Vanilla Doom smooth weapons

On 9/19/2018 at 5:18 PM, segfault said:

There's burying the lede, then there's this. Holy shit. I honestly can't wait to see what people do with this.

It's probably pretty underwelming, but I made this with it

https://jmtd.net/doom/mood/

Was there a patch made for this that fixed the nightmare desync issue? I’d like to get this running on some of my servers but just wanted to check what’s current before doing so. I love this!

Okay, new version is now available. Changes:

• Demo desyncs when playing in Nightmare mode have now been resolved. This turned out to be because of death animation length mismatches caused by merging death frames, as scifista42 guessed (thanks!). With this new version loaded I successfully played back 9,481 demos from the Compet-N archive without desyncing.
• Pain Elemental resurrection animation is now restored. Thanks again to scifista42.
• Plasma rifle reload animation has been tweaked and now resembles Linguica's GIF (thanks!). Hopefully this will be more to people's tastes.

Excellent! I’ll do some testing on various ports and let you know if anything else pops up. I think the zdaemon and odamex players will love finally having smooth doom for their ports of choice.

Great! Looking forward to hearing what people think of it - whether they love it, hate it, whether there are things they'd like to see improved, etc. Please do point people at the thread and encourage them to send feedback.

On 9/19/2018 at 6:12 PM, m8f said:

My only nitpick is Plasma Rifle. It feels static when firing

On 9/19/2018 at 6:31 PM, fraggle said:

As far as the plasma rifle looking static when firing, I think this is consistent with the original animation and this is intended to stay close to the original.

This bothers me too, so I slapped together a quick side-by-side comparison (there's no sound in the video for all you PG-sound haters :P).

I also don't like how the BFG barrel moves backward as if it has recoil. I'd rather have it static, because that's how it looks in vanilla--it always looked to me like the bright muzzle flash covered the barrel, so having it move looks really weird.

Other than these two, it looks amazing. I could look at that chaingun firing all day.

19 hours ago, fraggle said:

Okay, new version is now available. Changes:

• Demo desyncs when playing in Nightmare mode have now been resolved. This turned out to be because of death animation length mismatches caused by merging death frames, as scifista42 guessed (thanks!). With this new version loaded I successfully played back 9,481 demos from the Compet-N archive without desyncing.

Congratulations! By the way, how did you test demo sync on 9,481 demos? I guess you have a script, but how do you algorithmically determine that desync doesn't occur?

Using statcheck:

https://github.com/chocolate-doom/statcheck

Ah, statcheck - now I remember you announcing this a while back. This is interesting to me, as I've been working on my SyncDbg library which is designed to be embedded into a port, where it tracks things known to or subject to desync issues. Your batch/regression testing approach is brilliant! I am hoping to be able to use my library in conjunction with your process in a complimentary fashion.

I've stopped supplying estimated completion dates on my projects, both professional and hobby, because my estimates are always horribly wrong... So, let's just say that, one day, I may be asking you for some advice related to your statcheck setup and process, and hopefully, sharing some of my findings.

This really is the only sane way to do Doom regression testing. I doubt non-programmers can appreciate the significance of '9481': it provides a real-world number to judge your confidence level of your port's accuracy (confidence = 9481)!! Very cool, indeed.

Found a bug when using the Chainsaw on ZDoom-based ports. I tested this on ZDoom 2.8.1, Zandronum 3.0, and GZDoom 3.6.0. This has been the only weapon where something like this happens from my testing, probably because of ZDoom having its own smooth animation of the Chainsaw?

Other than that, no other bugs I can find besides than custom sprite conflicts, but that's expected really. I am also inclined to agree with @Rathori on the Plasma Rifle being static, looks a bit weird that you can handle all that fast firing yet only feel the recoil just after stop shooting.

But overall, this is great and glad to see these kind of animations in Vanilla Doom!

New version is up for download. Summary of changes:

• Chainsaw issues in ZDoom-based ports have been fixed. Thanks @SiFi270 and @Erick.
• Pistol pickup issue has been resolved - thanks again @SiFi270 for the copy/paste fix and sorry for not getting back to you sooner.
• Retracting BFG barrel has been removed - thanks @Rathori for the suggestion.

