Appreciation of beta 6
Boy is beta 6 cool. The slowdown is gone and everything seems pretty stable and responsive again, but there are a couple of options that appear to have been left out: vsync and refresh rate controls.
I was told to force vsync through my video card drivers in the meantime, but it just doesn't work. As for the refresh rate, I can't seem to change it, can't figure out the console command, though it may not even exist, so I'm forced to set my desktop resolution+refresh rate to that I want JDoom to run under, which's a pain in the ass. Ya know, vsync and refresh rate controls, for the love of god almighty with cherry on top
Now the questions: does JDoom support brightmaps? is there a way to change the Blood color of the enemies? and by that I don't mean the particles, I mean the regular blood splat sprite spurting from the wounded enemies in classic Doom.
Would you also happen to have a current screenie showing off that bias lighting goodness? B-)
Cheers.
I was told to force vsync through my video card drivers in the meantime, but it just doesn't work. As for the refresh rate, I can't seem to change it, can't figure out the console command, though it may not even exist, so I'm forced to set my desktop resolution+refresh rate to that I want JDoom to run under, which's a pain in the ass. Ya know, vsync and refresh rate controls, for the love of god almighty with cherry on top
Now the questions: does JDoom support brightmaps? is there a way to change the Blood color of the enemies? and by that I don't mean the particles, I mean the regular blood splat sprite spurting from the wounded enemies in classic Doom.
Would you also happen to have a current screenie showing off that bias lighting goodness? B-)
Cheers.
Comments
Sorry Ican't help otherwise. I can't say I care too much about refresh rate controls personally, since i'm on a 1680x1050 LCD with 2ms response time Refresh Rate and it's silky smooth
Brightmaps... not sure. Isn't the blood splatters part of a sprite and particle?
Refresh rate is already configurable in game, open the console and check the value of "vid-refresh". If it weren't for the fact you said you were an ATI user I would have suspected this to be the incompatibility issue with NVidia's "threaded optimization" driver option. Not at present no, but I have something better in mind for when we get around to the renderer rewrite. Not at present but it would be relatively simple to implement once we have fewer overriding priorities.
Hmm, did you ever play JDoom before the betas? vsync was there and it worked just fine. The tearing you get in JDoom without vsync is horrible if you own a CRT monitor.
I was also wondering, any chance of OPL synthesis?
Thanks.
Of course I did
If you run XP you should just be able to select your Sound Blaster as the default MIDI device as oposed to GS Wavetable Synth (inbuilt Software emu by Roland), providing you have correct drivers installed. Maybe not. If you have Vista, you're screwed - but could try using Vista MIDI Picker (although I think it's no longer working). Once again - I apologize if i'm way off - something for you to maybe try though while you wait I suppose.
Vista? wouldn't touch that with a stick! Anyways, I actually meant something like ZDoom's "OPL synth emulation". I do have an OPL-capable sound card (not a Sound Blaster though) but that would require full OPL-passthrough.
There are many MIDI emulators out there that work independant of a specific game, although most are at a commercial cost. But not all.
Anyways, perhaps we'll look at OPL eventually but its not high priority.
Well MPU-401 support is gone, but that's irrelevant. General MIDI support is still there, you can't select it though without that MIDI Picker - but it doesnt work on Win7 [says one device, 'Unknown'] they must have moved the registry key. But of course you cannot even use SoundFonts or anything at all with GM. In XP they made Roland GS the default, in Vista it could only be changed via Registry Hack, and in Win7... I havn't looked into it yet but maybe it's completely gone, and must rely on 3rd-party code much like Cakewalk Sonar can do (I still have full MIDI support with my ol' keyboard with said software via USB).
Well, I just spent 10 minutes searching and maybe there is goodness. For starters, that MIDI Picker does apparently work in Win7, maybe it is a WoW64 issue. Regardless, with Timidity++ and some SoundFonts, you can actually install a new MIDI device, set it as default in XP/Vista/7, and every single .MID playback will still use the sample bank from said Soundfont. ScummVM has a great guide on it and i'm going to have to check it out - Chuck maybe this will help you in the meantime. http://forums.scummvm.org/viewtopic.php?t=5346
EDIT: Wow... i've heard of this Timidity before, but didn't know it actually created a system-wide MIDI device using your own SoundFonts. I've been waiting for DOSBox to get support for it... Im gonna have to try all the classics with this baby and will definately try out the various free and commercial SoundFonts I have (Jill Of The Jungle in remastered, non-Adlib-nonsense...
I don't know if this is ideal or similar to this "OPL Synthesis" you were asking about, but there are General-MIDI compatible SoundFonts out there that sure do sound amazing. At Dooms Gate with the Soundfont from that guide sounds better than the Music Addons on the files mirror IMO.
Also note that with this method on effect, while playing a MIDI the entire soundfont sample bank has to be loaded in RAM im pretty sure.
*Phew* that was a long winded slightly-off-topic talk, but hey this is cool to know that it works 100%.
