DOOM Retro v5.4 (updated May 2, 2024)

[Endless]

Hey Brad.

 

Noticed that the r_gamma command doesn't stay after you quit the game. It returns to the default. Same when you switch between vanilla and normal mode.

[bradharding]

2 hours ago, Endless said:

Hey Brad.

 

Noticed that the r_gamma command doesn't stay after you quit the game. It returns to the default. Same when you switch between vanilla and normal mode.

Hey Endless. I didn't announce it on this forum, but please download v4.7.2 and the gamma correction level will be saved.

[schiz0id]

So it says my device id isn't working or something, the music still doesn't work.

[schiz0id]

I FOUND THE FIX

 

I use K-Lite Codec pack and just ran the general fixes with their Codec Tweak Tool. This repaired the music. If anyone else has k-lite codec pack for windows, you should probably check this out.

[Endless]

Hey mate! Noticed that when using the alt hud, on the lower right corner, right under the ammo bar, there's a timer bar for the powerups in game, like the toxic suit. I remember the bar used to shrink as time went by until the powerup was turned off, now, the bar stays static until the powerups finishes.

 

Also, not sure why but sometimes the weapon icon appears, other times not.

 

[bradharding]

58 minutes ago, Endless said:

Hey mate! Noticed that when using the alt hud, on the lower right corner, right under the ammo bar, there's a timer bar for the powerups in game, like the toxic suit. I remember the bar used to shrink as time went by until the powerup was turned off, now, the bar stays static until the powerups finishes.

 

Also, not sure why but sometimes the weapon icon appears, other times not.

 

Thanks @Endless! It might be because you've got translucency disabled, and I haven't accounted for that. I'll look into it.

As for the weapon icon, it won't be appear if you have a PWAD loaded that replaces one of the weapons. Does this happen for you apart from that?

[Endless]

11 hours ago, bradharding said:

As for the weapon icon, it won't be appear if you have a PWAD loaded that replaces one of the weapons. Does this happen for you apart from that?

I was playing a simple PWAD there for Doom, no weapon or sprite replacements AFAIK. So yeah, it seems to happen due to something else.

[BachoDOOM]

Greetings Brad

I have a problem, whenever i run Doomretro i get this error:

 

W_GetNumForName: SPLSHPAL not found!

 

Any idea why is this happening?

Thanks in advance

[bradharding]

1 hour ago, BachoDOOM said:

Greetings Brad

I have a problem, whenever i run Doomretro i get this error:

 

W_GetNumForName: SPLSHPAL not found!

 

Any idea why is this happening?

Thanks in advance

I assume you would get this error if doomretro.wad isn't present, or is not in the same folder as doomretro.exe, or is somehow corrupted. Try downloading again?

[BachoDOOM]

11 minutes ago, bradharding said:

I assume you would get this error if doomretro.wad isn't present, or is not in the same folder as doomretro.exe, or is somehow corrupted. Try downloading again?

Yup, turns out my download was corrupted, replaced the doomretro.wad and its now working, thanks Brad

[hawkwind]

BUGS -

1. Boom linetype 251 - scroll floor according to line vector, does not work with fake sectors.

See BOOMEDIT.wad sectors 103, 104 for example.

2. 4x animation not working in BOOMEDIT.wad sector 111.

Edited January 25, 2023 by hawkwind

[bradharding]

4 hours ago, hawkwind said:

BUGS -

1. Boom linetype 251 - scroll floor according to line vector, does not work with fake sectors.

See BOOMEDIT.wad sectors 103, 104 for example.

2. 4x animation not working in BOOMEDIT.wad sector 111.

Thanks. I've fixed 1. I'll look at 2 later. :)

[RastaManGames]

I know that this suggestion likely gonna be rejected very fast...

But what about simple decals? I mean...
After seeing so much blood that is splattered around gory decorations and near wounded enemies I want to see some of blood and maybe bulletholes/scorches all around. 🥺

 

Last time, as I've researched, this topic was mentioned in 2014...

[bradharding]

18 hours ago, RastaManGames said:

I know that this suggestion likely gonna be rejected very fast...

But what about simple decals? I mean...
After seeing so much blood that is splattered around gory decorations and near wounded enemies I want to see some of blood and maybe bulletholes/scorches all around. 🥺

 

Last time, as I've researched, this topic was mentioned in 2014...

 

And you're right! :P Never say never, but I will say unlikely. I have looked into this a couple of times, and decals don't feel right against the retro feel I try to maintain with this port.

