Doom works great with a PS1 style controller. Dpad to move, shoulder buttons to strafe.
What is the most authentic source port right now? I don’t want fancy 3d models or lighting effects or mouse look or any fancy filters.
Most source ports, even the advanced ones, can disable the extra stuff and play very closely to the original.
I found Chocolate doom “too vanilla”. You had to do all of the options (e.g. bind the keys, change res) in an external dos-style setup.exe :/ I found prBoom and prBoom+ to be the most useable vanilla of all of source ports. (The version on source forge is from 2011. There’s a ‘test’ version from 2013 that I’ve used without problem, it includes crosshairs and the Doom 3 BFG wads, should you want that. prBoom and prBoom+ focus on “compatibility”. You can launch them with some options to made them Doom v1.1 compatible, if you so desire. It’s what I used on a laptop to pistol start Doom 2.
Here, have a free book about Doom
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/idx/l/lvg/11878639.0001.001/1:7/--doom-scarydarkfast?g=dculture;rgn=div1;view=toc;xc=1
So if I were to set up either a LAN co-op or deathmatch game, what would be the easiest way to do this? Is there a particular source port that makes this simple?
zDoom’s original raison d’etre was better multiplayer, I think?
http://zdoom.org/wiki/Multiplayer
So just use chocolate/zDoom/prBoom+ – whichever you like best :) (Go with prBoom…)
Did anyone read this? I’ve never been interested in game development books, but I’d love to hear some cool tidbits or read a good section of the book.
I’ve been reading this, and I can’t really recommend it over Kushner’s Masters of Doom (2003). Kushner tells a much better story. This doesn’t seem to add much to it; it feels like a rephrasing of a lot of a material from Kushner’s book. There are tidbits of interviews with former ID staff sprinkled throughout this book, which purportedly adds a different dimension to the story that Kushner tells, but I honestly didn’t feel like it was value added from Masters of Doom.
If you haven’t read Masters of Doom, this might serve as a decent substitute.
Masters of Doom is an actual “making of” book, as the author interviewed people. I thought this webpage simply appears to be a fan writing about the game., but it looks like they also interviewed people from ID.. But, unless it adds something that Masters of Doom didn’t, I’m not going to bother.
That fan appears to be Dan Pinchbeck, the guy behind Dear Esther and Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs.
21 now.
The new Cacowards is out. DemonSteele seems to be the hot new mod this year like Brutal Doom was in the past. Melee weapon, limited hit system, dodging, meters, special moves. Enemies have been changed to balance it out. Check out the trailer.
New Doom 2 ultra-violence speedrun record: 23:03.
Yes, they are. It isn’t strange for a Doom mod to pull art assets of some of his “cousins”.
Arise!
I was thinking on doing a thread for Doom modding / sourceports, but this thread is more or less already about that, so I will re-purpose it.
Also, we wad another thread were we talked about Doom itself, here
This week I just played The Slaughter Spectrum. As the name indicates, it’s a 4-map slaughterfest wad.
They were very, very, pretty. But it’s also a bitch to move properly, you need a recent highend cpu (ie 8700k!) to do it without problem at all situations, because even modern sourceports like GZDoom aren’t multithreaded. The worst part is some areas of the first map. At least the second and third maps, which are the longest, had better performance than the first one. The fourth is a much shorter map, with an interesting gimmick.
Speaking of, GZDoom has now a Vulkan renderer in experimental phase, in my case it just crashes :(.
In any case, this mod is an intense experience, and it has some interesting parts, but it’s a slaugther map which I find a bit boring at times. You know, 90% of combat is holding the fire button with the RL, plasma or BFG. It also plays mostly with an arena design, where you reach an area, monsters spawn and area is closed, you kill them and area is opened again. No keys or interesting exploration, either.
On some occasions I had killed 350 monsters already and started being a bit tired of the map, when I noticed the monster count, being 350/750. Ouch. Difficulty is also pretty high (for me), although at least it supports all difficulty settings, I played it on the HNTR.
