellets not disappearing midair means ssg does more damage and stuns archviles much more reliably. Luckily no one really makes levels featuring ssg or archviles.

 

While you are right that GZDoom can't ever be "fully accurate" to vanilla Doom gameplay, the stuff mentioned here like chainsawing arachnotrons can be fixed by using Doom(strict) compat. And I am pretty sure SSG doesn't do more damage (if anything, the SSG does less damage in GZD than in vanilla at default compat lol) other than the fact that at default compat, the blockmap bug doesn't exist which makes it easy to not miss shots. Again, would use Doom(strict) compat to fix this.

[Christian Ck.]

I always choose other ports over GZDoom for a couple of reasons.

 

First of is the looks. I really like the more classic look of doom especially with the way light behaved in software rendering. I tried to mess around with the settings in GZdoom but it just does not look the same. That applies for HUD scaling too.

 

Next is gameplay. Movement in GZDoom feels off. I can't really point my finger as too why (I assume because the code is a lil different than more traditional source ports) but movement and sometimes even the combat feels a lot different compared to PRBoom or Zandronum.

 

Lastly is sound. Music sometimes just sound weird in GZ no matter the midi device. And it's poorly balanced. Idk if it's on me but some songs just sound louder and some not in GZ.

 

Everything I mentioned can be changed and messed around with in GZ which is really great but I rather just click and play and don't spend hours setting everything up the was I want :)

[Professor Hastig]

46 minutes ago, Endy McGufin said:

Next is gameplay. Movement in GZDoom feels off. I can't really point my finger as too why (I assume because the code is a lil different than more traditional source ports) but movement and sometimes even the combat feels a lot different compared to PRBoom or Zandronum.

 

Since you mention Zandronum, which is based on an older version of GZDoom, have you ever tried to find out when this changed? Personally, I cannot find a significant difference between these two, but PrBoom+ and most other classic ports do feel different - but that's hardly a surprise because their entire system input interface is different.

 

 

 

[dpJudas]

2 hours ago, houston said:

@Grain of Salt You get exactly what I'm saying. I thought the comment about Brutal Doom might be a little bit of a controversial opinion, but I really do think it's just one of many logical conclusions to what ZDoom appears to have been trying to do with Doom, and I think that the mechanics it introduces plays at least well enough with its own custom levels it introduced as PWADS. The 320*200 really does seem quite ridiculous now that you point it out like that, but I guess the developers just don't happen to own a CRT, or really be interested in using the base resolution. Not a hill I'd die on, screaming to everyone "PLAY IN 320*200!!", but it does seem just a bit sillier.

That's correct. I sold my last CRT monitor in 2001 and have absolutely no intention of ever owning one again. I'm sure the others would say something similar. :)

 

320x200 support was dropped because localization was deemed more important than supporting the original resolution. If you are going for that kind of retro vibe on a CRT monitor then honestly there's much better ports made for the purpose. Personally, I'd be booting up DOS if I was on such a computer.

[PhoxFyre007]

8 minutes ago, dpJudas said:

That's correct. I sold my last CRT monitor in 2001 and have absolutely no intention of ever owning one again. I'm sure the others would say something similar. :)

 

320x200 support was dropped because localization was deemed more important than supporting the original resolution. If you are going for that kind of retro vibe on a CRT monitor then honestly there's much better ports made for the purpose. Personally, I'd be booting up DOS if I was on such a computer.

Vanilla Essence honestly takes the legwork out of 200p resolution and can make it pretty accurate utilizing the internal options. However the menu is still displayed at a different resolution.

[dpJudas]

4 minutes ago, PhoxFyre007 said:

Vanilla Essence honestly takes the legwork out of 200p resolution and can make it pretty accurate utilizing the internal options. However the menu is still displayed at a different resolution.

Before the menu changes (that were made for improving localization) I did do some improvements to 320x200 myself. I did that mainly for the lulz of seeing it in action. I believe Rachael after the menu update restored the support for playing the game itself again at 320x200.

 

However, GZDoom is not and never has been a port trying to be good for purists. It has always been a port made for concurrent computer hardware. If you are trying to capture the original looks of the game, at that resolution, a GPU for it is going to be terrible anyway. The graphics are simply too perfect. You need broken crappy incorrectly rounded math and other things like that which only a software renderer can do right anyway.

[Professor Hastig]

34 minutes ago, dpJudas said:

That's correct. I sold my last CRT monitor in 2001 and have absolutely no intention of ever owning one again. I'm sure the others would say something similar. :)



 

I held out a little longer but once I got my first flatscreen I never looked back.

Optimizing software for such antiquated hardware isn't really much different than considering 12 year old GPUs as a valid development baseline, if not even worse...

 

[RataUnderground]

No one is asking the important questions.
If GzDoom drops OpenGL support in favor of Vulkan, should the name be changed to VzDoom? :p

[Professor Hastig]

11 minutes ago, RataUnderground said:

No one is asking the important questions.
If GzDoom drops OpenGL support in favor of Vulkan, should the name be changed to VzDoom? :p

 

https://github.com/dpjudas/VkDoom

 

There you got it... :D

 

[PhoxFyre007]

dpJudas does it again

[Individualised]

39 minutes ago, RataUnderground said:

No one is asking the important questions.
If GzDoom drops OpenGL support in favor of Vulkan, should the name be changed to VzDoom? :p

GZDoom's name doubles as GL ZDoom and Graf Zahl's Doom. Didn't we have a topic about this already?

