Flaws in official DOOM ports.

[UndeadRyker]

Doom Classic for iOS:

1. Physics and collisions are broken. The player can be halted to a dead stop when sliding on windows, and even phase through (or partly be inside) windows. That can result in a full reset of E1M2 since it's possible to fall out the diagonal windows of the exit room. To make it worst, you must do a full reset or cheat because...
2. There is only one save slot. It also auto-saves every time you open a menu, start a new game, and quit the game to go to the home screen. There's no feature to turn that off, and you can't manually load a game either.
3. The inventory message fonts go unused and gets replaced with an ugly, white plain font.
4. There is a useless weapon slot for the double barrel that gets shown on the screen that does nothing but take up space.
5. Bilinear/OpenGL filtering is forced on. This is my opinion but I hate how it looks and I can't turn it off.
6. The shotgun sounds are cut off for some strange reason.
7. The absence of the Nightmare difficulty (for some people).
8. There was multiplayer. The last update removed it for some unknown reason so the game is single-player only. Speaking of updates...
9. The last update was for iOS 7. You can't even play the game anymore if you have a newer phone or have updated your iOS!

Default controls were a little unconventional as well but thankfully it can be customized. Still, it was the worst official port I've ever played.

[Cacodemon345]

@UndeadRyker,It is your first post.

[PanterD2S]

Thought those "ports" auto-cheat with SR50 ON .... ^

"ports"...pfff 

[Cacodemon345]

No SR50 on ports.

[imradlol]

10 hours ago, Cacodemon345 said:

No SR50 on ports.

What is SR50?

[<inactive>Player Lin]

27 minutes ago, imradlol said:

What is SR50?

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Straferunning

[Cacodemon345]

@Player Lin, what's your opinion?

[PizzaGuy]

I did post this somewhere before Christmas but it's relevant here too.

Yes it's an hour long but well worth the time.

[riderr3]

23 hours ago, Cacodemon345 said:

@UndeadRyker,It is your first post.

I will say for myself - I'm registered here in 2011 and my first post in 2013. I was here before registering, and shitposted comments at idgames files section.

[Koko Ricky]

The PSX ports are endlessly intersting. The software rendering is stable, but the texels get bunched up at close range; this is especially noticeable when you die and hit the ground. Texels also "wiggle" when sectors raise or lower. Sometimes sectors clip sprites incorrectly, although this is rare. Even more rarely, the imp's alert noise is too loud and is slightly cut off. Not sure what causes this. 

 

Control-wise, it could have used dual shock support, but those controllers didn't exist at the time, of course. Some have complained about the default layout, but it's always felt good to me. 

 

More stuff: The game WILL crash on Suburbs if there are too many simultaneously active monsters. Virgil's track only plays once. Barons and mancubi only appear in a single map in Final Doom, which makes no sense. I don't know if this has to do with the decreased difficulty (UV feels more like HMP), the large size of manc sprites, or what. There's also no spider masterminds in Final Doom. I strongly suspect sprite size issue is the reason, as with the archvile. 

 

Lastly, screw having to use a link cable. Had affine texture mapping been implemented, splitscreen probably wouldn't have been too taxing to be feasible. I wonder how many people actually bothered to do the two games/two PS1s/two TVs in close proximity/link cable setup. Can you imagine how ridiculous that must have been to get working?

 

Edited January 5, 2018 by GoatLord

[Labryx]

1 hour ago, GoatLord said:

Lastly, screw having to use a link cable. Had affine texture mapping been implemented, splitscreen probably wouldn't have been too taxing to be feasible. I wonder how many people actually bothered to do the two games/two PS1s/two TVs in close proximity/link cable setup. Can you imagine how ridiculous that must have been to get working?

IKR, I would of loved to play PSX Doom co-op with my brother or some friends. But the fact you need 2 consoles, 2 T.Vs, and 2 copies of the game all in one room; I would rather just play the PSX TC for GZDoom cooperatively or maybe use a PSX emulator. Less headaches.

[PanterD2S]

Quote

What is SR50?

What is a Port?  ^

 

- thought PR-Boom is a port ....and I remember this long discussion.    including this SR50 switched on by default.

Lately i saw people on youtube playing Doom on PSX(?) and getting rewards(??) for goals they accomplish.  (wtf^)

IoS sounds like smartphone version - even saw a GameBoyDoom somewhere...

 

Thats all different new games. 

 

 

[Mattfrie1]

On 1/5/2018 at 3:01 PM, GoatLord said:

The PSX ports are endlessly intersting. The software rendering is stable, but the texels get bunched up at close range; this is especially noticeable when you die and hit the ground. Texels also "wiggle" when sectors raise or lower. Sometimes sectors clip sprites incorrectly, although this is rare. Even more rarely, the imp's alert noise is too loud and is slightly cut off. Not sure what causes this. 

...

Virgil's track only plays once.

 

 

Many of those same issues with software rendering are also in the PSX port of Hexen as well. The PSX port of Hexen also utilizes the LEAFS map lump in all of it's levels as well, so that might have something to do with it.

 

The imp alert sound is due to how the sound is "recorded" in the .LCD file for certain levels. Each level has a .LCD file associated with it which includes all the sound effects that the level will use as a way to better utilize system RAM. One can listen to all the sounds in these .LCD files by using a program like PSound, and you can hear how the sound is "cut off" in the source file as well, it probably has something to due with how it was compiled into the file. On a similar note to this, all the Lost Souls that the lone Pain Elemental in E1M1 on UV spawns are silent when attacking you. This is due to their attack sound being mistakenly not included in the level's .LCD file. Lastly, the music track for Minos also only plays once. A similar error also occurs on several levels in Doom 64 as well.

[betabox]

The imp's pain sound, shared by other enemies, also tends to sound cut off sometimes. IIRC the PSX Final Doom attract demo on Barons Lair has the same issue when the Revenants are being attacked. I thought it was a problem with my disc, or something similar.

Edited January 9, 2018 by betabox

[Optimus]

On 04/01/2018 at 3:41 PM, MetroidJunkie said:

The beginning of the level seems to have no trouble vertically repeating its rock texture, though, so that's weird.

 

 

I think what he says is that the limitation is that the texture doesn't repeat (I could check some PS1 GPU code example in the future to test this out) over a single triangle. The PS1 also uses triangles to simulate vertical columns as seen when enable wireframe on a PS1 emulator (and I think there was a video somewhere showing this). But in the case of high walls, they would have to split the tall column in more columns every texture repeat, so a 256 wall should be two 128 columns on top of each other, and maybe two triangles per column. So maybe too many high walls meaned more triangles and they only reduced heights in levels early on just to improve performance. So, possibly they could have made the Doom 2 levels the way they originally meaned to be but with decrease in performance.

[Cacodemon345]

On 1/6/2018 at 2:01 AM, GoatLord said:

Had affine texture mapping been implemented, splitscreen probably wouldn't have been too taxing to be feasible.

Carmack went with the CPU rendering in Vanilla Doom, PSX Doom, Saturn Doom.

Using CPU rendering in Saturn Doom was a poor decision.

Using GPU rendering in PSX Doom would increase performance in multiplayer.