Doomsday 1.9-beta6.7 released

Wow!!! That looks SO sweet, dam, its been a while since I have been in the scene, never would have thought that it would have gone this far... That looks incredible!!! Makes me happy to see a game I have loved forever go so far! Keep it up!!!! Doom 4 Ever!

Definitely looks the best of all the hardware rendered engines.

It's pretty damn buggy though.

I went through a wall twice. Once through a lower ceiling ending up beneath a lift I was up on. The second I managed to squeeze myself through the outer wall of the map I was playing ending up in the void.

Gargoyles keep getting stuck in each other and other monsters.

2s MID textures on self referencing floors doesn't show up at all. (This is the only Hardware rendered version I've seen this happen in. GZDoom and Legacy handles it fine, while Vavoom will render them only on the "outer" side... for some reason.)

Gasbag generators don't push aside the generated gasbags and just end up generating a ton of gasbags superimposed on each other. Effectively creating a mega-gasbag.

The inventory window of the statusbar in Heretic is also glitchy, ending up black. As if your inventory was empty a lot of the time.

All the weapon sprites are rendered too far down in the screen.

Will it ever be boom compatible?

Will it ever support Mapinfo?

kristus said:

It's pretty damn buggy though..

It is a "beta".

kristus said:

I went through a wall twice. Once through a lower ceiling ending up beneath a lift I was up on. The second I managed to squeeze myself through the outer wall of the map I was playing ending up in the void.

A known issue.

kristus said:

Gargoyles keep getting stuck in each other and other monsters.

This was a bug in the original Heretic that I don't think Dday ever fixed.

kristus said:

2s MID textures on self referencing floors doesn't show up at all. (This is the only Hardware rendered version I've seen this happen in. GZDoom and Legacy handles it fine, while Vavoom will render them only on the "outer" side... for some reason.)

This was an issue in an older 1.9 beta with certain non-Nvidia cards that was believed fixed a couple of betas ago. Indeed everyone over at the Deng forums stated it was fixed for them.
One could always submit a report with system specs if you suffer this issue.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/deng/

kristus said:

Gasbag generators don't push aside the generated gasbags and just end up generating a ton of gasbags superimposed on each other. Effectively creating a mega-gasbag.

Another known issue.

kristus said:
The inventory window of the status bar in Heretic is also glitchy, ending up black. As if your inventory was empty a lot of the time.[/B]

I've not personally heard of this bug. Again, feel free to report it.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/deng/

kristus said:

All the weapon sprites are rendered too far down in the screen.

This isn't a bug. Dday has an additional screen size option between the standard status bar and full screen sizes that draws the game world as full screen, but with status bar overlaying the bottom.

Krispavera said:

Will it ever be boom compatible?

It's my understand that this has been pushed back to after 1.9.0.

kristus said:

Will it ever support Mapinfo?

Dday has it's own eqivilent to all of Mapinfo's functions. That said, I agree it would be cool for it to be able to read the more widely used variant as well.

kristus said:

Will it ever support Mapinfo?

Problem is that there are three-and-a-half different MAPINFO formats.
1. Original Hexen
2. Old ZDoom
2.5 Vavoom, which is like ZDoom but with different names for some properties, and other minor differences
3. New ZDoom

If you start parsing MAPINFO lumps, then mods that were previously compatible will no longer be so unless you support (or at least, gracefully ignore unrecognized entries rather than refuse to run after encountering them) all these variants.

Examples:
Original Hexen:

map 1 "MY MAP"
warptrans 1
next 2
cluster 1
sky1 SKY2 0

map MAP01 "MY MAP"
next MAP02
cluster 1
sky1 SKY1 0

map MAP01 "MY MAP"
next MAP02
cluster 1
skybox SKY1

map MAP01 "MY MAP"
next = "MAP02"
cluster = 1
sky1 = "SKY1", 0

Vermil said:

It is a "beta".

I don't think Beta is equivalent to "-Lots of obvious and known bugs to be expected."

Vermil said:

This was a bug in the original Heretic that I don't think Dday ever fixed.

In original Heretic it CAN happen. But not all that frequently. In DDay it happens all the time. About half of all gargoyles managed to get stuck in another gargoyle, barrel or other monster.

Vermil said:

This was an issue in an older 1.9 beta with certain non-Nvidia cards that was believed fixed a couple of betas ago. Indeed everyone over at the Deng forums stated it was fixed for them.
One could always submit a report with system specs if you suffer this issue.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/deng/

Well. I got a Nvidia 8800GT 512mb

Vermil said:

I've not personally heard of this bug. Again, feel free to report it.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/deng/

I might if I actually used DDay for gaming. I don't. I just tested it out with my wad and figured that I should at least mention all these bugs at the thread.

Vermil said:

This isn't a bug. Dday has an additional screen size option between the standard status bar and full screen sizes that draws the game world as full screen, but with status bar overlaying the bottom.

I noticed that. It's not that mode I was using. I was using the standard screen size with statusbar.

Vermil said:

Dday has it's own eqivilent to all of Mapinfo's functions. That said, I agree it would be cool for it to be able to read the more widely used variant as well.

I think that considering it got support for Hexen. It should have that Mapinfo format support for all the games it support, since many wads use Mapinfo instead of Dehacked for level names etc.
Also, it'd be nice to not have to use 3 different systems for level names when there is a standard set by Hexen for that very task.

kristus said:

Also, it'd be nice to not have to use 3 different systems for level names when there is a standard set by Hexen for that very task.