[Professor Hastig]

Joking aside, changing a known brand for such technical reasons is never a good idea. Even big companies got burned by doing that, so what would it do to a Doom source port? Surely nothing good.

 

[Christian Ck.]

2 hours ago, Professor Hastig said:

 

Since you mention Zandronum, which is based on an older version of GZDoom, have you ever tried to find out when this changed? Personally, I cannot find a significant difference between these two, but PrBoom+ and most other classic ports do feel different - but that's hardly a surprise because their entire system input interface is different.

 

 

 

I don't really know exactly when it changed but in the newer versions of GZdoom gravity seems harsher? I only noticed it when doing parkour or cerain level skips where I had trouble running over leaps in GZdoom which I knew I could do in Zandronum 3.0

[WorldMachine]

Prboom+ runs Nuts.wad better than GZDOOM, which means that GZDOOM is poorly optimized

[liPillON]

an SUV goes around corners slower than a Coupe, which means that the SUV is poorly optimized

 

 

FFS can we just put an end to this meme?

it's a software designed differently, in order to enable different use cases

 

Edited June 6, 2023 by liPillON

[Dynamo]

11 hours ago, Grain of Salt said:

I think gz is kinda like those easter egg recreations of e1m1 in other games. It's the geometry of doom, and it looks pretty similar to doom, and it might even be fun and/or good, but it would be kinda silly to think you're playing doom when you play it.

I am fine with other ports and even use them myself, but... is the implication here that you are not really playing Doom when you play GZDoom? So I (and hundreds if not thousands of others) have not actually been playing Doom all this time? Preferences are one thing, but this feels belittling towards a ton of players for no reason. Yes, you absolutely are playing Doom when you are playing Doom wads on GZDoom, and the only silly thing here is thinking that you wouldn't be. An inferior, unnecessarily different way of playing Doom? Perhaps, that's up to opinion. But "sorry, you're not actually playing Doom"? Yeah, no. It seems extremely unfair to me to exclude so many other players through such statements, in a way that I've honestly never seen on virtually any other retro gaming community when it comes to ports or re-releases for other games. I would never argue that someone is not playing Blood just because they're playing Blood: Fresh Supply, which runs on another engine. I really don't understand the gatekeeping here, preferring other ports or refusing to play GZDoom is perfectly fine and even understandable, but "you are not playing Doom actually"? I am rather stunned. I have been playing Doom all this time, even if I use GZDoom, I promise.

10 hours ago, houston said:

Comparing (G)ZDoom to things like fan recreations of E1M1 or Doom inside Doom Eternal seems a little too far

Agreed fully. Different people will have different perspectives on how much of a dealbreaker the changes GZ has can be, but in no way is it magically a different game that merely tributes Doom, heh.

Edited June 6, 2023 by Dynamo

[RataUnderground]

17 minutes ago, liPillON said:

an SUV goes around corners slower than a Coupe, which means that the SUV is poorly optimized

 

 

FFS can we just put an end to this meme?

it's a software designed differently, in order to enable different use cases

 

Bad example, because indeed, SUVs are the worst optimized car models on the market. Heavy, with poor fuel economy, with much less space than a van and less seating than a minivan. The only reason they are popular is because of people bias and marketing.

[Redneckerz]

36 minutes ago, WorldMachine said:

Prboom+ runs Nuts.wad better than GZDOOM, which means that GZDOOM is poorly optimized

This is such a hilariously bad take, especially when we had 30+ replies trying to help you with CocoDoom and it ended up with you having a corrupt save game instead, that this is almost uncalled for.

 

Helion runs Nuts.wad better than both ports by such a huge margin its not even a contest. So what? Its not the point here. PrBoom and GZDoom both have different goals in philosophy.

[magicsofa]

11 hours ago, Endy McGufin said:

Next is gameplay. Movement in GZDoom feels off. I can't really point my finger as too why (I assume because the code is a lil different than more traditional source ports) but movement and sometimes even the combat feels a lot different compared to PRBoom or Zandronum.

 

This is mainly due to the framerate, I think. Capping the fps at 35 feels much closer to the original (just open console and type vid_maxfps 35).

[Edward850]

4 hours ago, Dynamo said:

I would never argue that someone is not playing Blood just because they're playing Blood: Fresh Supply, which runs on another engine.

You also can't argue that because it doesn't. BFS is not running on another engine, it was directly disassembled from it's original code.

[xX_Lol6_Xx]

I want performance without setting my i7 and NVS 3100 on fire, so GZDoom (Or it's forks in general) isn't a suitable port for me, at least with it's hideous defaults. Nugget-Doom, Crispy-Doom, Odamex and Zandronum are far better for my needs, to the point I only boot up GZDoom to play HeXen with mods.