Modding the PS3 port of Doom

[realjohnmadden]

Doom Classic Complete on PS3 has full-on PWAD support - granted, it's only used for Master Levels and so you have to replace Master Levels with a custom PWAD. But, it's actually one of the few official ports (that I know of, anyway) to support custom graphics from PWADs! You can also just edit the IWADs directly, of course.

Here's a Wolfendoom WAD I got off Doom Wiki. DEHACKED probably doesn't work, although I haven't actually tried it to see for myself.

Here's NUTS.WAD:

It actually runs well, but it crashed at some point and started playing the TNT title theme, for whatever reason.. (I replaced TNT MAP01 with Nuts.)

Sigil works fine, so far I've played up to E5M4. This goes over Episode 3, and I converted all the music to MUS so that it actually played them (there isn't any support for MIDIs, for some reason).

And to round it off, I swapped MAP32 and MAP01 in Plutonia, just to see how playable Go 2 It is on a controller. (Spoiler alert: not very.) I got up to the part with the Revenants coming from the courtyard and gave up.

Edited May 25 by realjohnmadden

[Dark Pulse]

I mean, if you're replacing files, I wouldn't really consider that "support," because there's literally no way to do it without a jailbroken PS3.

 

You're replacing the files, and as it turns out, to make the official stuff supported, a lot of that work also enables a lot of PWADs to work. It's more a side effect than intentional.

[houston]

For a moment I thought you meant through accessing a USB drive's filesystem, a lot of PlayStation 3 games actually did a similar thing officially.

[realjohnmadden]

7 hours ago, houston said:

For a moment I thought you meant through accessing a USB drive's filesystem, a lot of PlayStation 3 games actually did a similar thing officially.

Unreal Tournament is one of the games that actually worked like this - I should get my hands on that game eventually.

 

8 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

I mean, if you're replacing files, I wouldn't really consider that "support," because there's literally no way to do it without a jailbroken PS3.

 

You're replacing the files, and as it turns out, to make the official stuff supported, a lot of that work also enables a lot of PWADs to work. It's more a side effect than intentional.

I just thought it was neat, and I'm pretty sure not even the Unity port supports PWAD graphic loading.

[Dark Pulse]

12 hours ago, realjohnmadden said:

Unreal Tournament is one of the games that actually worked like this - I should get my hands on that game eventually.

 

I just thought it was neat, and I'm pretty sure not even the Unity port supports PWAD graphic loading.

Hey, I'm all for more people liking UT. Too bad we'll never get another because Epic is way too busy pleasuring themselves with all the money Fortnite brings them. Also too bad that they haven't released the source code for the original (and best); nor has anyone tried reverse-engineering it yet.

 

And yeah, it is neat, but the topic is a little (unintentionally, I believe) misleading in that it seems like some sort of secret support, so I'm just clarifying it up a bit in that people with an unmodified PS3 aren't gaining anything here. :P

[Muusi]

Too bad this doesn't work on the Unity version on PS4. My system can be jailbroken and I've looked through the files but nothing :(

[Edward850]

19 hours ago, realjohnmadden said:

and I'm pretty sure not even the Unity port supports PWAD graphic loading.

It... uhhh... does for the obvious reasons. And technically all the ports Xbox onwards do as the pwad mechanisms are still in place, even if unused. Though the master levels were also present in the ROE version on the original Xbox, and the XBLA version of Doom2 loaded in nerve.wad.

Edited March 6 by Edward850

[realjohnmadden]

9 hours ago, Edward850 said:

It... uhhh... does for the obvious reasons. And technically all the ports Xbox onwards do as the pwad mechanisms are still in place, even if unused. Though the master levels were also present in the ROE version on the original Xbox, and the XBLA version of Doom2 loaded in nerve.wad.

I thought they were just their own IWADs - granted, I haven't played the Unity ports much.

[Individualised]

3 hours ago, realjohnmadden said:

I thought they were just their own IWADs - granted, I haven't played the Unity ports much.

They are. Still it would be rather weird if it couldn't load graphics lumps from PWADs (though the Unity version does have some issues with limit removing and even vanilla PWAD compatibility)

[Edward850]

7 hours ago, realjohnmadden said:

I thought they were just their own IWADs - granted, I haven't played the Unity ports much.

They are but so they can be loaded regardless if you're running ult doom or doom2. Not every wad started like that however.

Edited March 6 by Edward850

[Roebloz]

Interesting that the port only has MUS support. Maybe they based it off an older version of the code?

[realjohnmadden]

On 3/12/2024 at 8:53 PM, Roebloz said:

Interesting that the port only has MUS support. Maybe they based it off an older version of the code?

Somewhat late reply, but probably not.

MUS is the native format for DMX music, and DMX actually converted from MIDI to MUS ever since engine version 1.5:

Quote

Although the MUS format is used in the IWADs, the Doom engine is able to read standard MIDI files if they can be converted on-the-fly to MUS format by the MIDI2MUS code that was integrated in version 1.5 of the engine. Converting from MIDI to MUS is a lossy operation, since track data is flattened (as in MIDI format 0), tempo information is transformed to be based on a time division value of 70, and all metadata information is stripped out.

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/MIDI

However, this functionality is completely missing in Doom95:

Quote

Unlike the later DOS versions of the Doom games, Doom95 cannot play back true MIDIs, only real MUS files.

