Optimize SpaceDM9 and zARENA to the latest zandronum?

[Zeberpal]

Do you remember these old beauties by Esselfortium and Dave Billing??

SpaceDM9 is amazingly beautiful 3-maps DM wad. Unfortunatelly it's quite unplayable in current state. Portals cause a lot of lags.
ZAN SOLUTION: Remove portals structure system and replace them with 3d floors.

zARENA is 20-maps DM wad for GZDOOM. Neat maps. Which are something between doom and quake. It can't be played in software, because it doesn't allow softplayers via ACS.
ZAN SOLUTION: Remove that stupid ACS script from maps.

It's just what Zandronum needs at the moment. Some beautiful 3dfloored DM maps

Why should we make a bycicle if there is already decent wads, which just awaiting to be optimized!

[Marcaek]

Spacedm9 has some really fun maps, it's just too bad that spacetokyo is so damn laggy.

Never heard of zArena, going to give it a look.

[mr fiat]

Spacedm9 has some really fun maps, it's just too bad that spacetokyo is so damn laggy.

Never heard of zArena, going to give it a look.

laggy doom map? challenge accepted.

on topic, spacedm9 does look intead very pretty id love to play some games on that.

[Ænima]

SpaceDM9 is amazingly beautiful 3-maps DM wad. Unfortunatelly it's quite unplayable in current state. Portals cause a lot of lags.
ZAN SOLUTION: Remove portals structure system and replace them with 3d floors.

Good luck. That will take total re-mapping in some areas, since Essel used slopes on a lot of the portal sectors.

[Medicris]

I just played some zArena with a buddy on GZDoom, and holy mother of jim carrey those are great.

I support Z& compat 100%.

[Dusk]

zARENA's license forbids derivative works so you'll have to ask the author for permission first.

[esselfortium]

Replacing the portals in SpaceDM9 with 3D floors would be in many cases completely impossible (for instance, see all the overlapping and angled sloped structures in Air Snares), and would overall be more likely to make performance actually become worse than better.

In the most performance-heavy SpaceDM9 map, Shogouki (map 3), the performance requirements are primarily due to the number of drawsegs being created from the map's multitude of 2-sided lines in a large open space. This would be nearly impossible to fix without completely redesigning the map's layout to incorporate some massive 1-sided-line structures to limit the line of sight. Replacing its portals with 3D floors would entail the addition of more 2-sided lines and thus the creation of more seg splits in the map.

In addition to this, SpaceDM9 was optimized for the software renderer, not OpenGL. I believe SpaceDM9's performance is poorer in GL, and unless things have changed recently, a lot of the lighting (especially in Shogouki) and some other graphical effects completely fail to work in GL. Given the processing overhead of 3D floors in software (and the inability to use sloped 3D floors in software at all), this would mean forcing the maps to run in the GL renderer which already tends to perform worse with them.

As much as I'd like to see SpaceDM9 running faster for more people and getting played more, I don't think this is a viable solution.

[Torr Samaho]

It can't be played in software, because it doesn't allow softplayers via ACS.

IMHO mods should never forbid a player to use a certain renderer. I think about adding a compatibility option to Zandronum that will make it lie to the mod to pass the ACS check.

[Ænima]

It can't be played in software, because it doesn't allow softplayers via ACS.

IMHO mods should never forbid a player to use a certain renderer. I think about adding a compatibility option to Zandronum that will make it lie to the mod to pass the ACS check.

What kind of asshole would make a script that would kick/disallow a player from playing just based on vid_renderer? I don't care if it's a mod where GL is "recommended", if a software player wants to play it then they should be able to play it.

Plus, I'm guessing the mapper's intention was to not let software users play because most of the maps use 3D floors -- Which is kind of a moot point now seeing as software 3D floors have been in Zandronum for a long time now ...

[Dave_Billing]

It can't be played in software, because it doesn't allow softplayers via ACS.

IMHO mods should never forbid a player to use a certain renderer. I think about adding a compatibility option to Zandronum that will make it lie to the mod to pass the ACS check.

What kind of asshole would make a script that would kick/disallow a player from playing just based on vid_renderer? I don't care if it's a mod where GL is "recommended", if a software player wants to play it then they should be able to play it.

Plus, I'm guessing the mapper's intention was to not let software users play because most of the maps use 3D floors -- Which is kind of a moot point now seeing as software 3D floors have been in Zandronum for a long time now ...

That asshole is me.

The script was included because at the time (2007-2008), GZDoom also included software rendering, which at the time couldn't make use of the GL features unique to the port. It was therefore important to prevent players from trying to play in software mode as playing maps without the GL features simply wouldn't make any sense.

