The Bleeding EDGE

[Gez]

With great stealth, a new version of EDGE has been made available a few days ago for Linux, Mac and Windows. More precisely, it is the first release candidate for EDGE 1.35, which is announced to be probably the last version this port will see -- so you can help it end on a high note by participating in the testing effort!

Other than bugfixes from 1.34, this version features better support for wide screens, greater customization of key binding, a inheritance mechanism for DDF, support for the HACX 1.2 IWAD, texture scaling in the TEXTUREx lumps, and other things which you can read about in more detail here.

So, go over there and test it. It's a good opportunity to try this WIP mod, too.

[kristus]

Hasn't EDGE seen quite a few "last releases" already?

[Scuba Steve]

Speaking of EDGE and related projects...

HAY NICK PERRIN, FINISH MARINES OF UAC!

[wildweasel]

And on a similar note...

HAY CORY WHITTLE, FINISH DON'S CHALLENGE!

[andrewj]

A little warning: RC1 can crash when saving a savegame.

[Marcaek]

WildWeasel said:

And on a similar note...

HAY CORY WHITTLE, FINISH DON'S CHALLENGE!

DC1 was great as it was, I've been waiting 9 years for DC2 :(

[Gez]

A few questions:
- Why is there no music? I'm doing nothing fancy; just playing the IWAD from a clean install.
- I can't bind use to mouse4 or mouse5 from the in-game menu. But I could do it by editing the CFG, so it's fine.
- Is there an IWADPATH setting somewhere? I like to keep ports in different folders and I don't want to duplicate the IWAD files needlessly. For now I just specify the path with the command line -iwad parameter.

[RjY]

I'm pretty curious about this COAL thing, motivations for inventing yet another script language, why it's better than lua, etc. The SVN log says it is based on QuakeC but didn't go into much detail..

[Coraline]

Gez said:

A few questions:
- Why is there no music? I'm doing nothing fancy; just playing the IWAD from a clean install.

Are you using Windows XP or Vista/7? If it's the newer versions, you need to download some TIMIDITY patches, and create a new folder in root called 8mbgmpat (then extract them into said dir). Set the music source in OPTIONS to Timidity, and restart your game (or warp to a different level). The music should play then. If it's Windows XP, set the music device to SYSTEM, and it should work (though you can optionally download the patches if you'd like).

I'm not sure about the IWADPATH though.. I just use a batch file.

[Graf Zahl]

That sounds very broken to me...

[Bastet Furry]

For me too, Midi is a problem under Linux but not under Windows.
So, why not just use DirectSound like always?

[Gez]

Chu said:

and create a new folder in root called 8mbgmpat

Again, I'd rather have a path variable in the config file then.

[andrewj]

Gez said:

I can't bind use to mouse4 or mouse5 from the in-game menu. But I could do it by editing the CFG, so it's fine.

That's quite odd, I have double checked the code and see nothing that could cause that. SDL has a bit of weirdness where button numbers 4 and 5 are the mousewheel and 6+ are the extra buttons, but the EDGE code is mapping that properly afaict. Unfortunately I don't have a mouse with extra buttons to test with.

Why is there no music?

I don't know, the code for playing MIDI via the Windows built-in software synthesizer worked fined in 98 and XP but not in Vista (and I guess not in Win7 either). Either Microsoft removed that synthesizer or changed something about it, hmmm maybe something to do with the timeSetEvent stuff. I am not very familiar with in Win32 API (I use Linux 99% of the time), and the piece of code in question (w32_mus.cc) was written by someone else, plus I don't have access to any Vista/Win7 machines to test on (even if I had some idea what to change in the code to get it working).

EDGE is a GPL-respecting port, so FMod is out of the question, and I wouldn't touch that POS SDL_mixer with a barge pole, and Bastet Furry it is news to me that DirectSound has an API for playing MIDI music. So I don't know what else to do, it's frustrating >:(

[Gez]

The Windows MIDI support changed with Vista. Some stuff still works (e.g., the MIDI player in SLADE 3 works even though the library used, Audiere, hasn't been updated in a while), but others don't. I've setup the GUS patches and I have music now, so the issue isn't too big.

