Please create a doomsday.exe to use with Steam Doom games

Spielor

Right now I have to add the Doomsday launcher as a non-Steam game and launch it from there.

Can you please create some kind of vanilla Doomsday.exe so that we don't have to use the Launcher?
I want to launch the Doom games in Steam without having to create a non-Steam shortcut and to have my playtime tracked.

Vermil

Doomsday and Snowberry are two separate programs; all Snowberry does is pass Doomsday.exe (which can be found in the bin folder in your Dday install folder) a command line.

Doomsday.exe by default launches into Ring Zero; Snowberry passes it a -game command line option, which tells Doomsday.exe to bypass Ring Zero and launch straight into a game. If you wish to launch straight into a game without Snowberry, you'll have to create a shortcut or bat file aimed at Doomsday.exe, that includes -game and any other command lines options.

One, small, aim of Doomsday 2.0 is to replace Snowberry with an in engine GUI. The Taskbar and Ring Zero UI's will eventually gain all of Snowberry's GUI features.

Spielor

can you give an example for a command line? like start doomsday with doom2.wad and the hd textures?

DaniJ

Look in your Doomsday runtime directory for a file called Options.rsp - this is a plain text response file containing the last configuration you Played when launched from Snowberry. You can use that as a basis for your batch file.

Example.bat:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Doomsday\bin\doomsday" -game doom1-ultimate -iwad "C:\DOOM\IWADS\DOOM.WAD" -userdir "C:\Users\Spielor\Documents\Doomsday Frontend\runtime" -basedir "C:\Program Files (x86)\Doomsday" -file "C:\DOOM\deng-dhtp-20130813.pk3"

Edit: As you are playing games you've downloaded from Steam; if you are using the default download path then you can omit the -iwad part entirely - Doomsday will find it automatically.

Spielor

Steam seems to run dosbox to start Doom. How can you integrate Doomsday with that?

DaniJ

You don't need DOSBox to run Doom using Doomsday. To prove this to yourself, simply navigate to your Doomsday install folder and try running the engine directly (on Windows, this is typically c:\Program Files (x86)\Doomsday\bin\doomsday.exe). If you're using the default download path in Steam then Doomsday will find your IWADs (main game data file) automatically. As Vermil describes above, either booting into the native Home Screen (a.k.a. i]Ring Zero[/i]) if you've multiple IWADs (DOOM, Heretic, etc...) to allow you to choose the one you want, or simply launching the one game you do own.

You'll probably still need to do this with a non-Steam shortcut, however (pointed at Doomsday itself, rather than Snowberry). As Doomsday is not distributed via Steam currently.

Spielor

Got it to work! Here is how:

I use Ultimate Doom as example

1. delete everything that is in Steamapps\Ultimate Doom\base
2. copy everything that is in the Doomsday\bin folder to Ultimate Doom/base
3. rename the doomsday.exe to dosbox.exe
4. copy the Doomsday\Data folder to Steamapps\Ultimate Doom
5. edit the launch options for Ultimate Doom. I used these: -game doom1-ultimate -iwad c:\Doomsday\wads\DOOM.wad -file c:\doomsday\snowberry\addons\deng-dhtp-20140616.pk3

What would be the launch option to use multiple addons?


edit: Ok I'm getting weird stuttering every few seconds when using the launch command. When I remove the launch command and select the game from within the doomsday engine it seems to run smooth. Can you load the addons (textures and hd sounds) while already being in the game?

Vermil

I'm not going to comment on your getting it to work. But I will answer the other questions.

The -file command line option can take multiple files (i.e '-file c:\ABC\addon1.pk3 c:\XYZ\addon2.pk3')

To load add-ons in game, bring up the taskbar while playing a game and type 'load c:\doomsday\snowberry\addons\deng-dhtp-20140616.pk3' (naturally, if you move the file, change the folder paths). In future, the taskbar/ring zero will feature a GUI for doing this, like Snowberry does.

That said, could the stuttering be being caused by your computer not being able to handle the increased memory used by the HD textures?

Spielor

no the game runs super smooth with everything turned on. It would probably run with like 1000fps if there were no limit.

The stuttering is only when using steam to start the game

Spielor

Ok I just tried something else:

It only stutters when I start it using the doomsday.exe. No matter if I start through steam or not.

When I use the doomsday launcher to start the games they run smooth. How is that possible?

Spielor

OK now it really works

I added -sfxchan 16 -notexcomp to the command line and now it works smooth as always.

I can finally play the doom games with doomsday engine in steam )

Vermil

Dday enables texture compression by default, which does what it says on the tin. However, some video cards or their drivers at least, can't un-compress the textures properly or possibly in your case, quickly enough and thus one can end up with visual artefacts on some graphics (Dday's texture compression produces visual artefacts on some graphics on my computer, for instance). -notexcomp disables this compressing.

Snowberry actually forces –notexcomp onto the command line it sends Dday (i.e it's added by default and I don't think the user can remove it, at least in Snowberry itself). Which is a bit bizarre really; why does Snowberry by default override Dday's default.

-Sfxchan refers to the number of sound channels Dday uses; it supports up to 256, but defaults to 16.

Spielor

What will happen if I set the sfx channels higher? What setting do you use?

skyjake

Vermil wrote:

Snowberry actually forces –notexcomp onto the command line it sends Dday (i.e it's added by default and I don't think the user can remove it, at least in Snowberry itself). Which is a bit bizarre really; why does Snowberry by default override Dday's default.

The correct default is to disable compression, however I believe back in the day when I added the -notexcomp option to Snowberry it was done as a quick fix that we haven't yet had time to address properly.

I'm taking care of this now: http://tracker.skyjake.fi/issues/1932

Vermil

Spielor wrote:

What will happen if I set the sfx channels higher? What setting do you use?

I'll quote myself from this report Skyjake made about a year ago after I raised a related suggestion with him:
http://tracker.skyjake.fi/issues/1594

"It is my understanding that if a user tries to launch Dday with a number of sound channels greater than what their system has, that Dday would adjust accordingly."