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Doom95

I imagine they had stripped out MIDI-to-MUS code in Doom95, and then later ports also did the same. Doom95 also uses a different sound engine, and the BFG ports likely used another different sound engine as well that played back music using GUS patches (I heard some stuff about OpenAL when browsing here, that might have been it?).

 

Also, something I forgot to mention:

On 3/6/2024 at 10:23 AM, Edward850 said:

It... uhhh... does for the obvious reasons. And technically all the ports Xbox onwards do as the pwad mechanisms are still in place, even if unused. Though the master levels were also present in the ROE version on the original Xbox, and the XBLA version of Doom2 loaded in nerve.wad.

In that case, what does this mean?

Quote

This also means that certain new features such as freelook are not planned,[5] and that certain limitations of the original engine, such as the issues when attempting to load sprites, flats, and textures from different archives, are left in place.[6]

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Doom_Classic_Unity_port

 

Our WAD support is otherwise mostly equivalent with vanilla, with all the pitfalls and tricks involved with adding new sprites, flats, and so on that it entails. We don't read multiple TEXTURE1/2/PNAMES lumps or anything like that. There are some changes around how it detects IWADs so we can ship mods like BTSX as an IWAD and have it work in both games.

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/116619-doom-unity-port-wad-suggestion-thread/?tab=comments#comment-2182511

Edited May 11 by realjohnmadden

[Lila Feuer]

Go 2 It isn't that bad on a gamepad get on my level.

[Devalaous]

1 minute ago, Lila Feuer said:

Go 2 It isn't that bad on a gamepad get on my level.

 

Given that ive beaten Post Mortem, Afterlife, Darkdome and Citadel at the Edge of Eternity on a controller, Go 2 It is child's play :p (The Twilight is the REAL hardest map in Plutonia anyway)

[Edward850]

2 hours ago, realjohnmadden said:

In that case, what does this mean? 

It uses vanilla loading specifications (or more specifically, the loading rules are unmodified from Doom v1.9).

Edited May 11 by Edward850

[Gez]

On mardi 5 mars 2024 at 11:00 PM, Dark Pulse said:

Hey, I'm all for more people liking UT. Too bad we'll never get another because Epic is way too busy pleasuring themselves with all the money Fortnite brings them. Also too bad that they haven't released the source code for the original (and best); nor has anyone tried reverse-engineering it yet.

Have you looked at @dpJudas's SurrealEngine?

[Dark Pulse]

9 hours ago, Gez said:

Have you looked at @dpJudas's SurrealEngine?

I have. Highly promising work, but time will tell if it actually gets to be a good and full reimplementation that'd free us from the original engine, or if it, like many other such projects in the past, falls to the wayside and gets abandoned.

[Lila Feuer]

10 hours ago, Gez said:

Have you looked at @dpJudas's SurrealEngine?

Oh I hope this'll be a thing and eventually support single player Unreal and all its mods, that'd be a nice fat middle finger to Septic. That's something else I don't think people thought of either; they didn't just say "lol, lmao even" at their flagship title, they also said "screw the entire mapping/modding community that's still going to this day too" on top of it.

[Redneckerz]

19 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

I have. Highly promising work, but time will tell if it actually gets to be a good and full reimplementation that'd free us from the original engine, or if it, like many other such projects in the past, falls to the wayside and gets abandoned.

Given its by the guy who enhanced GZDoom and has brought us VKDoom and ZDray, i agree, but i also think it will be a well done implementation if finished.

 

That and the UT Community SDK are the most exciting things in UE1 land. Tho i still wish Epic would just open source that version of the engine.

[Dark Pulse]

7 hours ago, Redneckerz said:

Given its by the guy who enhanced GZDoom and has brought us VKDoom and ZDray, i agree, but i also think it will be a well done implementation if finished.

 

That and the UT Community SDK are the most exciting things in UE1 land. Tho i still wish Epic would just open source that version of the engine.

"B-But the code is a mess!"

 

That's literally one of the reasons Tim Sweeney gave.

 

I could see ensuring they get the okay from Digital Extremes (things were a co-development up through UT2004, after all), but "the code is a mess" is literally the weakest fucking excuse ever. The community would be more than happy to clean up 25+ year-old code, and it's not like your illusion as a master programmer is destroyed if they find some hacky bullshit here and there.

 

Also, for something like UE2, this will be mandatory to do. They've made clear there's no chance of that being opensourced, since various middlware (Karma physics, SpeedTree, etc.) were integrated directly into the engine rather than modularized - meaning that if you removed all that stuff, you'd remove a lot of what the games need to run.

 

The closest that exists to that is the now little-known "Unreal Engine 2 Runtime," and that was only ever officially released for Windows - Linux/OSX users were advised to license the full Unreal Engine 2, instead.

[realjohnmadden]

More observations:

 

Freedoom Phase 2 (0.6.4) crashed on the loading screen, but played the actual music.

Freedoom Phase 2 (0.13.0) works fine, but upon starting the game, no new music played (it was still the music from MAP11/DEMO1), and sound effects were just original Doom sounds. Both of these went over TNT.

Doom 2 the Way We Remember It worked fine, but again, MAP11 music instead of the actual MAP01 music in the WAD, and it crashed after completing MAP01 (right before loading MAP02). This went over Master Levels.