As a miscellaneous point, while playing E1M1 in ultra violence, one of the shotgun guys in the secret tunnels always come out in the courtyard. I've never seen that happen with vanilla or with any other port.

[Quasar]

andrewj said:

I don't know, the code for playing MIDI via the Windows built-in software synthesizer worked fined in 98 and XP but not in Vista (and I guess not in Win7 either). Either Microsoft removed that synthesizer or changed something about it, hmmm maybe something to do with the timeSetEvent stuff.

Yes, this API was nerfed in Vista. Pure laziness out of Redmond as far as I can tell. It has caused a lot of people a lot of grief.

[Graf Zahl]

Do you mean DirectMusic? I have heard that it was removed because it was not stable. I played around with it years ago but was constantly unable to get anything reliable out of it. I'm surprised anyone used it at all in released code...

[Bastet Furry]

Umm... back in the days several commercial products used it, at least IIRC.
WinAMP and Diablo 1 come to mind.

[Quasar]

Graf Zahl said:

Do you mean DirectMusic? I have heard that it was removed because it was not stable. I played around with it years ago but was constantly unable to get anything reliable out of it. I'm surprised anyone used it at all in released code...

Me? No. I'm talking about the high precision timer API.

[andrewj]

Quasar said:

Yes, this API was nerfed in Vista.

Thanks a million James, it's a relief to know that.

[Pirx]

Gez said:

W greater customization of key binding,

that's great. might sound like some minor improvement, but if if you're used with binding your weapons to the keys around A-S-D for more than 10 years, then reaching for the number keys row is a pain, especially when under attack.

[andrewj]

RjY said:

I'm pretty curious about this COAL thing, motivations for inventing yet another script language, why it's better than lua, etc.

Major reason #1 : It is hard to save/restore the VM state with Lua (to implement savegames). It is not part of the standard Lua code (which kinda proves that it is not easy), and at the time I made the switch the best Lua library for doing this, Pluto, was years out of date, though funnily enough a major update of Pluto came out some months later. I was also doubtful that if something was wrong with that serialization library, I wouldn't have the expertise to fix it myself, especially regarding stuff like Lua's closures and co-routines.

Major reason #2 : Lua scripts can use a lot of memory without any limit placed on you. Tables can be trivially created in the syntax with {}. I think this is bad in the context of a game engine, for one thing this can potentially lead to really huge savegames (and hence slow to load and save). Plus I think limits are generally needed in a game engine to ensure some level of consistency between two different computers or even two different maps.

Major reason #3 : I wanted a scripting language for the game sim which would be a good fit for client/server networking. QuakeC and entities are a system proven to work for that, whereas I had trouble envisioning how Lua could be used to do the same thing. COAL ended up being just for HUD drawing, though it was planned for the game sim too.

Minor reason : concern about the garbage collector causing pauses in gameplay. I have a feeling this would not be an issue, but the risk was always there.

[Tormentor667]

Wasn't there a Quakedoom based on EDGE?

[kristus]

You mean Qdoom by Fanatic?

[Tormentor667]

Yes, exactly. Can this still be downloaded somewhere? And also be played with the latest version of EDGE?

[GreyGhost]

Those old 3ddownloads.com links are a pest - here's where AtomicGamer hides them. We'll have to find out about compatibility issues the hard way.

[kristus]

Heh, Doom Anomaly. I wonder if anyone proficient with EDGE could get that to work on current EDGE too. I never actually got to play it.

EDIT: I just tested QDoom with the latest EDGE. I only played a few maps but it seems to be working liked it used to. MP3 music won't work for me though, but again, that is just liked it used to be.

[andrewj]

QDOOM 1.01 should work fine in latest EDGE, it is one of my test cases since it has heaps of DDF and RTS stuff going on.

EDGE has not supported MP3 music for a long time though (cannot legally decode them without a license from the IP owners). The music pack could be converted to OGG/Vorbis I guess, but you'd need a new playlist.ddf too.