TruthInFiction

Getting pulled in is the normal behavior. Just try locking onto a pinky or something tougher with the chainsaw and walking backwards. The difference between Helion and other ports here is notable.

Think of the iwad as containing all of the game's copyrighted art assets plus the levels that id made for the commercial release of the game. Things like physics, stats and the ability to look up and down are coded into the executable, and those differences in the games are why source ports specifically need to implement support for the different games and why prboom wouldn't let you play Heretic. As such, you could technically load an iwad like a pwad if the source port supports it, but you're going to end up with strange behavior, because by loading a specific iwad you are telling the source port to look for certain thing ids and texture names and then loading in levels that were designed with different thing ids and texture names, not to mention that Doom and Heretic have a totally different level format than Doom 2 or Final Doom (i.e ExMx vs. Map xx formats.) A pwad conversely cannot be loaded as an iwad because it doesn't contain the information needed to tell the source port what game you're trying to play. A pwad can be something as small as a sound replacement, or as large as a full total conversion that replaces all art and sound assets in addition to replacing the levels of one of the games. When you load up mods, you first need to be aware of what game they are intended to work with, as well as what type of source port they are intended for. A mod that is vanilla compatible will work with any source port you want to load it into, but if it requires a limit removing port then Chocolate Doom or Heretic will not suffice since they have no expanded capabilities over the original games. If a mod requires GZDoom to operate, then you won't be able to load it into Crispy Doom, because while Crispy Doom expands the limitations of the original game, such as level size and the amount of monsters you can have, GZDoom supports other things such as scripting that just don't exist in those ports. Of course, any mod you download should tell you this, and will typically include a text file that will tell you what game it is intended for, as well as what all is new and what source port is required.

Also, the game we got was heavily simplified compared to the original vision due to the hardware limitations of the day. Strictly speaking, if one wants to play the game "the way ID intended", more modern settings are probably the way to go.

Will ZZDoom actually work on XP? The stated minimum is Vista. If it does work on XP that would be pretty cool, as my particular setup involves a Radeon HD 6850 which seems to have terrible support for Open GL in the drivers, because I get weirdness any time I try to use GZDoom, no matter how old the version.

So I just loaded up Helion for the first time in a while, and the new version has fixed the map name issue for Breach and other wads but the issue still persists for No End in Sight. Does NEIS maybe use a method for renaming maps that isn't supported by Helion?

You aren't missing out on any modding capabilities if you stick strictly with GZDoom. Out of all of the ports available there GZDoom is the most advanced and has the greatest compatibility for mods. Chocolate Doom is designed to be a 1:1 replica of the original game and all of its limitations, so it is the least compatible port there for mods. Crispy Doom, Doom Retro and PrBoom are pretty much Choclate Doom+, in that they have higher limitations than Chocolate Doom but they are not as advanced as GZDoom. LZDoom is just a version of GZDoom that is meant for lower spec devices, and is a bit behind at this point as it is no longer updated. Zandronum is a multiplayer focused port. I would say they're all worth giving a try, but check what sort of source port your mods require, which should be in the documentation. If it is vanilla compatible it will work with any of the source ports there. If it requires a limit removing port it'll work with any of them except Chocolate Doom, and if it requires GZDoom it'll likely work with LZDoom as well as long as the version of GZDoom required isn't too new. I'm not so sure what the capabilities of Zandronum are as I've never messed around with it.

Yes, I'm running Linux Mint 21.

Here's what I'm seeing in Breach: And here's No End in Sight: The loading screen is also showing the default map names as opposed to the custom names, although I'm having a hard time getting a screenshot of that. I find it odd because for instance Valiant and Abscission both work fine.

Are there methods of pushing custom map names to the automap that Helion doesn't support? I've noticed that it works for some maps but not others. Examples where it doesn't work would be No End in Sight, Breach (by Viggles) and Don't Turn Your Back on the City.

I kind of thought that's where Eternity fell, but I've never used it so I just left it out. As for Legacy, @wesleyjohnson states that it is 100% Boom compatible. I don't know these things in enough detail to say one way or another so I'll just have to take his word for it. I probably should also have noted the multiplayer focused ports, which to the best of my knowledge really only includes Zandronum, Zdaemon and Odamex. Strictly speaking they would fall into one of the other categories, but being multiplayer focused they would logically have their own feature sets to design around as well, such as Odamex's horde mode.

Well, the first thing you should understand when looking into source ports is that there are different classifications. The most basic is Chocolate Doom, which aims to be exactly like the original game with all of its limitations and bugs, just made to work on modern operating systems. When someone refers to "vanilla compatible" they are referring to a map that could run on Chocolate Doom or even the original Doom executable. By extension this also means any vanilla compatible map can run with any other source port. The next step up would be the limit removing ports, which I believe is what most ports are. Boom was a very early source port that increased the limitations of the orignal Doom engine, essentially meaning that you could make bigger maps with more enemies than what the original game would allow. Boom also set new standards in place that allowed for mapping features that you couldn't pull off in the original game, so any port that claims to be "Boom compatible" would support mapping features that were implemented in Boom, and the same applies for MBF and its successor MBF21. A few examples of more modern limit removing ports would be DSDA Doom, Crispy Doom, Doom Retro or Helion, with more examples even right on the front page. A step further than limit removing ports would be the advanced ports. These will tend to add all sorts of additional functionality to mapping and modding beyond just making sectors and adding monsters, such as scripting or the ability to alter monster behavior. The most well known example of this by far is of course GZDoom, but Doom Legacy and Edge also fall into this category.

Looking great! Just an FYI, screenshots are listed in the keybinding menu twice, once with the print screen button and again with f12.

Fair enough. Just because it has always been named one way doesn't mean it needs to stay that way forever. I do hope that if and when newer modernized ports come out they begin adopting the same naming convention because that will go a long way with helping people get used to it, and it probably is better that way since the main purpose of that functionality has changed. Ah, that's good to hear. I'll look forward to seeing that get rolled out, then.

I finally got around to trying out Helion's newest release and I've got to say the key binding functionality has been improved a lot, although I think some of the terminology in there could use a bit of work. Instead of automap "increase" and "decrease" I think you would be better off with automap "zoom in" and "zoom out" for clarity purposes. I'm not really sure what to think of "hud increase" and "hud decrease", because while I can see that those are the intended functions of the keys, they can be confusing when compared to how other ports handle it. GZDoom for instance labels them as "decrease screen size" and "increase screen size" respectively. Maybe this is just something users need to get used to when playing with Helion as opposed to another port, but going from a port that says "decrease screen size" to another that says "increase hud" for changing the status bar size in the same direction can definitely throw people off. One thing that has been bugging me for a while, and that I'm surprised nobody else has brought up is how Helion handles skyboxes. I wasn't sure of this at first but having loaded up the same map in GZDoom and Helion there is a clear difference. Here is what Helion looks like: Now here is GZDoom: Now here is GZDoom with software rendering and skyboxes set to stretched: You don't need to load custom maps for this, as you can see the difference just by loading up vanilla Doom maps in Helion and GZDoom. It doesn't look exactly the same as GZDoom's stretched skies so maybe that isn't what's happening, but that's not really my wheel house XD.

I've noticed another oddity. For whatever reason, Helion seems to double the amount of ammo you get from enemy drops regardless of difficulty level whenever you load a megawad. It doesn't seem to happen on individual levels, as I tried loading up Romero's E1M4b and E1M8b and this didn't happen for either one individually or when they were loaded together, and also doesn't happen if you don't load any custom maps. The megawads I tried this with were No End in Sight, Sigil, Breach, Abscission and Return to Hadron.