Everything you asked has been answered in the Wiki, specifcially the Author's Guide. Useful information for you could be on any of those pages depending on how you wish to approach it, try the Runtime Directory Structure page, the Addon format page is a must-read too, or even the very detailed guide on How to use hires textures in your map (although that's more related to custom, 3rd party Hi-Res textures as opposed to existing DTP textures). Either way i'm sure you'll find it on one of those pages.
I copied over a floor texture and could replace it using the directory structure that I already set up like I was supposed to. I knew that floor texture could replace an Eternal one because if I switch on the hi-res texture pack, it does. I am controlling which ones to use without replacing ones that shouldn't be replaced that would make it look messed up. Thanks though for the links.
Then you could use that last link I posted about HiRes textures in a custom map to make a PK3 for Eternal. I would take a look myself, but as I said - I don't think Eternal works properly yet anyway (so it doesn't interest me too much) :P
Good luck!
Actually, Eternal seems to work good enough to play through it and only sometimes has problems with objects being "see through", but not too much. I played it in 1.8.6 long ago and it wouldn't let me go beyond map 28 because you couldn't complete Eternal with 1.8.6.
P.S. If you want your MIDI's sounding REALLY great with the help of a great quality SoundFont, try this page. The guide worked 100% exact for me on Win7 x64, and the Soundfont included there is definately the best out of the many I tried. Doom music sounds very very cool and high quality ;D
In regards to hardware, yes exactly that. As long as you don't run a Pentium 4 or similar-generation dinosaur with only 1GB of RAM (I run 2GB, but 4GB definately helps if you're serious about multitasking), Windows 7 is very much so worth it for so many reasons it's not funny. Its a massive change from XP, but there was literally no reason whatsoever for me to keep my XP partition when I removed it last week.
EDIT: Nah sorry, that's a myth. It was misinterpreted from a Microsoft advertisement, using my above example - if you run an old Pentium 4 with 2GB of RAM, Vista SP1 will actually be faster than Win7 (and XP will still be faster than both) in gaming and load times in general. But it's at that stage where if you've got the hardware, RAM and CPU particularly, then the overhead that comes with the "bigger and bulkier Windows" are unnoticable. Win7 is indeed the fastest loading Windows yet - WHEN you have lots of additional software installed (a fresh XP install booting is still faster than a fresh Win7 install booting according to my own tests; Athlon X2 5000+ and 2GB DDR-800) thanks to the massive improvements in the old Prefetch system (XP) and it's improved a lot since Vista's SuperFetch. I might get an extra 1 or 2fps in Windows XP for modern games, but the advantage of DirectX10/11 in Win7 makes up for that - and I don't game much regularly, the UI and usability improvements of the latest OS over XP's ancient GUI far outweight the measly drop in gaming perfomance - which I can still run Crysis at 1680x1050 on high anyway and it always keeps above 30fps).
And UAC is really good. People whinge about it, but to them I say this - hey, Linux has done it for years - you want to make system changes, you gotta do it as root, right? Extra security - both from accidental user choices AND from malicious software. It's only annoying because "l33t" users claim they like to have control over their PC and uninstall/install anything at the drop of a pin. UAC nags in Win7 are very minimal once you install all your software, now we just gotta wait longer for the old-school software out there to get their crap together and make it compatible with User Virtualization via UAC Elevation. That's the problem there thoough - Linux had it for ages, so everything there is pretty much aware of the root user system of things - but UAC should of been in XP, since everyone ignored Microsofts' security advice to never use an administrator account for general day-to-day usage (that's why UAC was created - a way to use an administrator account but not be exposed to potentially system-damaging software).
From a System Administrators point of view, Windows 7 is seriously the best Windows yet since Windows 95. It's so easy to manage and maintain.
OK, sorry about that Microsoft fanboy rant guys. Off topic I know, but I guess this thread isn't going much else places anyway
Do you think games that use source ports will perform better if I use WIn 7 with my hardware instead of XP? My processor can take advantage of 64 bit, but the games need to be made ofr it too. Maybe someday Doomsday will support 64 bit.
Well I run the 64-bit version of Windows, 99.9% of 32-bit applications work fine and full speed on a 64-bit OS. But the catch is that every application will use a tiny bit of extra RAM (comparing 32-bit to 64-bit addressing) so thats why the 4GB really helps.
In regards to Doomsday performance in XP Vs Windows 7, this is something I tested and I noticed no performance difference whatsoever (my graphics card settings and engine settings were identical across both Windows version). It's mainly the RAM factor, when people complain about Vista or 7 being slow. Vista and 7 technically have more superior quantum scheduling (i.e. more efficient at CPU thread management) and when XP came out, dual-cores wern't even around - i'm not sure if that's a factor, but in Windows 7 it's definately more responsive ALT+TAB'ing and generally faster at browsing webpages/harddisks/etc for me.
Aero might have something to do with that though (since all Window elements have some level of acceleration with the graphics card) but again Aero adds around 100MB or more to RAM usage.