The Hexen format is not adapted to ExMy-style names, so it wouldn't work for Ultimate Doom, Heretic, and Chex Quest.

So use Old Zdoom then. I've used that standard for my Mapinfo and it works fine with New Zdoom,Skulltag,GZdoom and Vavoom.

Gameplay niggles:
As mentioned, there are indeed a few gameplay bugs currently in the 1.9.0-beta releases but these really aren't what we are focusing on presently. The purpose of the 1.9.0 beta series is a complete overhaul of the engine architecture and minor gameplay hitches like occasionally passing through walls aren't particularly important right now.

The official stable release is still 1.8.6 and that is the version that people should be using for every day play.

From 1.9.0-beta 7 onwards the focus will begin to shift back to improving the play experience and fixing the little gameplay niggles.

BOOM support:
BOOM support is coming. I can't say more than that because I know it must sound somewhat grating by now.

The reason its taking so long is because we do not want to implement the majority of the BOOM features the way that is traditionally done in compatible ports. Instead, we are opting to integrate them completely into the engine architecture so that they are logical facets of it rather than game-specific extensions. It would have been far easier to copy and paste it all from the BOOM source (gross simplification) with the end result being something like Risen3D but we don't want to do it like that.

Today for example, I have been revising the way in which Doomsday handles the management of skies. The primary reason for this is the architectural changes we have been planning for a long time now but in the process I am implementing features that are required for BOOM support.

MAPINFO support:
Ultimately, I would like to support some of the features offered in other ports but as mentioned earlier in the thread, there are quite a lot of variants to consider. In other words, its a nice to have but not important at this stage in development.

kristus said:

2s MID textures on self referencing floors doesn't show up at all. (This is the only Hardware rendered version I've seen this happen in. GZDoom and Legacy handles it fine, while Vavoom will render them only on the "outer" side... for some reason.)

They have been removed deliberately because we are completely redesigning how they are handled (along with support for 99% of DOOM.exe tricks). They will return in a future beta.

I think that considering it got support for Hexen. It should have that Mapinfo format support for all the games it support, since many wads use Mapinfo instead of Dehacked for level names etc.
Also, it'd be nice to not have to use 3 different systems for level names when there is a standard set by Hexen for that very task.

Doomsday already supports a far simpler method. Simply edit one text string definition and the name of you map is changed everywhere.

That's still another level names system I have to put in to support it though. I already got two in there.

I agree with you and I have already committed to implementing at least vanilla Hexen-level support of MAPINFO in all supported games (in another thread here at doomworld). I just haven't gotten around to it yet.

Ok, thanks. :)

Waiting for a Linux build...

MP2E said:

Waiting for a Linux build...

http://sourceforge.net/projects/deng/files/

It was released this morning. However KuriKai has yet to update the download link on the HQ website.

Vermil said:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/deng/files/

It was released this morning. However KuriKai has yet to update the download link on the HQ website.

That is not technically a linux build, but is the source code which you can build deng from.
anyway, I updated the link to the tarball

DaniJ said:

I agree with you and I have already committed to implementing at least vanilla Hexen-level support of MAPINFO in all supported games (in another thread here at doomworld). I just haven't gotten around to it yet.

I will shortly be committing (to the deng master code repository) support for MAPINFO lumps in all supported games. It is unclear yet which release will see its debut but most likely it will be in 1.9.0-beta7

The level of support for MAPINFO lumps is currently set at vanilla Hexen compatible. However, cluster, hub and map progression is currently ignored in jDoom and jHeretic (will be implemented at a later date as there are a few kinks to be worked out first; i.e., there is currently no hub concept in these games).

In addition, all games now support vanilla Hexen format ANIMDEFS.

DaniJ said:

The level of support for MAPINFO lumps is currently set at vanilla Hexen compatible.

I think it should at least have the possibility to reference map by their lump name instead of their number so as to be useful for Ultimate Doom or Heretic.

But then it should also handle the differences this would mean in ZDoom. Fortunately there's only one that needs immediate attention: The sky scrolling speed.

Precisely. There is no need to reference maps by lump name presently because I have chosen to side step the whole concept of how map progression is defined in jDoom and jHeretic currently. I will no doubt have to return to the issue very soon but for now, I just need to get the handling of these lumps (MAPINFO/ANIMDEFS/SNDINFO/SNDSEQ) out of the games and into their own plugin(s).

The more time I spend with Hexen, the more I feel like the majority of the extensions Raven made to the DOOM engine could have been implemented a whole lot better than they have...

Why does the sky scrolling speed need special treatment?

DaniJ said:

Why does the sky scrolling speed need special treatment?

ZDoom used a different scale initially (possibly because Randy made an error) and once Hexen support was added he needed to make a special case for original Hexen MAPINFOs.

To be precise, Hexen uses integer values for specifying the scroll speed but ZDoom MAPINFOs use floating point which are 1/256th of Hexen's values.

The deciding factor which format is being used is the map name. If it's just a number it's Hexen, otherwise ZDoom.

I see. Given that the Zdoom interpretation of the scroll speed is dependent upon the map name being a non-number, I can ignore this too for now (I want to avoid updating the old parser for these if at all possible*). Thanks for the heads up.

* We plan to utilize the new parser and lexer skyjake implemented for our global scripting system on these lumps too in the near future.