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After playing that, I got in the mood of more Doom, and I found Eviternity. It’s a 32-map megawad which uses a very good, cohesive texture pack, and it’s being great. Maps are small but well designed, interconnected and twisted in interesting ways. It doesn’t rushes out in putting out the biggest weapons and enemies, instead it follows a more natural, paced progression, and the difficulty is gasp normal and balanced, unlike so many wads that are too hardcore.
Still, I wanted to play it a bit more differently. I usually play this levels normally, but this time I wanted something that would spice up the gameplay itself a bit, without reaching the extremes of Russian Overkill, and would maintain normal themes and balance (so no Guncaster where you are a Wizard Dragon or Neutronian Chaos with MSPaint style either).
In the end it was recommended to me Final Doomer, which is a very well done collection of weapons. Five collections of weapons, to be more exact. They maintain some basic standards (pistol / shotgun / mg / RL…) but each set has it’s own interesting spin, like one where you have a bow that paralyzes enemies, or the super shotgun has a very reduced range and the normal shotgun fire energy projectiles that can bounce projectiles. The design, sounds, animations, it’s all pretty pro.
I also got a list of misc. mods to improve the experience. They are:
Doom HQ music
Droplets (better blood, without being an exaggerated gore mod)
Doom HQ Sfx
Smooth Doom (smoother animations)
Faithful Doom + Neural Upscale (well, I have FDoom turned off right now, it has some incompatibility with Final Doomer)
edit
Final Doomer has an imcompatibility with both Faithful Doom and Smooth Doom, so as replacement of the latter I’m using Beautiful Doom, which is somewhat similar.edit: Beautiful Doom has a BIG impact on performance, so I don’t recommend it, as least not for the big maps.
Final Doomer gives newer collection of weapons, ok. But, what about the monsters? In some wads I played over the years, I’ve seen maps with Heretic enemies (oh hell, even Duke3d enemies), or with recolored enemies like ‘shadow imps’, or with some slight variations, so I was thinking, it would be cool if there was a way to put new enemies in any map, automatically. And if possible, in a way that preserve the original aesthetics and design balance.
I started searching for mods that do that. There are thousands of Doom mods, so I was sure this was a solved problem! This was what I found:
Shades of Doom. This is a nice mod with tons of variations, but it’s only a cosmetic mod, it doesn’t change anything of the gameplay.
Colorful Hell is a mod that adds color-coded version of enemies, each color more and more powerful than the last. Ugly, imo.
The famous DoomRL Arsenal mod has its own monster pack that can be used individually, although I found that the new monsters are rare and only appear more on higher difficulties.
LegenDoom adds random legendary monsters, tougher than usual and that drops a legendary weapon.
Champions adds colored elite versions with new abilities.
Complex Doom is a bit like the previous two, but with real new monsters instead of colored skins. Each monster type has 3-4 tougher variations, and they drop new usable items/powerups. Weapons are also redone.
There are also bigger mods like Aeons of Death, which puts lots of new enemies of tons of games, but it also has more stuff like spells and new weapons and they can’t be turned off, and in general it seems it screws over the balance a lot.
Finally, I discovered Super Shuffle, which is much closer to what I wanted in the first place. It’s a collection of new enemies, mostly lifted of other mods or taken from the beastiary, but it mostly keeps the theme (no cartoon characters or strange shit), and the original balance (although not totally). It also has new items and a series of ‘classes’ (7 new weapon sets), like Final Doomer, although they don’t seem as good as some of the ones in FD. In any case one of the classes is the original Doom, so you can play with that if you don’t want new weapons.
No love for the Doom Visor mod? After looking at the same HUD for 25 years I thought it was a nice change of pace. Very well done and loaded with customization options.
This is probably going to sound snotty but I truly don’t mean it that way at all, but… Why? I’m totally curious what the draw is for playing new stuff in the old Doom engine. I loved Doom back in the day but I don’t have any desire to go back, seeing those videos.
That’s NOT me being judgemental, that’s just me not understanding so asking for some insight from people that this is a draw for. :) From the development point of view I can understand the technical challenge of trying to push an engine so old to do crazy things, it was just the playing it part I was curious about.
This?
It looks ugly as hell! in fact, it’s the opposite of how I play, usually, with as little hud as possible:
