Various questions

I thought I'd just start one thread for all my recent questions, rather than starting multiple threads. I have a few questions/bug reports about build 591:

-Is there a way to show the mapname in the automap like in previous versions? I remember this feature was going to be added back in quickly, but I still don't see it. Is this really hard to put back in? I always like looking at the map name and number each time I start it. Having to open the console to see this is irritating.

-I noticed the invisible bridges are still messed up in Final Doom - Plutonia. Was this ever put on the to-do list?

I guess that's it for now. I'll post my small questions here in the future.

Comments

  • The automap name bug introduced in 1.9.7 (or there about), that the automap name appears under the status bar instead of where is should, is a known bug that has yet to be fixed.

    Support for rendering hacks, such as the invisible bridge on Plutonia Map02, is slowly being re-added. Though that particuar case and many of the most common rendering hacks have yet to be added.

    It is my understanding that support for more rendering hacks is slowly being worked on the in the background of working on other things; in that Deng team are probably not going to annouce, "I'm going to spend the next week on supporting rendering hacks specifically" (obviously things may change). Rather they will be re-implemented slowly, one by one.
  • With regard to doom.exe renderer hacks, Vermil is correct in his appraisal of how we are tackling them.

    The problem I faced with render hack support back during the 1.9.0-beta series, was that the map geometry construction in Doomsday wasn't behaving at all comparatively to doom.exe's software renderer. Despite some initial success I realised that the lengths I was going to with that code should have been unnecessary, given my understanding of the software renderer.

    Consequently I decided to abandon that work and take a different "back to basics" approach, removing existing support and then revising the core map renderer geometry construction.

    The first part of the process in supporting these renderer hacks is now pretty much completed. A great many of the bugs and map support issues have already been wheedled out and now, the geometry construction is behaving much more predictably with the hacks also. Its now a case of reintroducing support for each hack and addressing any conflicts with things like dynamic lights or Fakeradio as we go.
  • edited 2012 Aug 20
    I've found another problem. I currently have two mods I created for doom. One is a difficulty mod that increases the health and damage of the monsters, while the other is a simple ammo mod that reduces the ammo you get in the game. With build 591, I can no longer run these two mods together. Whichever has the higher load priority works, while the other does not. I've played through both Doom1 and Doom2 with these mods running side by side in the past builds with no issues. What changed?

    You can download them here. Two pk3 mods are contained in this zip file, so don't rename it to pk3!
    http://www.mediafire.com/?bwj73gu8001arva

    To test it, you can load Map1 and find a ZombieMan. He should have like 3,000 health (increased it just to test). The ammo you pick up should be less than normal, too. 3 shotgun shells instead of 4, for example. You'll notice that only one mod works at a time.
  • Your zip file only contains one of the add-ons; the ammo changing one.

    That said, I made myself a pair of deds (ok, I extracted one of the deds from your above mentioned add-on) that did what you say your add-ons did and they both loaded fine at the same time.
  • Whoops, sorry. I updated the archive above. Try again.

    My mods certainly don't work together...
  • You are right; your add-on pk3 don't both seem to work together. The log shows both are being loaded and read.

    That said, I extracted the deds out of both pk3's and ran them and they worked fine together. So there seems to be nothing wrong with the deds themselves.
  • Vermil wrote:
    You are right; your add-on pk3 don't both seem to work together. The log shows both are being loaded and read.

    That said, I extracted the deds out of both pk3's and ran them and they worked fine together. So there seems to be nothing wrong with the deds themselves.

    So this is most definitely a bug with build 591. They worked fine together in the past, but something prevents them both from working at the same time, unless they are combined into one file.
  • I was playing through the Vengeance Megawad for Ultimate Doom today, and realized I couldn't access a secret level because a switch wasn't operating. To test, download the Vengeance Megawad in the link below, open up E1M3, and go to these coordinates:
    MAP [E1M3] X:-1056.75 Y:-1626.14 Z:0

    At these coordinates, you'll see a light decoration near you. A secret Door is supposed to open when you click the wall in front of it, but it does not work in Doomsday. I tested in Zdoom, and it worked just fine. The mod was made in '99, and is supposed to work in all ports, so I know it's a Doomsday related issue.

    Download the Vengeance megawad here:
    http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/?id=10106

    I was searching for the secret exit in this map for an hour before I realized I could not access it because of a bug!