This script is therefore, redundant, and some of these messages will pop up anyway due to changes to the program code in more recent versions of the port.

Therefore, I'm in the process of removing this redundant code and hopefully, this will fix the issue once and for all.

[Dusk]

It can't be played in software, because it doesn't allow softplayers via ACS.

IMHO mods should never forbid a player to use a certain renderer. I think about adding a compatibility option to Zandronum that will make it lie to the mod to pass the ACS check.

I don't think that compatibility options to get around abuse cases is a good idea in general because there will always be a case the compatibility options would not cater for. The potent for abuse is pretty much limitless, and thus patching the pwad is the only true way to counter this kind of abuse.

[Bloax]

The script was included because at the time (2007-2008), GZDoom also included software rendering, which at the time couldn't make use of the GL features unique to the port. It was therefore important to prevent players from trying to play in software mode as playing maps without the GL features simply wouldn't make any sense.

I'm sure printing a clear message that would explain the situation in
BIG BOLD RED LETTERS[/size]
could have done the trick. Or was ACS far too limited to even print a message back then?

[Blzut3]

I'm sure printing a clear message that would explain the situation in

Even that is dumb idea. Just don't try to sniff the renderer/port. It's the user's problem if the map doesn't work, not yours. The proper way to do things is to check for feature supported. For example, put a pointless 3D floor over a texture that says "This mod requires a renderer with 3D floor support!" under it. This way the message is only seen if the renderer doesn't render 3D floors.

It may not be as effective, but it keeps your mod from breaking (either functionally or cosmetically) when a new renderer comes around.

[Dave_Billing]

The script was included because at the time (2007-2008), GZDoom also included software rendering, which at the time couldn't make use of the GL features unique to the port. It was therefore important to prevent players from trying to play in software mode as playing maps without the GL features simply wouldn't make any sense.

I'm sure printing a clear message that would explain the situation in
BIG BOLD RED LETTERS[/size]
could have done the trick. Or was ACS far too limited to even print a message back then?

I made it quite clear actually. I make no apologies for this.

[Torr Samaho]

I don't think that compatibility options to get around abuse cases is a good idea in general because there will always be a case the compatibility options would not cater for.

I think the freedom to choose the renderer is important enough to warrant a compat flag.

The potent for abuse is pretty much limitless, and thus patching the pwad is the only true way to counter this kind of abuse.

So you prefer to leave the players at the mod maker's mercy?

[Dusk]

No, I prefer to leave the players the option of fixing the WAD if problems like this is found. If we actively start going after all possible sorts of abuse I fear it'll descend into madness quite quickly.

[Torr Samaho]

No, I prefer to leave the players the option of fixing the WAD if problems like this is found. If we actively start going after all possible sorts of abuse I fear it'll descend into madness quite quickly.

What about cases where the mod author doesn't want the WAD to be altered? Or where the author is not reachable, but explicitly forbade derivative works in the readme?

[Marcaek]

Well, if an author is shortsighted enough to actively forbid permission for compatibility but not patch it on their own then they must not give a shit about their own work. The second point is a legitimate concern though, typically people patch stuff like that anyway under the assumption that the author would want their work played provided only the necessary modifications are made and nobody claims credit for their work.

[Torr Samaho]

Knowingly violating the license authors attached to their work, for whatever reasons, IMHO is not an option.

[StrikerMan780]

It can't be played in software, because it doesn't allow softplayers via ACS.

IMHO mods should never forbid a player to use a certain renderer. I think about adding a compatibility option to Zandronum that will make it lie to the mod to pass the ACS check.

I beg to differ, having the ability to check the renderer properly without it being faked is important to me. I don't stop the person from playing, but I do have a check that prints in giant red letters "THIS MOD WAS DESIGNED FOR OPENGL, DON'T COMPLAIN IF THIS LOOKS LIKE SHIT AND IS GENERALLY UNPLAYABLE IN SOFTWARE!". The message will recur every time they spawn until they get the hint. I'd rather have that, then having people bitching, pissing, moaning, and trashing the project just because they expected it to work with something it clearly wasn't designed for.

I have a mod that exclusively uses OpenGL features, such as models, true-color textures/sprites, sloped 3d-floors, and Quake2-style Skyboxes. Many of the actors lack actual sprites, instead using placeholders, since they are normally represented as models.

A lot of visuals in the mod rely on the fact that models have actual volume (once voxels are in, it won't be as important.), and if people were in software, people would see through things OpenGL players would not.

Not to mention, that the thing would look like utter trash in Software, to the point of nigh unplayability. (No HUD sprites, no object sprites, etc.).