Time to trim the fat.

Though my week off from work is almost at its end now, I haven't had much time to enjoy actually playing any games.

The week began with me ready to once again immerse myself in Oblivion, only to discover that one of the mods I was playing with (which still remains unidentified, by the way) was making the game instantly crash to desktop whenever I attempted to remove a specific vanilla item from defeated enemies. I could systematically open each active plugin with one of the editing tools and look for anything modifying that item, but instead I first chose to try the process of elimination method and in the process somehow borked the game so that now I can't even start a new campaign.

So I decided to turn my attention to one of my old favorites, classic Doom -- more specifically, Doom run with the source port GZDoom. With the latest version of my favorite source port I had only been running the game for about 45 minutes when suddenly the framerate deteriorated so drastically that I could progress no further. So what's the first thing I do in this situation? I go make a fool of myself in their bug report forum, of course. After a bit of posting and simultaneous testing, I came to the conclusion that there wasn't anything wrong with the source port but instead that the problem was somehow being caused by the mapset I was trying to play. So I switched to another megawad and, by the third map of the set, the framerate again went to crap -- worse, whatever is causing the problem is apparently preserved in the saves so restarting the executable in hopes that the issue will clear out of the RAM and GPU is ineffective.

I've read that the openGL support of AMD/ATI/Radeon video cards is becoming increasingly atrocious with each new series of GPUs they release, so I began to investigate further along that avenue. I tried several different versions of the drivers for my current video card, to no avail, then I went so far as to actually pull the hardware out of the tower and stick my older Radeon GPU back in. Still the problem persisted. In the end I decided that if I was going to get to play the game at all this week I'd have to switch to ZDoom, which is of course the source port that the openGL version is based upon.

But that wasn't the end; when things on the computer go good for me they go great, but when they go bad they go straight to hell in the proverbial handbasket.

I was playing Armadosia with ZDoom and by the time I was halfway through the second map the framerate again went straight to crap. WTF? It's not even openGL! I've been playing games like Oblivion at 1600x900 resolution with the details maxed! This should run like a racehorse! WTF?

I was only running the game with one other mod. The mod had never given me any trouble before so I had by default ruled it out as a possible cause of the issue... but just for the sake of being thorough I decided to disable the mod and launch the game one more time. Without that remaining mod the game ran without the slightest stutter, even in the openGL version; with the mod enabled again the stuttering returned and soon the game was unplayable. Anyone care to guess which mod was causing the problem?

Herculine's Doom Upgrade.

Now my critics can rejoice; my randomizer mod actually does make the game unplayable.

This of course has me very frustrated. I've been developing the mod and playing with it for over two years now and have never had such issues until now, though during that time the mod has steadily grown in its size and scope. Apparently it has finally reached a size where the source port engine can no longer handle the amount of information that needs to be processed, even if I enable the executable to take advantage of all my system's RAM. Again my critics can rejoice; all along they've said that the mod has too much stuff in it and now it seems that they're finally correct.

Readers familiar with ZDoom modding might ask: "Herc, what if it's just one item that you've recently added that's causing the problem?" While there's always a slim chance of that I suppose, I doubt that it's likely because the coding for all these things is basically the same. When something goes wrong in said code usually the worst that can happen is a sprite won't show up when it's supposed to or a monster won't do something when or how exactly it was intended. I really don't see how one could code a single monster or item to produce such a drastic impact on the graphics processing unless it simply had a ton of visual effects crammed into it, and even then the problem would have been abated by adjusting or even totally disabling the openGL options as I did while I was trying to locate the problem. Also, I think it would be safe to assume that the bug would only manifest itself when said object was actually spawned in a map, while this bug is persistent as long as the mod is active in any case. The only conclusion I can reach at this point is that the issue is the result of the sum of all the parts; too much data is being loaded at one time to be processed.

Thus the title of this post. The only option I see left to me at the moment is to create a version of the mod in which the content is at least halved. The easiest way I can think of to do so is to start a new mod from scratch and systematically add to it only the content that I refuse to omit and then work from there. That's not as bad as it sounds, though; in a way my critics are right in that the mod does contain some things that aren't really necessary. For example, of the array of weapons that are in the current version I only actually ever use about half of them, so logic dictates that I should only keep about half of them. Perhaps there really isn't any need for four different kinds of shotguns, after all. The list of monsters and power-ups that won't make the cut will likely be long in the end; things like the Time Imp and the Time Freeze Sphere, for example, are really cool but they depart from the original gameplay style drastically enough that they can be cut without really detracting anything from the ultimate purpose of the mod. Time to trim the fat.