[DRON12261]

[I warn, I don't know English very well and there may be some semantic errors here. But I tried to double-check the text several times with the translator and hope something like this doesn't come up.]

 

If I did not mess up the settings, etc., it seems that I found a rather critical bug: either after some time in the game, or after one or more deaths (I could not figure out the exact reason, but more likely the second), the sound volume begins to randomize terribly, but more often in the direction of silence. And this mainly applies to the sounds of the player, but I also noticed it and for the sounds of the monsters. It happens so that you at all with some kind of chaingun or shotgun start shooting almost silently. Moreover, I have this problem appears regularly, and in fact is very strongly interferes with playing, only helps restart the port, but the other players I have not heard about this problem.

 

Maybe I messed up something with the CVAR, but the cvar itself, affecting the sound part, not so much. I had a similar situation before, I was turning off R_BLOOD to disable custom port blood (it was killing my FPS toooooo much) but instead it was turning off all the blood, including vanilla sprite blood (I thought it was a port bug). But then I figured out that just set R_BLOODSPLATS_MAX to 0 and that sort of solved my problem. What is really lacking here is also a lot of settings menu, so that I don't have to constantly go to wiki and console to find explanation of needed settings, but it's not that critical.

 

Also another very important and missing thing is the incorrect display of the picture during the Intermission screen with the story text box ("interbackdrop" field in UMAPINFO). I stumbled upon this problem when trying to put the appropriate picture behind the text in the background when creating my Hotel of the Dead using UMAPINFO, but it seemed to break when on other alternative boom-compatible ports like Woof! and DSDA, everything was going fine. In the end, to keep it compatible with Doom Retro, I was forced to just insert a solid Flat texture fill.

Spoiler

This is what it SHOULD look like (screenshot from sourceport Woof!):


This is what it looked like with the same UMAPINFO in DOOM RETRO:




In the end, in the release version of Hotel of the Dead I was forced to do a texture fill instead of a picture, which was obviously not the original idea:


You can replicate this situation by downloading this wad and changing the line "interbackdrop = "DEM16_KK"" in UMAPINFO to "interbackdrop = "WIMAP0"" for example in MAP01.

 

 

Another strange but not critical thing - after playing Doom Retro I always have CAPSLOCK on (although I don't even touch it when playing).

 

In general this is now my one of my favorite ports and probably the most visually pleasing and beautiful port. And I am very eager to see a fix for the above issues, because these things are actually very much in the way of quiet and comfortable game (the problem with sound) and because-that in the future, I would like to lay out their maps with a recommendation to pass them is on Doom Retro (but here prevents the problem with the backgrounds via UMAPINFO).

Edited March 4, 2023 by DRON12261

[bradharding]

8 hours ago, DRON12261 said:

If I did not mess up the settings, etc., it seems that I found a rather critical bug: either after some time in the game, or after one or more deaths (I could not figure out the exact reason, but more likely the second), the sound volume begins to randomize terribly, but more often in the direction of silence. And this mainly applies to the sounds of the player, but I also noticed it and for the sounds of the monsters. It happens so that you at all with some kind of chaingun or shotgun start shooting almost silently. Moreover, I have this problem appears regularly, and in fact is very strongly interferes with playing, only helps restart the port, but the other players I have not heard about this problem.

This has been reported before, although I haven't been able to replicate it. I think it has to with the music volume being lowered each time the menu or console is opened, although I'm not sure yet why that would affect the SFX volume. I'll continue to investigate.

 

8 hours ago, DRON12261 said:

Maybe I messed up something with the CVAR, but the cvar itself, affecting the sound part, not so much. I had a similar situation before, I was turning off R_BLOOD to disable custom port blood (it was killing my FPS toooooo much) but instead it was turning off all the blood, including vanilla sprite blood (I thought it was a port bug). But then I figured out that just set R_BLOODSPLATS_MAX to 0 and that sort of solved my problem. What is really lacking here is also a lot of settings menu, so that I don't have to constantly go to wiki and console to find explanation of needed settings, but it's not that critical.

There will be a proper settings menu eventually. (BTW, entering cvarlist and cmdlist in the console may help in the meantime.)

 

8 hours ago, DRON12261 said:

Also another very important and missing thing is the incorrect display of the picture during the Intermission screen with the story text box ("interbackdrop" field in UMAPINFO). I stumbled upon this problem when trying to put the appropriate picture behind the text in the background when creating my Hotel of the Dead using UMAPINFO, but it seemed to break when on other alternative boom-compatible ports like Woof! and DSDA, everything was going fine. In the end, to keep it compatible with Doom Retro, I was forced to just insert a solid Flat texture fill.

