ZDoom vs Legacy: Make your choice.

[Porsche Monty]

What would be pretty interesting IMO is statistics for people who deliberately keep their systems compatible with older video games and people who constantly upgrade to the newest hardware/OS to get the best out of the current titles.

I'm guessing new would beat retro like in nearly every other field or circumstance these days, but by how much? 75-25? 85-15?

The most hardware-demanding task that my 3.0ghz has to put up with is high-precision yuv-to-rgb conversion for full HD, and even that works fine as long there's absolutely nothing else stealing CPU cycles.

As for GZDoom specifically, the only feature my GF6200-powered rig refuses to cooperate with is glowing flats. The hiccups are bad even when you're looking at the ceiling.

[Gez]

printz said:

Or dear. So this means that I need several computers, each with its own Windows, to test my in-dev software thoroughly.

If you want to be thorough, you'll want to have:
Win XP 32
Win XP 64
Win Vista or 7 32
Win Vista or 7 64

For Linux you'll want to test 32 and 64-bit versions of the major distributions. That's what, nowadays, Ubuntu and Debian? Do people still use RedHat? Mandriva? Meh, I'm out of the loop.

For Mac, however, you only need to test the very latest version. If it doesn't work on older systems, or on older hardware, you can do like the late Steve Jobs himself did and tell your customers to iFuck iThemselves. They'll love you for it, because Apple. :p

[RestlessRodent]

What about ReMooD!? Only one mention?

Darkman4:
How does Legacy handle multiple control inputs, thought? Can it detect plugged-in controllers, or does everyone have to use a single keyboard (which sounds hilarious)?

Only a SINGLE joystick is supported and it only used the first controller, so if your first controller happens to be a dumb accelerometer in your laptop then you are shit out luck. ReMooD supports up to afaik whatever amount of joysticks (16?), but they currently do nothing. I am going to make joystick mappings because of the way the sticks actually work. You will have to bind a joystick to a local 1-4 stick in order to use it. Because if you bind all your junk to JOY2B3 and you re-launch the game, Joystick 2 could be a completely different stick. So this would prevent that.

So virtually, one joystick and one keyboard, or just one keyboard. Legacy supports 2 mice but the second mouse must be a serial mouse provided it was not detected by your OS and eaten up. ReMooD removed support for a second mouse, these days multiple mice are pretty much unheard of and you could at least easily implement it in Linux by just reading directly from the different /dev/input/eventX anyway.

Graf Zhal:
Sure. The issues I am having comes from the Allegro library Legacy uses. This thing does some stuff my computer doesn't like. Performance in the software renderer is abysmal and this regularly screws up my system's sound settings, not to mention that it crashes very often. So unless that POS gets replaced by something more stable I won't bother trying again.

Legacy only uses Allegro for DOS and that was it. So unless you are running DOS then you aren't using Allegro. Afaik up to 1.42 it used custom Win32 and DirectDraw code whereas in 1.44 I believe wesley switched to pure SDL. As for ReMooD, I switched to pure SDL the soonest I could. But if you happen to want to compile ReMooD for DOS, the only choice is Allegro, whereas on modern systems you have SDL and Allegro (SDL by default).

But the software renderer is quite slow, due to 3D floors and other happenings and changes to the renderer.

Lance MDR Rocket:
I'd use splitscreen if I had any friends :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'(

Seriously though, it's a cool feature. Doesn't ReMood still have it? Hey GDeath how's ReMood going?

ReMooD has 4 player split screen and I work on ReMooD alot these days. It is going quite well.

Porsche Monty:
If your efforts stand any chance of being appreciated, a decent, modern, stable OS like WinXP must be fully supported. Win98 is obsolete beyond help and Linux a complete pile of garbage. In fact, migrating the development environment to Linux caused the Win32 version (traditionally the most popular) to be neglected and basically destroyed.

I'd like nothing better than to see Legacy back in business, but without a solid XP backbone and frequent SVN builds to increase and sustain the public interest, I'm afraid this project is a dead end.

For ReMooD at least, I target 32-bit/64-bit every system under the sun! I occasionally test ReMooD on Windows and Mac to see if they work along with other exotic systems. Most cases it is just compilation though. My current platform is Linux mostly though but I actually do have two primary Windows systems, Windows 98 and Windows Vista. I will not support Windows 95 though. Generally, I test the Windows version less because it is a bit of a pain but whenever I do test it I iron out all the existing bugs. I've worked with Windows, Linux, Mac and varying architectures from x86, x86_64, ARM, PowerPC, and MIPS so the code I write is pretty stable and works virtually the same. For XP/2003 based testing I could also just use ReactOS. There also exists WINE too which I also test besides native Windows.

I personally had the latest builds of ReMooD but due to server issues I could not host them anyway and I have yet to recreate the automatic build system. But when I did have automatic builds, it proved out to be quite well and made the port more popular as you could check out and play my latest changes without digging in alot.

Porsche Monty:
Indeed. Quite recently I tried rainbowstar.wad on ZDoom just for the heck of it (and for the record, it crashes the current 1.44 build in software mode) as I already knew GZDoom could handle it, and the whole thing just worked flawlessly with translucent 3D floors and all. If that ain't something!

rainbowstar.wad runs on ReMooD just fine and in fact the WAD exposes many bugs and crashes in Legacy (mostly due to some bugged 3D floor drawing code).

---

I rewrote much of the Legacy code in ReMooD so although most of it is still Legacy code, parts of it are going my own ReMooD code.

But while there is the long transition process, I am slowly getting there and as things progress things get better and more efficient and easier to maintain.

[Graf Zahl]

Well, the last ReMooD version I tried was too unstable and the shitty menu replacement was the final nail in the coffin. It didn't suffer from Legacy 1.42's issues but had different ones instead.

I sincerely hope at least the menu has been reverted. The menu didn't even work properly with some custom graphics.

[Porsche Monty]

No way I'm touching it without OpenGL stuffed back in.