Dark Pulse

You say this like you're some kind of authoritative figure who got all of these mappers to go "Oh yes, I intended Dark!" You're not. Stop trying to pass yourself off like your opinion is the only one that matters and other people aren't allowed to disagree. Look, it's fine that you're arguing Dark should be an option, and obviously you're right that there's a lot of people who don't care about playing Doom how it looked back then (though I'd also say those people wouldn't be getting GZDoom in the first place, but I digress). But facts are facts: Light attenuation (which is what you call "the glow") was intended to be part of the engine, as it is part of what made the game more realistic compared to Wolf (which had no light attenuation at all... or lighting, for that matter). All those maps from back in the day were, to a point, built with this in mind, because there was no "turn it off" option for things like that. More modern stuff that came about after the various source ports tweaked the lighting are a different story, of course. "Dark" was essentially just eyeballing Vanilla Doom's lighting falloff, but it was also made at a time when it wasn't possible to selectively brighten certain areas - which is what the vanilla renderer actually did, and couldn't really be done on GPUs until shaders became a thing in the early 2000s. It's also, simply put, not accurate, and while you may prefer that look, functionally speaking, thousands upon thousands of levels were never made with it in mind. "Software/Vanilla" replicates this, and thus, is most accurate in that sense - PERIOD. Not liking it does not mean that it is not an objectively better choice for the majority of Doom maps that do not specify their own lighting mode (including literally every map ever made before source ports that tweaked lighting came out). Yes, it's a breaking change. Yes, there's some users (such as yourself!) who are clearly not happy with it since the mode you preferred got forced into a MAPINFO option. And yes, there's a fair point to an argument that "People who want to play it how it was back in the day wouldn't care." But this still boils down to a basic fact: the way you prefer makes maps darker than was intended much of the time, and making players think that's a "proper" way to play the maps is misleading, because odds are they were intended to be played with a setting that had the lighting halo around the player - and as you point out repeatedly, Dark is the only one that does not have this. It's much better to make the defaults close to what the vanilla game would have done, give the mappers the flexibility to specify a darker one if they want that via some minimally-invasive MAPINFO settings that any mapper worth their salt can figure out how to make, and roll with that. The fact this sucks for you is understandable, but going back to how things were will mean a lot more people will for some reason think that a lighting mode that doesn't have something that was a key part of Doom's lighting system is intentional and by-design - and simply put, that's a mistake. You're also ignoring a key benefit of the change - that now Mappers can FORCE a specific lighting mode, and in turn, set up how they want lighting to work on their levels, whereas the old way turned it into a global thing that they had absolutely no control over if the user decided to change it. That's actually fairly important, but the payoff from that will be years down the line. I do feel like the main lighting modes could use better naming conventions though. Personally I'd say "Software (Classic ZDoom)", "Vanilla (Original Doom)", and "Performance (Low-End Hardware)" or something like that. It's a bit more verbose, but at least it clarifies the difference between what Software and Vanilla are supposed to mean, and removes the ambiguity of "Classic (Faster)" which seems just confusing as heck.

And now I'm thinking of Chia Pets. Thanks.

Competitive play is not the end-all be-all decider of options like that.

Other way around. Some light modes are brighter than others, and if you are using it but the other guy is not, that's an advantage, so for netplay, the ability to change that needs to be locked.

It was 100% hardcoded. And yes, you can have more than one, but only one per episode. Just make sure the lump is named appropriately (IN_E1, IN_E2, etc.)

Patching console games costs time, money, and has to go through all sorts of QA processes. Patches are, simply put, costlier to put out on consoles than PC. So unless it's really worth it, it's generally not done.

It's fully possible. It's called an Intermission Script. It's slightly arcane, though: https://zdoom.org/wiki/Intermission_script That said, the end-cluster text and the intermission map can't be used at the same time I think. You can either have the intermission map at the end of the level, or the end-text at the end of a level, but you can't have the text lead into the intermission map or vice-versa directly off the intermission script. (Though you could get a similar effect via cluster definitions.)

"At some point, when the bugs slow down, the more devious programmers intentionally leave a few in there, just to see how long it takes for a user to find them." -- Some very posh British-sounding guy

1) Answered right'chere! 2) There are a few small maps that run on actual PSX Doom, but it requires using GEC's tools to burn a level to an ISO and running the ISO. I know PsyDoom does support custom levels though, and that is generally a much friendlier (and more performant) way to play PSX Doom, including this project. I don't know of any custom levels specifically in mind, but I sure if you look, you may find a few! 3) That's just a simple sound and texture replacement, pretty much. I don't know of any offhand, but those sorts of things have been around for years. It won't fully reflect the PSX atmosphere in some ways, though - colored lighting requires you to edit the map, for example, and the mapper may not have paid attention to (or indeed, even known about) memory limits that would need to be addressed on the real PSX.

Because what you think is great and moody, someone else will think is dark and shit. If a mod or mapper wants a desired light profile for their stuff, they can set that in MAPINFO and then the user's lightmode is ignored. Otherwise when left up to the user, depending on their whims, it might be brighter or darker than intended.

If you're just creating new maps and textures and stuff, you don't need to do a single bit of code, but for fancier map effects, new items, and so on, you will want to learn ZScript, but it's pretty simple for just creating new things. There's plenty of examples to learn from - literally take any mod, fire it up in SLADE, and examine the added stuff.

Collision was handled differently in PSX Doom, and stuff like this could happen. In terms of authenticity, it should be kept in so that it properly (accurately) simulates the inaccuracy of the original game. That said, I think there might be some sort of compatibility option that might fix this bug by giving more PC-like collision detection? If not, Taco might be able to implement that.

Mostly done, but on hiatus for the remaining few things as GEC has turned their attention to other projects. That said, the latest beta still has in excess of 100 maps.

If it's complete in-box, that's possibly a reason for why it's so high, but that does seem a good bit higher than what I'd expect.

Who knows? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It'll be easier than ever to do stuff now that the biggest hurdle (the art) is resolved though.