I'll work on this straight away.

(EDIT: Fixed!)

 

8 hours ago, DRON12261 said:

Another strange but not critical thing - after playing Doom Retro I always have CAPSLOCK on (although I don't even touch it when playing).

Have you changed the alwaysrun CVAR at any point, either through the console or editing doomretro.cfg?

 

I'm glad you're enjoying Doom Retro, and thank you for taking the time to raise these issues - the translator did it's job well! :)

Edited March 4, 2023 by bradharding

[DRON12261]

7 hours ago, bradharding said:

This has been reported before, although I haven't been able to replicate it. I think it has to with the music volume being lowered each time the menu or console is opened, although I'm not sure yet why that would affect the SFX volume. I'll continue to investigate.

By the way yes, I almost always use the console for at least the PISTOLSTART ON command and switching to other maps via MAP ____.

 

7 hours ago, bradharding said:

There will be a proper settings menu eventually. (BTW, entering cvarlist and cmdlist in the console may help in the meantime.)

Yes, I am aware of these commands, as a substitute until a full-fledged settings menu appears is a good alternative.
 

7 hours ago, bradharding said:

I'll work on this straight away.

(EDIT: Fixed!)

Cool! Now I can make full use of UMAPINFO in my next works.
 

7 hours ago, bradharding said:

Have you changed the alwaysrun CVAR at any point, either through the console or editing doomretro.cfg?

Yes, the very first thing I did after downloading Doom Retro was to put ALWAYSRUN ON in the .cfg file. In any case, it's probably not good when it's hardwired into the CAPSLOCK key.

Good luck with the fixes, I eagerly await the next update.

[DRON12261]

Oh yeah, and I remembered one more thing! Is it possible to add some additional cvar (something like PISTOLSTART_AUTOLOAD) or just make the last quick save load instead of full map restart and unnecessary pressing F9 with PISTOLSTART ON? As far as I remember the last save is loaded automatically only if PISTOLSTART is off, which is not very convenient.

[DRON12261]

Well, I spent a long session without opening the console in the game and indeed, this time there were no problems with the sound, the game went very comfortably. I played for a little over an hour, although before that it always took 10 minutes for the sound to start to stutter.
Looks like the problem really lies in the console.
 

And by the way, I suggest to improve ALTHUD a bit, adding information with timer, and counter of kills, items and secrets, which could be controlled by additional cvars, like ALTHUD_TIMER, ALTHUD_COUNTERS, etc.
 

I even did mockup of what that might look like. And drew a few different variations of the 16x16 monochrome icons (attached archive below). Very lacking is a counters in the HUD itself without having to go into the automap. For a default statusbar you could implement in a similar way as it is done in Woof!, DSDA or prBoom+.

Spoiler

icons.zip
 

And probably also flashing linedefs on the autocard in the appropriate color if there is an action on those linedefs that requires a certain color card-key. A similar thing was implemented in Woof! and helped very quickly navigate on the map, especially if it is very large and confusing.
 

Eventually, when all this is implemented, including the posts before that, I will no longer have a reason to go back to ports like Woof!(other than testing my maps) and I will finally and comfortably migrate to Doom Retro, playing numerous vanilla and Boom wads.

Edited March 6, 2023 by DRON12261

[bradharding]

Hello again! Today sees the release of v4.8 of DOOM Retro! This is another big one, and includes some significant changes, including to the fuzz effect, rocket trails and widescreen HUD. Please visit www.doomretro.com for the extensive release notes and to download, and once again thanks for everyone's support!

[DRON12261]

50 minutes ago, bradharding said:

Hello again! Today sees the release of v4.8 of DOOM Retro! This is another big one, and includes some significant changes, including to the fuzz effect, rocket trails and widescreen HUD. Please visit www.doomretro.com for the extensive release notes and to download, and once again thanks for everyone's support!

Well, I found a critical bug in 4.8.0)
 

If you turn on PISTOLSTART, the game inevitably crashes when you go to the next level.
 

It also inevitably crashes if you die and trying to load save (also with PISTOLSTART on).
 

And if you turn on PISTOLSTART in the main menu and try to load the game, it also crashes.
 

I think there was a chance with loading (I also experimented with AUTOLOAD) that it might not crash, but it is most likely to crash.

P.S.
If it makes a difference, I am attaching my config:
doomretro.zip (.zip, because DoomWorld doesn't allow you to attach a .cfg right away)

Edited March 6, 2023 by DRON12261

[bradharding]

Thanks @DRON12261. It was a simple typo that I overlooked when testing because it doesn't happen when the playername CVAR is its default. Please redownload v4.8 and it should work fine now.