    Edit: Is there a way to disable the up arrow from opening doors when you double click it? I see no option for it in controls, and it seems to be bound by default.
  • Vengeance requires a Boom compatible port. This is mentioned right at the top of the wad's readme:

    "Like dude you need that one BOOM engine to play this.
    Get it at [url=HTTP://WWW.TEAMTNT.COM]HTTP://WWW.TEAMTNT.COM[/url] if you don't already have it!"
  • Download the Vengeance megawad here:
    http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/?id=10106

    I was searching for the secret exit in this map for an hour before I realized I could not access it because of a bug!
    As Vermil pointed out, you couldn't find the exit because the map is for a BOOM compatible port - the line special that triggers/opens it is not yet supported.
    Edit: Is there a way to disable the up arrow from opening doors when you double click it? I see no option for it in controls, and it seems to be bound by default.
    The controls menu doesn't feature half of the options available for configuring the controls. That UI will be completely replaced shortly.

    To disable the double click behavior - delete the control binding for it, either directly from your config file, or from the console (do a listbindings to lookup the id of "sym-control-doubleclick-positive-walk" then delete it - delbind <bindid>).
  • edited 2012 Sep 7
    Oh... I was thinking that Vengeance was a Vanilla Doom Megawad. :-/ I guess I should stop playing it in Doomsday.
    DaniJ wrote:
    To disable the double click behavior from the console - delete the control binding for it
    Thanks, that's the command I was looking for. I searched through the game config file, but couldn't figure out which one it was.

    Dani, did you figure out the issue behind my two difficulty mods not working together in separate .pk3 files?
  • I can reproduce the issue but I've not yet looked into the cause. I'm currently working on other things, I'll get around to this soon.

    BTW: You don't need to put DED files into a PK3, you can simply load the DED files directly.
  • DaniJ wrote:
    I can reproduce the issue but I've not yet looked into the cause. I'm currently working on other things, I'll get around to this soon.

    BTW: You don't need to put DED files into a PK3, you can simply load the DED files directly.
    Ah, like I can simply put a .ded file into the addon folder? What about the info?
  • DaniJ wrote:
    I can reproduce the issue but I've not yet looked into the cause. I'm currently working on other things, I'll get around to this soon.

    BTW: You don't need to put DED files into a PK3, you can simply load the DED files directly.
    Ah, like I can simply put a .ded file into the addon folder? What about the info?
    The Info file would be redundant with DED-only add-ons, all it would provide are some nicer metadata strings for the frontend. So I'd discard the Info and then look for the DED file by name in the add-ons list.
  • Dani or Skyjake, how close do you guys think you are to enhancing the performance of Doomsday? I've been using Risen3D lately to play lots of custom packs out there, because it is faster and more stable on my old PC. When I playtest my own megawad in production for example, I get 15-20fps in a majority of the large areas, while Risen3D rarely ever drops in performance at all (with all the same graphics enabled). In fact, I have to disable dynamic lights in Doomsday, and the fps still drop significantly. I'm not sure why Doomsday is running so slow compared to how it used to be, but I certainly hope it gets addressed in the not-to-distant future. Ultimate Doom and Doom2 run fine mind you, but anything modern with more detail does not.
  • Dani or Skyjake, how close do you guys think you are to enhancing the performance of Doomsday?
    I can investigate specific performance issues almost at any time, providing you send me a WAD for testing and pinpoint to me the specific location where FPS is clearly dropping (a savegame or coords). This allows me to look at the bottlenecks in a profiler and see if there are any that can be solved with reasonable effort. Mind you, if the underlying cause is too complex to fix, it will have to wait until we start work on the 2.0 renderer.

    You can send maps to me via Gmail: skyjake.code [at] gmail.com.
  • I'll go ahead and zip up the first map of my Megawad so you can see the performance issues for yourself. The very first room gets pretty bad on my computer. Just give me some time to separate the first map from the rest of the WAD (the entire Megawad is 15mb). I'll send the map to your e-mail.

    Edit: I'm also noticing that map#1 takes several minutes to load with build 591. In the very first room, I get 20fps with ALL addons and dynamic lights disabled. In Risen3D, I get 60fps with all addons turned on. I'll definitely send it to you, since something isn't right.
  • I'm getting particularly bad performance in some maps after I move in them:

    A couple of admittedly Boom maps I've launched in Dday for testing purposes (both extremely detailed maps), start running at full speed, but then as soon as I move, their FPS drops by 30% as soon as I move and I never get it back until I change maps.

