Friday, June 17, 2011

To G Or Not To G?

This afternoon as I was playing through some maps using my Doom Upgrade with my favorite sourceport, GZDoom, I found myself in an area that was full of not only stationary light sources such as torches but also a large number of projectile-throwing enemies. As sometimes happens on my rig in such situations, even without the OpenGL settings at their maximum, I experienced a bit of framerate stutter. Nothing crippling, mind you, but noticeable enough that a thought or two occurred to me...

Computer specs these days are so varied that almost no two rigs are the same, especially so if you've assembled your own as I have. Furthermore, some folks might only have a laptop, a device I admittedly know little about compared to a desktop rig though I have heard that gaming on them can often be a challenge due to their various specs. Upon having this thought I also realized that in regard to my little randomizer mod I've neglected to clearly mention a detail that could be quite important to some folks...

Around here I'm generally singing the praises of GZDoom because it's my favorite, and in the documentation for my randomizer mod I state that it's intended for use with GZDoom. This is because the mod contains GL definitions for most of the new monsters and their attacks, as well as for the inanimate light fixtures and power-ups it adds to the game. What I've neglected to tell you all is that the mod doesn't have to be used exclusively with GZDoom...

GZDoom is an OpenGL upgrade of another sourceport, ZDoom. The two are practically identical with the exception of course of GZDoom's OpenGL lighting and texture rendering capabilities. Being as such, my little randomizer works just as well with ZDoom as it does with its offspring; the executable simply ignores the GLDefs and loads everything else quite normally. The only differences obviously are that there are no 3D lighting effects and textures will look a lot more like vanilla Doom.



I realize of course that if the OpenGL stuff does indeed cause performance issues there's always the alternative of staying with GZDoom and simply switching off the OpenGL stuff altogether. Still I thought I should make mention of ZDoom and of my mod's compatibility with it because one of my goals with my little blog here is to provide information and playing options, so hopefully this info will be useful to some folks. And of course having another sourceport on hand can be useful in other ways, because you never know when you're going to happen upon that one map or mod that will work with one but not the other.

That's really all I've got for now. Until next time, always be sure to keep your chainsaw well-lubricated with demon blood!

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