 

To answer your previous post:

 

3 hours ago, DRON12261 said:

Well, I spent a long session without opening the console in the game and indeed, this time there were no problems with the sound, the game went very comfortably. I played for a little over an hour, although before that it always took 10 minutes for the sound to start to stutter.
Looks like the problem really lies in the console.

I have made a change that should hopefully fix this issue. Please let me know if you're still experiencing the issue.

 

3 hours ago, DRON12261 said:

And by the way, I suggest to improve ALTHUD a bit, adding information with timer, and counter of kills, items and secrets, which could be controlled by additional cvars, like ALTHUD_TIMER, ALTHUD_COUNTERS, etc.
 

I even did mockup of what that might look like. And drew a few different variations of the 16x16 monochrome icons (attached archive below). Very lacking is a counters in the HUD itself without having to go into the automap. For a default statusbar you could implement in a similar way as it is done in Woof!, DSDA or prBoom+.

I'm reluctant to change the alt hud any more, preferring to keep it minimal. What I may do is simply have a companion CVAR to am_playerstats that shows the stats in the same way.

 

3 hours ago, DRON12261 said:

And probably also flashing linedefs on the autocard in the appropriate color if there is an action on those linedefs that requires a certain color card-key. A similar thing was implemented in Woof! and helped very quickly navigate on the map, especially if it is very large and confusing.

I'll see what I can do. Thanks.

[DRON12261]

So, I again spent a session in the usual manner: started the port, opened the console, prescribed PISTOLSTART 1, started the NEW GAME on UV game, then through IDCLEV loaded the necessary map and proceeded directly to the game. Unfortunately, the sound problem is still there. It's funny, from the beginning I was running ADO2022 like that, and my sound didn't go silent, everything went at a normal constant volume, but sometimes the sound would not play at all (there was a chance that, for example, a shotgun shot or a chain gun firing a sequence would happen completely without sound). But now I ran PRCP2 and the sound problem repeated itself in exactly the same manner as it was before. I'll probably even try to catch that moment when the sound starts to break and record a demo video to get a better idea of what the problem is, but I'll get into that a little later.
 

And yes, on top of that I also stumbled upon a very strange bug that causes the crash. If I run PRCP2 (cvar PISTOLSTART doesn't matter this time), start a new game and put IDCLEV23 and then immediately after level load put IDCLEV25, the game inevitably crashes. Moreover, with other cards it works fine, without crashes. But specifically in this sequence of actions it leads to crashes. This also applies to prescribing MAP MAPXX in the console instead of IDCLEV.

[bradharding]

4 hours ago, DRON12261 said:

So, I again spent a session in the usual manner: started the port, opened the console, prescribed PISTOLSTART 1, started the NEW GAME on UV game, then through IDCLEV loaded the necessary map and proceeded directly to the game. Unfortunately, the sound problem is still there. It's funny, from the beginning I was running ADO2022 like that, and my sound didn't go silent, everything went at a normal constant volume, but sometimes the sound would not play at all (there was a chance that, for example, a shotgun shot or a chain gun firing a sequence would happen completely without sound). But now I ran PRCP2 and the sound problem repeated itself in exactly the same manner as it was before. I'll probably even try to catch that moment when the sound starts to break and record a demo video to get a better idea of what the problem is, but I'll get into that a little later.
 

And yes, on top of that I also stumbled upon a very strange bug that causes the crash. If I run PRCP2 (cvar PISTOLSTART doesn't matter this time), start a new game and put IDCLEV23 and then immediately after level load put IDCLEV25, the game inevitably crashes. Moreover, with other cards it works fine, without crashes. But specifically in this sequence of actions it leads to crashes. This also applies to prescribing MAP MAPXX in the console instead of IDCLEV.

Ok, so there's another solution I can try for the sound then. Thanks for testing! As for the PRCP2 issue, I can't replicate but it may be related to a little fix I made a few hours ago. I plan on releasing a small point release later today that addresses a few things.

[bradharding]

Hey all. I've just uploaded a small point release that addresses a few issues that crept in. Please visit www.doomretro.com. 😁

[indigotyrian]

Awesome to see 4.8 drop! Really excited to see my favorite port continue to get love.

 

Is there a reason custom PLAYPALs now disable a lot of the graphical effects? A fair number of these effects I really like but I also like playing with custom PLAYPALs, so having them all disabled is disappointing. Would it be possible to have a cvar that overrides this behavior?

