win32 installer?

[leileilol]

I know Windows and installers are evil, but doing this could possibly kick some momentum into the project and may attract contributors and help popularity (raise awareness of the project rather).

It could use NSIS or InnoSetup and bundle Prboom, with media changes for that (freedoom icon to replace non-Free ouchface icon, and the non-Free menu graphics in prboom's wad file)

I'm asking, because since I did that win32 installer for OpenArena it got plastered onto freeware game sites and even FilePlanet's front page within days quickly gaining publicity. Oddly it hasn't hit happypenguin yet even though i made a tarball release too :\ heh.

[fraggle]

I strongly support this idea. I planned to do this over a year ago but never got round to doing it. It would greatly help if people could just download and install Freedoom without having to learn about what a Source port is, what an IWAD file is, etc.

[Enjay]

As long as the stand-alone downloads were still available too, I don't see that it could do any harm.

[leileilol]

hmm, i'm afraid i'll have to hold my plan off since prboom has a substantial amount of non-Free resources :\

[myk]

leileilol said:
hmm, i'm afraid i'll have to hold my plan off since prboom has a substantial amount of non-Free resources :\

That's true; it's got DOOM graphics and Wolfenstein sounds and sprites in the wad.

[boris]

myk said:

That's true; it's got DOOM graphics and Wolfenstein sounds and sprites in the wad.

I have to say that I'm quite surprised. The WAD with this non-free (or even illegal?) data is also included in the prboom release that's officially available for Debian.
Anyway, it shouldn't be too time consuming to build a special prboom release for Freedoom. Are those Wolf3d sprites and sounds actually of any use or are they just remains from the MBF heritage?

[Grazza]

boris said:

Are those Wolf3d sprites and sounds actually of any use or are they just remains from the MBF heritage?

They are needed if you use the MBF helper dogs, which I doubt anyone ever does. Replacing them with random placeholders (to avoid a crash in case anyone activates this feature) would surely not inconvenience anyone.

[myk]

Also, the submenus could be modified as to use only IWAD content (such as using small fonts for all menus except the ones normally in the games.)

[Jon]

Hi. I maintain the Debian package. It hasn't occurred to me before to inspect what was in prboom.wad (as strange as it sounds). This is indeed a problem. If a user here is sufficiently annoyed by it, please file a bug.

I think I may substitute the dog sprites for an existing freedoom monster sprite, although I cannot think of an appropriate one (maybe the demon). A more appropriate replacement would be very welcome.

[leileilol]

Scuba's old demon, shrank down a bit?

[boris]

Jon said:

Hi. I maintain the Debian package. It hasn't occurred to me before to inspect what was in prboom.wad (as strange as it sounds). This is indeed a problem. If a user here is sufficiently annoyed by it, please file a bug.

I think I may substitute the dog sprites for an existing freedoom monster sprite, although I cannot think of an appropriate one (maybe the demon). A more appropriate replacement would be very welcome.

Maybe the prboom team should change their WAD. Do they even realize/know that they have those resources in the WAD? Sure, nobody will care about Wolf3d, but it's rather some political thing.

[myk]

boris said:
Maybe the prboom team should change their WAD.

The code a bit, too. I'd say it needs to have full screen type menus for anything that is not already in the game, because the large font menu graphics are cut and pastes from the IWADs. Or alternately, to use Freedoom graphics in these places (but they have another style, so they would look stupid).

What happened here is that Boom and MBF started with the old license when this didn't really matter, and when they were GPLed no one thought, remembered, or dared mention the engines had IWAD material compiled into them (MBF more so), even if it isn't much.

Eternity probably has the same sort of problem, unless it already did what I'm implying above (small menu fonts only read from the IWAD directly, with IWAD flats as background); I'm not sure as I've not used it lately.

[Jon]

myk said:

The code a bit, too. I'd say it needs to have full screen type menus for anything that is not already in the game, because the large font menu graphics are cut and pastes from the IWADs. Or alternately, to use Freedoom graphics in these places (but they have another style, so they would look stupid).

Yes, those are also a problem. Although the freedoom text/font doesn't fit now, what I am about to begin working on for 0.7 is some infrastructure to make text-graphic lumps easy to generate from a "font". We could then generate prboom replacement lumps now, and trivially regenerate them if/when a more suitable font is drawn.

[Jon]

For Debian, I am removing dog support from prboom in the short-term. I've started work on a replacement dog sprite (and I don't think it will take all that long to finish) but it won't be done in the next week at least.

[myk]

Maybe to make it easy you could swap them for friendly marines, naturally keeping the dog stuff in the code so that it can be applied to the helper (or to monsters) through BEX patches.

[Jon]

myk said:

Maybe to make it easy you could swap them for friendly marines, naturally keeping the dog stuff in the code so that it can be applied to the helper (or to monsters) through BEX patches.

That's a thought. I might be able to do that. The only problem I can think of is the height difference between the dogs and the marines (most projectiles will go over the dog's heads, and seem to pass through a taller sprite).

I'm not sure if disabling dogs disables the friendly flag (and thus breaks BEX patches that rely on it); I shall check.

[myk]

Yeah, what I mean is changing the code, actually, so that the default helper is just like a marine, with marine-like qualities (size, speed, behavior), keeping the dog code in there for the BEX stuff but not using it automatically (since it would need sprites not in the wad to be used).

[Jon]

myk said:

Yeah, what I mean is changing the code, actually, so that the default helper is just like a marine, with marine-like qualities (size, speed, behavior), keeping the dog code in there for the BEX stuff but not using it automatically (since it would need sprites not in the wad to be used).

Although this is a better solution in general, at the moment debian is in freeze, and the simplest solutions are best here. Rather than introduce new/changed code, simply disabling dogs will have to do. The package in unstable right now has replacement menu graphics and no dogs; I've requested it be let through to etch too.

[leileilol]

Any WAD file yet?

[Jon]

leileilol said:

Any WAD file yet?

Yeah, prboom.wad in 2:2.4.6+dfsg-1. Here's a link directly to it:

http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/pkg-games/packages/branches/prboom/upstream/2.4.6+dfsg/data/prboom.wad?op=file&rev=0&sc=0

[RTC_Marine]

you could replace some of the stuff in the prboom.wad with freedoom stuff I suppose.

[leileilol]

M_SLIDE*, STKEYS*, BOXC*, BOXU*, BOXL* are still doom derived.

STCFN123 and STCFN124 are Quake derived. STCFN125 looks too jarbled to tell

[myk]

STKEYS*

Perhaps it can be said so. Also, they've always looked like crap to me (too much downsizing for the resolution scale.)

Jon said:
Although this is a better solution in general, at the moment debian is in freeze, and the simplest solutions are best here. Rather than introduce new/changed code, simply disabling dogs will have to do.

I see. In any case, it's something proff, cph, and entryway should look into (and then it could be incorporated into Debian whenever possible).

[funduke]

Wouldn't it make sense, that a freedoom-artist creates free doggie sprites to replace the wolf3d-sheperd-sprites?
Same behaviour, no inconsistencies, no legal problems.

Greetings
Funduke

[Jon]

funduke said:

Wouldn't it make sense, that a freedoom-artist creates free doggie sprites to replace the wolf3d-sheperd-sprites?
Same behaviour, no inconsistencies, no legal problems.

I'm doing just that. It might take some convincing of Proff that the new one is as good as the old one though

[funduke]

Jon said:

I'm doing just that. It might take some convincing of Proff that the new one is as good as the old one though

Nice to know.
Enjoy the work on it! :)

Greetings
Funduke