Doom 64 EX: Slows when pausing and freezes up after dying!

[Guest Unregistered account]

So, I've been getting into Doom 64 (learning how to make maps, too!), and after a few minor slips setting EX up, I've come across two persistent problems:

1) Less troubling, but still inconvenient, the program appears to freeze for roughly five seconds whenever I press the escape key to bring up the menu. If I just want to quickly flit between testing and building levels, I'd really want to do so like with classic Doom.

2) Far more problematic, whenever the downwards red fade/blur effect occurs, the game slows down to a crawl, and promptly freezes up. This occurs whenever you exit a level or after you press the spacebar to restart after dying. So... yeah. A bit of a problem.

 

Any ideas for what it could be?

Edited May 6, 2017 by Unregistered account

[wildweasel]

What operating system and video hardware does your computer have?

[Guest Unregistered account]

Acer Laptop.

Windows 10, 64-bit

Intel Core i3-2328m (2.2GHz, 3MB L3 cache

Intel HD Graphics 3000, up to 1760 MB Dynamic Video Memory

15.6"HD (1366x768) LED LCD

4GB DDR3 Memory

500GB HDD

 

Sorry if any of this was nonsensical, just copying off the side of the laptop.

[Nevander]

In my experience with EX, it's very unstable and prone to lag, bugs, jittering, stuttering, and whatever else. I think it's just poorly optimized at the moment since Kaiser gave up working on it.

[Edward850]

3 hours ago, Nevander said:

In my experience with EX, it's very unstable and prone to lag, bugs, jittering, stuttering, and whatever else. I think it's just poorly optimized at the moment since Kaiser gave up working on it.

Uhm... Maybe don't download bootleg copies of Doom64Ex then? All of this is demonstrably false.

 

@Kapanyo the Intel HD 3000 is a very old GPU with limited OpenGL support, it's even possible it is software emulating the shaders. I'd check first that you do infact have the latest drivers available for your GPU (especially on Win10), but it's entirely possible that the integrated GPU is hitting its limitations in its intended purpose. (It was never quite meant for games.)

Can't explain it stalling when opening the menu, the menu is a very basic on/off state and the most expensive thing it could do is pause all the level sounds. Heck it doesn't even play a sound so it's not loading anything. Seems like a case of the gremlins? Are you sure you downloaded the right build?

Edited May 6, 2017 by Edward850

[Nevander]

5 hours ago, Edward850 said:

Uhm... Maybe don't download bootleg copies of Doom64Ex then? All of this is demonstrably false.

It has absolutely nothing to do with the ROM I am using. I have tried tons of different ROMs and they all do it, that's because EX is the problem.

[Edward850]

I wasn't talking about the ROM. If the ROM was broken, it wouldn't have been able to unpack it in the first place.

The problem you are suggesting contradicts what can be reproduced in the engine. It's open source, though, so if you can track down this optimization problem you are apparently having, please report the offending code.

However "demonstrably false" still my main point. I could record a video of it running absolutely fine on even a lowly legacy GTX 330M if you wanted. Nor did Kaiser ever give up working on it. That's just plain silly.

Edited May 6, 2017 by Edward850

[Nevander]

That's just the thing though, I don't know what the problem really is down to the code. All I can tell is that something IS wrong with EX on my system. Don't get me wrong, it runs and is playable. It's just sometimes I may get a random crash, or after a few minutes or maybe right off the bat it will start doing that mouse stuttering problem I seem to get. But I don't know why it does those things and I wouldn't know where to begin to find out how. This is one of the major reasons I decided to do my own port to GZDoom because I was sick of dealing with this with no updates from Kaiser.

[Edward850]

Okay, that's fine. Please stop blanket posting that everybody must be having these issues, though. It's disrespectful. It also doesn't help Kapanyo in any way.

Edited May 6, 2017 by Edward850

[Guest Unregistered account]

Thanks for the help, DooDes, I'll be sure to check my drivers ~ I might mention that the download (which, as far as I'm aware, was the latest version?) was from Sourceforge... that probably means nothing, but I'd heard it had taken a rather malicious turn lately.

 

And yeah, I'm fairly sure the problems aren't to do with power, because the actual game runs super-smoooth and the only WAD I've ever played on it that slowed it down in OpenGL was Level 2 from SpaceDM9. It can run TF2 at a decent framerate (I know that's not much of an achievement these days, but if it can do that it should be able to display a screen transition).

 

Also worth noting is that it's not the menu itself that slows the game down, as the program runs at full speed after the initial delay and the menu is up. It's just as though it has trouble loading the menu...?