However, fans of the mod up until this point need not despair; I'm not throwing it away. It will remain here in my DropBox folder, patiently awaiting the day that a version of the source port will be developed capable of handling it smoothly. But in the meantime, I'll be diligently working on a "lite" version of the mod and when it's ready for release you'll hear it here first. Until then I'll either have to play "vanilla" Doom or just go back to another game; hopefully the game I pick next won't be a crash-happy mess as well.

GZDoom v1.7.01

Just a quick post to pass along a bit of info to any of my fellow Doomers out there who might not have heard it already; another new version of the classic Doom sourceport GZDoom has been released. This time around it's version 1.7.01. And as always, don't forget to occasionally check for new svn builds as well. Enjoy.

GZDoom Marches On

To quote the DoomWorld News post:

Graf Zahl has decided to release a new official build of GZDoom. In addition to all the ZDoom updates since 2.6.1 and later, the main interest is a new shader-based lighting mode created by Korshun that replicates the original software renderer and COLORMAP's look, except smoother and with more color depth. If you do not have a computer that supports shaders, there still are plenty of interesting things from the ZDoom side, such as better OPL emulation, support for the BFG Edition IWADs, or the alt-hud now providing a berserk indicator.

1.7.00 is the latest version. Thank you Graf Zahl and Korshun.

Development and Testing

Until now I've kept revisions of my infamous Doom Upgrade mod to myself until I've felt they were worthy of an official release but today the fancy struck me to try something different this time. I'm still working on what tentatively will be called the second edition of the mod and, while I don't feel that I've accomplished everything that I want to do before calling it a final release, the current version is very much playable and I have already made enough changes to it that in many ways it is quite different from previous versions. Thus I'm going to post a link to the current version of the mod here and, if you few readers of the blog feel inclined to do so, you can download it, do some beta testing of your own and give me feedback here. This time instead of suddenly getting a new version thrown at you from out of the blue you can let me know what you think of the development thus far and even make suggestions as to what you'd like to see in the mod in the future. So, without any lengthy descriptions of what you'll be getting yourselves into, here's the link:

HERCULINE'S DOOM UPGRADE: SECOND EDITION

This is a direct link to my DropBox file, which gets updated whenever I feel I've done enough editing worthy of saving. It's a work in progress, but at this point I think the only new additions will be monsters, brightmaps and such so the file found here should always be totally playable. Enjoy (I hope)!

EDIT:

Oh, I forgot...

For any newcomers, this mod requires either ZDoom or (preferably) GZDoom and of course a licensed Doom IWAD. I also recommend a launcher and a custom music WAD.

Still Around, Still Doin' Stuff

It's been kinda quiet here at the blog lately for two main reasons:

1.) Lately I've found myself spending quite a bit of time playing BORDERLANDS and looking forward to playing BORDERLANDS 2. I've had more fun with the game than I'd anticipated and I find myself easily losing track of the time when I'm playing. I like the game enough that at one point I considered doing a bit of a review of it here, complete with screenshots and maybe even a video, much as I have done with other games here in the past. Then I remembered that the corporations producing these video games are not paying me to endorse their products and suddenly the motivation to blog about them left me quicker than you can say "claptrap". Thus a simple statement that I'd recommend the games to others will have to suffice.

2.) My Doom Upgrade project has not died; when not playing other games newer than Doom, I'm still working on improving the mod and I plan to release a Second Edition version at some undetermined point in the future. My efforts to further improve the thing include the additions of several new monsters of my own creation (since one of the major accusations about the mod has been that I just stole a bunch of stuff from other modders). In the hopes of insuring that said creatures will be accepted by my peers, in the process I have submitted each for approval to Realm667. This has proven to be a time-consuming process; creatures that I've submitted months ago are still waiting to be either accepted or rejected while creatures submitted by other modders just over a week ago have already been approved. (I'm told that this is simply due to the fact that the site admins just have a lot to do and I should just be patient.) Anyone interested in looking at what I've submitted thus far (and how it's been dealt with) can look up the monsters here in their respective Realm667 forum submission threads (I've also submitted some brightmaps).

So that, in a "nutshell", is what I've been up to lately. If the motivation and inspiration strike me, maybe next time there will be a blog post here that's more interesting to read.