    One of the two is this mapset: http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/?id=16792
  • Vermil wrote:
    start running at full speed, but then as soon as I move, their FPS drops by 30% as soon as I move and I never get it back until I change maps.
    I noticed one issue related to sector reverb calculations: they're quite slow when the map is complex. In CRFE_P1:Map01 I get a significant performance boost if I disable sector reverb updates. Fortunately, they are only needed when 3D sounds are enabled. In the next build, running with "sound-3d" set to zero should be somewhat faster.
    ...Megawad...
    Skipping sector reverb updates unfortunately do not help in Lightning Hunter's map. The initial loading time should be better with "sound-3d 0", though.
  • We could probably introduce a fair bit of artificial latency into the reverb calculation/updating and nobody would really notice. Certainly it seems excessive to do a full update each tic.
  • I came up with a better solution still: a particular sector's reverb is not needed until the listener enters it, so now nothing is done until the player moves into a sector whose reverb is out of date. This is simpler and more efficient than running a continuous background thread.
  • I tried build 616 today. The mysterious lag that occurred after playing for a bit seems to be gone, but it still takes about 2-3 minutes to load my map in Doomsday (the one I sent to you, Skyjake). The low fps in high-detailed rooms still makes the pack unplayable. Pretty much every room in my pack has a high sector count, so the entire WAD lags on my computer for the most part. I'm lucky to get above 25fps in the most detailed rooms. I guess I'm going to just have to wait until the team does some major optimizations to the engine.

    It's odd that Doomsday runs at 25fps in large rooms with no addons or dynamic lights, while Risen3d runs at 60fps with models, high-res textures, dynamic lights, and everything else enabled.
  • Doomsday is doing more visually and the render is of a higher quality so I don't think its that much of a mystery to be honest. If you want to properly compare apples, then disable the features and reduce the quality settings in Doomsday appropriately to match Risen3D. For starters you should turn off all anti-aliasing, fakeradio, etc...
  • Dday 1.9 is almost an entirely new beast under the hood compared to 1.8.6 or Risen3D.

    But it isn't yet as speed efficient; huge improvements have most certainly been made compared to earlier versions of 1.9, but there is still a long way to go in some areas to match 1.8.6 or Risen3D.

    Dynamic lights are one notable case, which I am aware your wad is full of; I have a dlight test case where 1.8.6 comes out over 300-400% faster than 1.9.

    Not to say its all dlights mind and 1.9 may never be quite as fast, due to it pushing more visual prowess than either of them (and it's going to be pushing a huge huge amount more post 2.0).
  • Vermil wrote:
    Dynamic lights are one notable case, which I am aware your wad is full of; I have a dlight test case where 1.8.6 comes out over 300-400% faster than 1.9.
    It sounds to me like there is a bug or other problem somewhere if you are seeing such a dramatic effect on performance.
  • DaniJ wrote:
    Doomsday is doing more visually and the render is of a higher quality so I don't think its that much of a mystery to be honest. If you want to properly compare apples, then disable the features and reduce the quality settings in Doomsday appropriately to match Risen3D. For starters you should turn off all anti-aliasing, fakeradio, etc...
    I just now disabled Fake Radio, dynamic lights, shiny surfaces, AA, AF, Multitexturing, Halos, Particles, Decorations, Ceiling/floor glows, and everything else I could find (and no addons of course). I still got 25-30fps in my map. This tells me the engine simply needs to be better optimized.

    I got a new computer today that is running a dual core processor with Windows 7 64-bit, and a Geforce GTX 550 Ti Video Card. My map runs only a mere 10fps faster than my old computer in Doomsday (35fps instead of 25fps). This isn't a big jump considering every other game has had a massive jump in performance. Heck, with my new computer, I can be looking at 100+ models on the screen in Risen3d with no performance drops. I can run Doom3 on Ultra settings and get full fps in the starting room. Yet, Doomsday lags in a large room with no special graphics enabled whatsoever. I hope this is conclusive evidence that Doomsday simply needs more optimization. Skyjake already seems to know this, but you seem to be skeptical Dani.
  • I'm not sceptical and am fully aware that renderer performance is subpar and that optimization is necessary. However what this thread shows is that what we are actually looking at is one or more components which are grossly under performing, rather than a general lack of optimization (which was what was being alluded to).

    Also note that I've not even seen your map.

    Skyjake has done some performance profiling of the map renderer using your map and we have located what appears to be the cause of the severe performance degradation. I'm currently working on optimizing that component in fact.
  • DaniJ wrote:
    Skyjake has done some performance profiling of the map renderer using your map and we have located what appears to be the cause of the severe performance degradation. I'm currently working on optimizing that component in fact.
    I'm happy to hear it. Maybe if you lock down the performance issue with my map, plenty of other large maps will also run far better.
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