DSDA Doom vs GZDoom?

[BunnyBun]

Hey guys! I see a lot of Doom youtubers playing doom on DSDA. Are there any benefits to this? Better performance? Is it limit removing so I can play modern/beefed up mapsets like the doomer boards projects or eviternity 2? And how does it fare with mods, if at all?

[Major Arlene]

DSDA is more limited in some regards, but it's a good general purpose engine for regular play of non-ZDoom WADs and it's widely used for demo recording. You'd want to use GZDoom if you want to play with most mods though.

[BunnyBun]

2 minutes ago, Major Arlene said:

DSDA is more limited in some regards, but it's a good general purpose engine for regular play of non-ZDoom WADs and it's widely used for demo recording. You'd want to use GZDoom if you want to play with most mods though.

I dont typically play with a lot of mods. I just want a chunky vanilla engine that I can play most/all wads on : )

 

[Devalaous]

DSDA is probably going to end up the second most-used port and for good reason. It's got great UMAPINFO support that frees a lot of older ZDoom-only stuff, rewinding, an onscreen minimap, built-in stat tracking and record keeping for EVERY wad you play, an its also got good controller support. DSDA and GZDoom are what I'd recommend to anyone new to the community, with Woof and Eternity as additional options

[Ravendesk]

Many gimmicky vanilla/boom/mbf wads have parts that are broken in gzdoom, because gzdoom doesn't emulate these engines 100% accurately, and when a wad is using engine quirks for certain creative elements, gz starts to have problems with them. Despite the fact that many mappers go out of their way to make things still work in gz as well, it's not always possible.

 

So it's better to play non-udmf wads in dsda than in gz, because dsda guarantees they work as intended.

 

For pure vanilla stuff you might also want to use chocolate doom instead.

[fruity lerlups]

different purposes.

DSDAdoom is all about demo compatibility, its compat settings emulate the original engines, boom and implement mbf features faithfully.

GZdoom is all about moddability, as a result of its extensive capabilities, it sacrifices compatibility with demos, thus it is not used for speedruns.

Just detault to DSDAdoom for anything vanilla up to mbf21 format, and anything zdoom/zscript/UMF format, use GZdoom <3

[fruity lerlups]

9 minutes ago, Ravendesk said:

For pure vanilla stuff you might also want to use chocolate doom instead.

id onyl say use chocolate if you want faithful software renderer, prboom and DSDA have faithful engine emulation for vanilla so compat isnt an issue

[Firedust]

Both. In fact, I'll take anything that isn't Eternity with its horrid clunkyass movement.

[fruity lerlups]

3 hours ago, BunnyBun said:

I dont typically play with a lot of mods. I just want a chunky vanilla engine that I can play most/all wads on : )

 

sorry for spamming thread mods. This sounds like you should use DSDAdoom :)

Just check the format, anything that says:

"limit removing"

"boom"

"mbf" up to "mbf21"

Will run perfectly on DSDA doom

anyrhing that is "UMF" "Zdoom" or mentions Zscript, use GZDoom!

Most idgames frontends will clarify the intended port!

[Sneezy McGlassFace]

1 minute ago, fruity lerlups said:

id onyl say use chocolate if you want faithful software renderer, prboom and DSDA have faithful engine emulation for vanilla so compat isnt an issue

Chocolate is the only doom port i know of in somewhat common use that is advanced enough to accurately crash as the exe would. Dsda or gzdoom can't accurately replicate savegame corruption or tutti frutti either. If you ask me, having part of a room turn into HOM because the drawsegs limit was exceeded is essential part of the vanilla experience. 

[No-Man Baugh]

1 hour ago, Sneezy McGlassFace said:

Chocolate is the only doom port i know of in somewhat common use that is advanced enough to accurately crash as the exe would. Dsda or gzdoom can't accurately replicate savegame corruption or tutti frutti either. If you ask me, having part of a room turn into HOM because the drawsegs limit was exceeded is essential part of the vanilla experience. 

