Achievements for source ports - an idea/fantasy

[Muusi]

Recently I've been collecting loads of RetroAchievements on my Raspberry Pi + CRT combo. Achievements in retro games push me to play retro games without save states and cheats, as they were intended and in some cases make me play familiar games in ways I haven't before, which is brilliant. Many emulators have support for the site Retroachievements where you can track your progress on a game much like with PSN Trophies for example. 

 

What I'd love to see is this kind of system for PC Doom (PS1 Doom has a retroachievements set which is lovely). Something you toggle on and it disables cheats and what have you. I know GZDoom has a mod that does something like achievements I guess but only on your local machine, what I'd love to see is something online, with community created sets of achievements, so you could brag about how badass you are. 

 

 

Anyone else interested in anything like this? Of course I have no idea if something like this could even be achieved but I'd certainly love to see it. 

 

PS. If you're on RA, please drop a set request for Team GEC's Doom Master Edition which is listed of the site😎

Edited January 22 by Muusi

[Arrowhead]

Dropped a request for that set. Hopefully we see something eventually.

 

Was playing Doom 2 GBA today for RA.

 

:)

Edited January 22 by Arrowhead

[Lippeth]

I'm usually indifferent toward achievements and largely ignore them unless they're particularly interesting or novel like in the Stanley Parable, but a somewhat related feature I've always kind of wanted was a time calculator.

[Devalaous]

I like RA in ways, but I utterly despise the 'Hardcore' feature and the way it encourages looking down on regular players, while disabling almost every quality of life improvement out there. Not to mention all the control freak nature some developers have, requiring you to modify your isos or pirate a US version of your game because they cant be bothered to support PAL or Japan versions. I already see that kind of attempted control in some Doom wads, I cant stand someone basically looking over my shoulder with a 'what are you up to in MY work?' leer and tampering with my settings with embedded settings.

 

If this kind of system showed up in ports and it disabled all the quality of life stuff, like saving (just look at how much aggro pops up in 'is saving bad?' threads here), stat counters, rewind etc, I would refuse to use it on principle. We already have stuff like DSDA for competitive people to butt heads over whos the best 'legit' player, for any achievement system, I'd rather it all just be local stuff for the player to turn off or on at will and complete their own way, on their own terms. DSDA-Doom has internal level tables that track your scores, times, and even skill 5 runs, thats already a step in that direction.

[Muusi]

2 hours ago, Devalaous said:

I like RA in ways, but I utterly despise the 'Hardcore' feature and the way it encourages looking down on regular players, while disabling almost every quality of life improvement out there. Not to mention all the control freak nature some developers have, requiring you to modify your isos or pirate a US version of your game because they cant be bothered to support PAL or Japan versions.

I don't see how Hardcore encourages looking down on regular players, that's why there are 2 separate sets of achievements. I love the way Hardcore makes you play the game like you had to play it 30 years ago, without save states. Me enjoying the frustration doesn't mean I also look down on other players. 

 

When it comes to supported regions in RA, some games work different in different regions (more work for the developer) and by default most PAL games run in 50hz, making so that they literally run slower than an NTSC copy, making them not very enjoyable to play and potentially making it unfairly easier to get competitive high scores in RA. Thus I can see how for many developers it isn't worth it to support PAL releases, not many people play those, same with japanese releases, they're not very popular. 

 

With Doom of course it would obviously be an option to toggle on or off. Achievements + saving i guess would be a problem in a way so I guess there should also be a normal and a separate Hardcore set of achievements, the other not tampering with saving at all and the other maybe only allowing saving only at certain points or maybe not at all. Doing it like this should avoid the "is saving bad?" discussion, you could play both ways. 

[fruity lerlups]

i like the idea but implementation would be limited/difficult outside of something like action script or zscript, i suppose the ideal here would be to try and target vanilla as much as possible say plboom but that would be considerable effort

[Muusi]

3 minutes ago, fruity lerlups said:

i like the idea but implementation would be limited/difficult outside of something like action script or zscript, i suppose the ideal here would be to try and target vanilla as much as possible say plboom but that would be considerable effort

Yes the target should be vanilla in my opinion. Maybe a separate executable or something integrated into the source port that sniffs around the game tracking values or whatnot.

[yakfak]

i'd love this!

I don't care about feeling badass or whatever so what fires my imagination is mappers using the achievements as a hint system, like...

Beat this map without going through a teleporter

Defeat three barons in melee (to let you know those sniping barons are accesible up close later)

Get over two hundred monsters following you at once (to encourage the player to skip incidental kills until a bigger end-of-level battle has been unlocked)

 

people can already record demos of themselves beating maps without saves so if that's all chevos were meant for it'd be a bit of a waste

[fruity lerlups]

3 minutes ago, Muusi said:

Yes the target should be vanilla in my opinion. Maybe a separate executable or something integrated into the source port that sniffs around the game tracking values or whatnot.

Thinking about like, something like DSDA doing something for tracking runs online, insta-uploading demos from your executable to your profile and verifying the demo, etc. not for achievements but after that if you just have something in the executable that sniffs for achievements you can get those too.

Competitive runners might like the idea of the former and then achievements can be done as an after thought.

[fruity lerlups]

2 minutes ago, yakfak said:

don't care about feeling badass or whatever so what fires my imagination is mappers using the achievements as a hint system, like...

itd be cool to like encourage certain runs like "only kill pinkies with berserk", "let 3 cyberdemons die to infighting" or "beat the parr time with every secret"

[Stabbey]

Achievements are largely pointless. I am utterly indifferent to this idea and don't feel like it's the best use of time for the coders of the source port.

[bioshockfan90]

Avid user of RA here (not the emulator, but you know what I mean...), Prboom+ retroarch core implementation would be really cool and from what I've heard it'd work the same as any other core in RAlibretro, just getting devs to understand code pointers and develop the sets. The only real 'issue' you're going to run into is that the RetroAchievements scene and the Doom scene do not have that much overlap, so for the launch of support (unless we get some people on here dev'ing for the 'system') it'll be gated to the IWADs and probably some of the biggest hits. 

 

What more can you do? Par times? Speedrunning? There's not much of a ceiling to it unlike other video games which have a lot more to be explored than a 'system' (and I keep saying system because as others have said, there's no point in source port devs adding RA support to ports when there's already retroarch cores, it'd be a whole lot more workload and utterly pointless) consisting of roughly the same game. Things like the PSX Doom set (which I have played, great stuff!) are probably best left as they are. 

 

In the end? Cool idea, but it'd take a lot of work and there's only so much that can be done. I can see this happening more in the form of a .pk3 as seen on that one ZDoom forums mod or otherwise. RetroAchievements support would largely be just adding achievements to Doom 1, Doom 2, and Final Doom. I can't imagine many mappers wanting to have integration with a third party managing what 'achievements' are tied to their WAD.

 

One last thing - if my assumptions are right and one day we do see the Prboom+ core implemented in RA, it would be limited to Boom compat wads. just Food For Thought. :p