Edited March 8, 2023 by segfault

[bradharding]

19 hours ago, segfault said:

Awesome to see 4.8 drop! Really excited to see my favorite port continue to get love.

 

Is there a reason custom PLAYPALs now disable a lot of the graphical effects? A fair number of these effects I really like but I also like playing with custom PLAYPALs, so having them all disabled is disappointing. Would it be possible to have a cvar that overrides this behavior?

I was noticing too many graphical issues with WADs with custom palettes (smoke trails in Ancient Aliens, KDiKDiZD, etc.), and per-pixel translucency effects (short light lamps in KDiKDiZD, etc.). I think this solution is better than allowing these (and future) WADs to have these problems. I'll look at a CVAR to override this though. By "custom PLAYPALs", I guess you mean you're loading a PWAD that contains a PLAYPAL lump by itself? Perhaps I can autodetect for that instead... what custom palettes are you using?

[indigotyrian]

3 minutes ago, bradharding said:

I was noticing too many graphical issues with WADs with custom palettes (smoke trails in Ancient Aliens, KDiKDiZD, etc.), and per-pixel translucency effects (short light lamps in KDiKDiZD, etc.). I think this solution is better than allowing these (and future) WADs to have these problems. I'll look at a CVAR to override this though. By "custom PLAYPALs", I guess you mean you're loading a PWAD that contains a PLAYPAL lump by itself? Perhaps I can autodetect for that instead... what custom palettes are you using?

 

By "custom PLAYPALs" I mean both WADs that use a custom PLAYPAL lump as part of its design and also WADs that just have a PLAYPAL. I know Ancient Aliens and especially KDiKDiZD do real wacky stuff with the PLAYPAL and COLORMAP but many WADs with custom PLAYPALs (Eviternity, AUGUR;ZENITH, Violence, Magnolia, etc.) are more "orthodox" in how they handle custom colors and don't do things that break Doom Retro's effects.

 

As for individual WADs that just have PLAYPALs in them I'm not aware of many, but I do really like OPal, and I'm familiar with PalPlus though I don't really use that.

[hawkwind]

The 4x animation is still not fully working in Boomedit.wad sector 111.

It appears that doomretro is not reading the ANIMATED Lump correctly for flats.

If you open up the ANIMATED Lump in SLADE you will see that both NUKAGE1 and SFALL1

are set to 2 tic speed, making them have 4x animation. SFALL1 is a texture which animates at the correct

speed wheras the flat NUKAGE1 does not.

 

Edge-Classic has 4 animated liquid types - Vanilla, SMMU, SMMU+swirl and parallax. The 4x animation only works with vanilla, and the SMMU methods look much the same as what doom-retro does.

 

Not a bug. doomretro.cfg has a setting at this default = r_liquid_swirl on. Changing to r_liquid_swirl off restores vanilla behaviour.

Edited March 9, 2023 by hawkwind

[bradharding]

4 hours ago, hawkwind said:

The 4x animation is still not fully working in Boomedit.wad sector 111.

It appears that doomretro is not reading the ANIMATED Lump correctly for flats.

If you open up the ANIMATED Lump in SLADE you will see that both NUKAGE1 and SFALL1

are set to 2 tic speed, making them have 4x animation. SFALL1 is a texture which animates at the correct

speed wheras the flat NUKAGE1 does not.

 

Edge-Classic has 4 animated liquid types - Vanilla, SMMU, SMMU+swirl and parallax. The 4x animation only works with vanilla, and the SMMU methods look much the same as what doom-retro does.

 

Not a bug. doomretro.cfg has a setting at this default = r_liquid_swirl on. Changing to r_liquid_swirl off restores vanilla behaviour.

 

Spending the past few minutes looking into this, and concluding everything works fine, I just came back here to ask if you are turning r_liquid_swirl CVAR off. I'm glad you figured this out for yourself.

 

7 hours ago, segfault said:

By "custom PLAYPALs" I mean both WADs that use a custom PLAYPAL lump as part of its design and also WADs that just have a PLAYPAL. I know Ancient Aliens and especially KDiKDiZD do real wacky stuff with the PLAYPAL and COLORMAP but many WADs with custom PLAYPALs (Eviternity, AUGUR;ZENITH, Violence, Magnolia, etc.) are more "orthodox" in how they handle custom colors and don't do things that break Doom Retro's effects.

 

As for individual WADs that just have PLAYPALs in them I'm not aware of many, but I do really like OPal, and I'm familiar with PalPlus though I don't really use that.

 

Okay. Maybe I'll just revert this change, and reimplement compatibility fixes for said offending PWADs then.