 

I do kinda have beef with Chocolate Doom for it's setup launcher being far more permissive than Vanilla, namely in letting me bind the scroll wheel which wasn't even assignable in the vanilla (all you could do with mouse bindings was reassign the 3 preexisting actions- shoot, strafe, and forward -beween the 3 mouse buttons)

I get that even for a port that aims for authenticity above all else; limiting mouse button binds is a pretty insane ask for any modern software. But in my eyes having to go into Doom's config and set b_speed to an arbitrary number to 28 or 32 in order to achieve shiftless running or run an entirelly seperate application just to disable the vertical mouse movement are a huge part of the vanilla experience. and having some of those QoL features handed to you feel like you're being lied to if you haven't already played the original DOS executables. They're nice if you only mainline that hardcore kind of authenticity, but for educational purposes I still feel like it was good for me to play Doom.exe even under dos-box

But I mostly just play Nugget Doom anyways, both it and it's mother port Woof are what I recommend 110% if you just want a faithful software renderer but still want some really really good QoL features and the ability to play Boom and MBF/21 maps

Edited January 24 by No-Man Baugh
cut the whole note about woof and nugget's resolution entirelly because it's no longer true for Woof

[Sneezy McGlassFace]

32 minutes ago, No-Man Baugh said:

 

I do kinda have beef with Chocolate Doom for it's setup launcher being far more permissive than Vanilla, namely in letting me bind the scroll wheel which wasn't even assignable in the vanilla (all you could do with mouse bindings was reassign the 3 preexisting actions- shoot, strafe, and forward -beween the 3 mouse buttons)

I get that even for a port that aims for authenticity above all else; limiting mouse button binds is a pretty insane ask for any modern software. But in my eyes having to go into Doom's config and set b_speed to an arbitrary number to 28 or 32 in order to achieve shiftless running or run an entirelly seperate application just to disable the vertical mouse movement are a huge part of the vanilla experience. and having some of those QoL features handed to you feel like you're being lied to if you haven't already played the original DOS executables. They're nice if you only mainline that hardcore kind of authenticity, but for educational purposes I still feel like it was good for me to play Doom.exe even under dos-box

But I mostly just play Nugget Doom anyways, both it and it's mother port Woof are what I recommend 110% if you just want a faithful software renderer but still want some really really good QoL features and the ability to play Boom and MBF/21 maps (worth noting: Woof is locked between 200p and 400p while Nugget can scale up by multiples all the way up to 1200p)

 

I know this is already off topic enough but I wanna say that I second nugget-doom. Great port, love the QOL features, and Alaux is a great guy too. But if the question is DSDA vs Gzd, I'm saying DSDA. The things Nugget adds are relatively minor in comparison to the vast gap between dsda and Gzd. 

 

For vanilla educational purposes, Dosbox-x or Dosbox-staging and the original exes are very good choice. They're still being developed and far more accurate than the original dosbox ever was. Not as accurate as 86box/PCem of course but it's a nice balance, I think. That's how I do my vanilla development lately, anyway. 

 

Edit: I mean to say, chocolate is close enough in most cases and had a huge advantage of ease of use / convenience. 

Edited January 24 by Sneezy McGlassFace

[NightFright]

The killer feature of DSDA and Nugget Doom is the rewind option. Woof will get it as well at some point. Your violated F6 key (or whatever you use for quicksaves) will thank you for it. 

In general, ever since Woof became a thing, I've pretty much abandoned GZDoom as my standard port and now only use it for mods which require it. For those rare occasions I need Heretic or Hexen (Strife is basically only good for a single playthrough of the campaign IMHO), Crispy Heretic/Hexen usually does the trick. DSDA supports those as well, but with some remaining caveats so far. I guess International Heretic/Hexen would also be an option if you need higher resolutions and some additional bling-bling. 

Edited January 24 by NightFright

[Maribo]

2 hours ago, fruity lerlups said:

id onyl say use chocolate if you want faithful software renderer, prboom and DSDA have faithful engine emulation for vanilla so compat isnt an issue

DSDA-Doom and Woof both have extremely faithful software renderers (just turn down the resolution to Chocolate levels if you want the extra crunchy visuals). The indexed lighting used in DSDA-Doom's hardware render is also very similar to the software renderer, though it's not perfect and has issues with some esoteric tricks like not rendering HOMs properly.

 

Anyway, to directly answer OP's questions:

7 hours ago, BunnyBun said:

Better performance?

We'll go with "usually", because there's always some weird esoteric case that nobody can think about. Generally speaking it only makes a huge difference if you're playing something on the extreme end of map size/monster count, or if you're playing on old hardware.

 

7 hours ago, BunnyBun said:

Is it limit removing so I can play modern/beefed up mapsets like the doomer boards projects or eviternity 2? And how does it fare with mods, if at all?

Yes to limit-removing. Mods, depends. The kind of mods you're looking at will have to be vanilla/limit-removing/boom/mbf/mb21 and must NOT conflict heavily with modifications that any of the PWADs you try to play make to the game, but that 2nd part is the same for GZDoom. Smooth Doom (MBF21 edition) and Minicharge are gameplay mods that would work in DSDA-Doom, for example.

edit: I realized that calling MBF21 Smooth Doom a gameplay mod isn't really accurate (it plays basically the same to vanilla gameplay), but it's still a good example of a mod that works in DSDA-Doom.

Edited January 24 by Maribo
smooth doom

[Li'l devil]

GZDoom has dynamic lights and ambient occlusion, making other ports thoroughly obsolete!

[No-Man Baugh]

14 minutes ago, Li'l devil said:

GZDoom has dynamic lights and ambient occlusion, making other ports thoroughly obsolete!

Yada yada poe's law, bla bla can't read sarcasm

[SilentD00mer]

If you don't play with mods so much you can use DSDA, it's simply more faithful to vanilla and has a lot of QOL features like the rewind option people said above, and supports many map formats we have today (except for Zdoom format, of course)

[Powerlord]

I'd really like to stick with DSDA, but the main thing keeping me from finally going over is that there's no "minimal" hud that also doesn't give you map stats like monster and secret count. GZDoom has a hud that just shows keys, armor/health, and current ammo, all as numbers with little icons. It's the perfect amount of information and making sure the information doesn't clog up my screen for me. With DSDA I either have to stick to the classic hud that, yknow, is iconic and all, but has a lot of information I don't really need for moment to moment casual play, or I have to take the hud that just has a lot of jumbled up information that's hard to discern, and also states monster and secret count, which I really don't like. GZDoom is also just generally more convenient and obviously allows for the millions of mods that people make (although I only ever run mods for easy pistol start and swapping out monster sprites without changing gameplay). A minor thing is that I very much enjoy crosshairs that change color to indicate current health so I don't have to look at the bottom or corner of the screen in the heat of a firefight to know I'm dying, and DSDA doom also has this except there's no real scaling option so it's either a handful of tiny pixels in the middle of my screen or a massive gross blemish on it. I hear you can mod the engine yourself to fix these issues but I can't put in all that effort of learning how when GZDoom is still right there. Anyways, I realize I've only stated my personal stake in the comparison so here's some more info that might help somebody in general decide which they'd like.

GZDoom is the most convenient for sure, very easy to set up and pretty easy to configure along with it running smoothly with any mods or iwads out there (except for some I'll get into in a moment). It also has a lot of modern options if you'd feel inclined to turn them on (you shouldn't, but you can!) but for the love of god please turn off texture filtering. The downsides would be that it does feel a bit off from classic doom even with the most fine tuned settings, some things will just end up looking and feeling ever so slightly different for people that're used to playing it lots through more vanilla-accurate ports. That and with the way GZDoom draws actors and lines and basically the whole game in general, the engine can choke when played with maps that feature a fuckton of things or painfully intricate architecture, namely slaughtermaps. DSDA is very vanilla accurate, isn't too hard to tune to your liking, and is still able to run most modern mapsets that don't feature GZDoom exclusive hacks. Basically, anything that's still doom to its core should run with DSDA, like eviternity or the majority of the DBPs. You can even still run it with opengl for those that like to use mouselook but also not hurl from the weird effect mouselook has in software renderers. The negatives are mostly what I stated above, you can't run many (if any?) gameplay mods with it and it's not as customizable, missing a hunk of quality of life features GZDoom has. Basically, if you just wanna play some normal ass doom, DSDA definitely has you covered. If you're a bit picky or can't play vanilla and need to slap on 6 gameplay mods for a fix, or if you're incredibly lazy, GZDoom's got you. Sorry for the massive message lol

[Doomy__Doom]

28 minutes ago, Powerlord said:

I'd really like to stick with DSDA, but the main thing keeping me from finally going over is that there's no "minimal" hud that also doesn't give you map stats like monster and secret count.

You can make one for yourself. "stat_totals" is an entirely optional element.

[Maribo]

24 minutes ago, Powerlord said:

I'd really like to stick with DSDA, but the main thing keeping me from finally going over is that there's no "minimal" hud that also doesn't give you map stats like monster and secret count. GZDoom has a hud that just shows keys, armor/health, and current ammo, all as numbers with little icons.

You can remove the stat counters and timer by making your own custom HUD lump and loading it by launching with -hud whatevernameyouwant.lmp

Here is a modified minimal HUD with those widgets removed, accomplished by removing the stat_totals 2 32 bottom_left and composite_time 2 40 bottom_left lines from the doom full section. - hud.zip

And here is what it looks like:

Spoiler

If you're interested in how this looks, you can extensively tweak DSDA's HUD and find documentation for it over here. You might not be able to replicate an exact HUD in the style of GZDoom, but you can move everything around how you want and some pieces have optional icon toggles, or only show up under specific circumstances.

[No-Man Baugh]

34 minutes ago, Powerlord said:

snip

I guess I'm now the patron saint of Woof because in that port you can just go into the hud options and turn on or off the level stats and timer, along side having an option for keeping the big numbers from the classic hud without having the actual big hud itself, which is how I like playing most of the time

 

honestly that's my main reason for switching from DSDA to Woof; I remember someone saying that DSDA had more options that Woof but Woof has more options that I agree with. The comp level menu, turning off the double closing door sound, colored monster blood, (not even GZDoom has that by default) blockmap fix, more accurate (and better looking) specter effect, I might not always take advantage of all of these options, but I am so very glad that it has them.

[BunnyBun]

6 hours ago, fruity lerlups said:

sorry for spamming thread mods. This sounds like you should use DSDAdoom :)

Just check the format, anything that says:

"limit removing"

"boom"

"mbf" up to "mbf21"

Will run perfectly on DSDA doom

anyrhing that is "UMF" "Zdoom" or mentions Zscript, use GZDoom!

Most idgames frontends will clarify the intended port!

thank you for the amazing information! Im new to all this, what is the difference between mbf21 and boom, and limit removing? What does it even stand for?

[BunnyBun]

9 hours ago, Devalaous said:

DSDA is probably going to end up the second most-used port and for good reason. It's got great UMAPINFO support that frees a lot of older ZDoom-only stuff, rewinding, an onscreen minimap, built-in stat tracking and record keeping for EVERY wad you play, an its also got good controller support. DSDA and GZDoom are what I'd recommend to anyone new to the community, with Woof and Eternity as additional options

Whoa a stat tracker and minimap? Do you know how I may find these option in DSDA doom? Also what is UMAPINFO?

[BunnyBun]

4 hours ago, NightFright said:

The killer feature of DSDA and Nugget Doom is the rewind option. Woof will get it as well at some point. Your violated F6 key (or whatever you use for quicksaves) will thank you for it. 

In general, ever since Woof became a thing, I've pretty much abandoned GZDoom as my standard port and now only use it for mods which require it. For those rare occasions I need Heretic or Hexen (Strife is basically only good for a single playthrough of the campaign IMHO), Crispy Heretic/Hexen usually does the trick. DSDA supports those as well, but with some remaining caveats so far. I guess International Heretic/Hexen would also be an option if you need higher resolutions and some additional bling-bling. 

I agree with the violated F6 key. I quick save way too often and it was actually beginning to impact my enjoyment of the game. With DSDA I can just rewind if I ever die, so its like a sense of freedom of not worrying about quicksaving anymore.

[Novaseer]

4 minutes ago, BunnyBun said:

thank you for the amazing information! Im new to all this, what is the difference between mbf21 and boom, and limit removing? What does it even stand for?

Different compatibility levels and mapping format standards.

 

Limit-removing refers to a vanilla-adjacent experience where there is no additional content, but limits on map creation are relaxed, allowing for larger and more detailed levels.

 

Boom, MBF, MBF21 etc. add various levels of additional content and as complevels modify certain characteristics of the game engine (such as RNG).

 

Notable Boom features include silent teleports, light sequences and conveyor belts - the latter allowing for complex scripted events using voodoo dolls.

MBF adds a few fancy code pointers and the ability to have multiple skies in the same level (although most modern sourceports apply these lines to Boom complevel too).

MBF21 adds shit like instant kill floors (including on monsters), music changers, and a load more stuff I haven't personally tried but would probably recognise if given an example from Eviternity II.

 

The compatibility level typically matches up to the mapping format - if a map is limit-removing, run it on the vanilla complevels - usually complevel 2. If it's Boom, 9. MBF, 11. MBF21, shockingly, 21 - although DSDADoom does have a more helpfully localised targeted compatibility level in its menu which is more convenient to set if you're not launching from the command line.

[No-Man Baugh]

2 minutes ago, BunnyBun said:

Whoa a stat tracker and minimap? Do you know how I may find these option in DSDA doom? Also what is UMAPINFO?

The stat tracker is under "Level Tables" in the options and also lets you warp to any selected level, and in the automap settings there should be an option called "show minimap"

 

You can also a way to export your level data by giving it the console parameter "-levelstat" if you're launching from command line, but this is especially usefull with a launcher like... well Doom Launcher which simplifies this with just a checkbox

 

UMAPINFO is a recent mapinfo format adopted by most of the major ports out there like GZDoom and DSDA-Doom. it lets modders do simple stuff like give maps names and customizable lables, to some pretty serious stuff like divide levels into episodes, insert textscreens wherever, play the outro after any map, even totally reorder where exits lead to beyond the hardcoded vanilla order that only ZDoom was previously able to cross. I highly recommend reading the Doomwiki article on it, some real potential in here that even now still hasn't totally been fully explored: https://doomwiki.org/wiki/UMAPINFO

 

[NightFright]

There's still no way to turn off that brief appearance of the run duration on the intermission screen in DSDA, right? I mean, it's almost nothing and I know this is important to have for a port with speedrun focus, but personally I really wouldn't need it.

Edited January 24 by NightFright

[TuxWare]

I would recommend GZDoom because of its highly customizable visuals, Mapping features, ACS, bug free experience, finite tall actors, zscript and in future even quake style lightmaps.
GZDoom and VKDoom are perfect indie game engines for making games like unity and godot tho gzdoom is only good for FPSs and such.
GZDoom isnt 100% vannila accurate, but 90% of people wouldnt care about them since they are so miniscule.
The thing that is being talked about is the perfomance, while it is true that dsda-doom has better perfomacne, it shouldnt matter unless you are playing something like nuts or junkfood.
But if you want to speedrun dsda is by far the better choice

[faceplant641]

22 minutes ago, No-Man Baugh said:

The stat tracker is under "Level Tables" in the options and also lets you warp to any selected level, and in the automap settings there should be an option called "show minimap"

 

 

I had no idea level stats were a thing.  You've made this gameplay tracking nerd's day.

[No-Man Baugh]

I adore Boom-based ports like DSDA-Doom and Woof for their authenticity to the game, but if performance is what you're really after: It might be worth shouting out Helion

It's compatibility with mods is closer to DSDA than it is even basic ol ZDoom, but if you're really struggling to run a big-ass map like The Given or any given slaughter map even in DSDA, than I'd turn to Helion because it's really really really efficient