I'm still looking into the plasma rifle issue. Interestingly the perkristian sprites do actually animate with that pulsing recoil effect but my conversion appears to have lost it. Hope to have a fix soon.

Almost perfect. It only lacks Plasmagun's movement while shooting. Also it's not 100% compatible with Eternity engine's savegames: If i save game without vsmooth and load that savegame with vsmooth, there is no weapon at all - not only sprite, but can't fire or change weapon either. If i save with vsmooth and load it without vsmooth, it works without problems. However there was no such problem with Choco.

That sounds like an Eternity bug more than anything.

I suspect it's going to be very hard to eliminate such bugs, especially since different source ports work in very different ways. That said, I can sort of guess what the cause might be (ie. savegames contain state number), and it might actually be possible to fix. I'll have to investigate further.

I forgot to mention that there is no problems also when i save and load with vsmooth.

Hey fraggle, I'm really liking the smooth weapon animations! Besides the plasma gun looking static (which it sounds like you're working on), it's very nice to have a vanilla compatible smooth animations.

However, I did come across an issue when playing vsmooth.wad with Ancient Aliens. If you load the two together, it looks like the weapon sprites change to like yellow/purple.  It seems to be present in PrBoom+ 2.5.1.4, GZDoom 3.6.0, and ZDoom 2.8.1.

Zdoom is wad emulator (veeery faaaar from vanilla Doom). Did you try Eternity Engine?

2 minutes ago, Rimantas said:

Zdoom is wad emulator (veeery faaaar from vanilla Doom). Did you try Eternity Engine?

Nah I haven't, I don't really use Eternity as PrBoom is my go-to source port.

BTW, I just ran AA and vsmooth in ZDL again and I had to edit my post. That weird sprite color appears in GZDoom, ZDoom, and PrBoom+ 

You should try new version of Eternity.

It's because that vanilla smooth guns aren't paletted in Ancient Aliens palette. And any port with this mod and Ancient Aliens wad will have same problem. 

4 minutes ago, Rimantas said:

You should try new version of Eternity.

Yeah I maybe I should. I'll give Eternity a shot sometime soon. 

3 minutes ago, Myst.Haruko said:

It's because that vanilla smooth guns aren't paletted in Ancient Aliens palette. And any port with this mod and Ancient Aliens wad will have same problem. 

I figured something like this was the problem. I ran some other variations of Perkristian's smooth wad and got the same result. 

Well what can you do huh? 

11 minutes ago, chowbar said:

 

Yeah I maybe I should. I'll give Eternity a shot sometime soon. 

 

 

I figured something like this was the problem. I ran some other variations of Perkristian's smooth wad and got the same result. 

Well what can you do huh? 

You can open vanilla smooth weapon mod(save additional unpaletted copy of this somewhere) in slade and ancient aliens megawad(aa-tex resources also good for it) also and do conversion after you copy palette and colormap from that megawad. Smooth gun weapons should be converted from doom to global existing palette. It won't compatible with doom palette, but it will be compatible with that megawad. 

2 minutes ago, Myst.Haruko said:

You can open vanilla smooth weapon mod(save additional unpaletted copy of this somewhere) to slade and ancient aliens megawad(aa-tex resources also good for it) also and do conversion after you copy palette and colormap from that megawad. Smooth gun weapons should be converted from doom to global existing palette. It won't compatible with doom palette, but it will be compatible with that megawad. 

Oh yeah I guess you're right haha. As a complete doom noob who's never touched slade or gzdoom builder maybe I'll do something like this later down the road. As someone with zero editing experience, a task like this is a little out of my current skillset.  

No worries. I believe, fraggle will consider patch for Ancient Aliens megawad and palette, if not I can do it when I'll have some free time. 

Sorry, it's unlikely that this can be fixed to work with AA. While the WAD is built with my limited palette hack which makes it work okay with other WADs that replace the palette (eg. BTSX), the AA palette is just too different to the original Doom palette to work. You can compare the palettes to see what I mean.

14 minutes ago, fraggle said:

Sorry, it's unlikely that this can be fixed to work with AA. While the WAD is built with my limited palette hack which makes it work okay with other WADs that replace the palette (eg. BTSX), the AA palette is just too different to the original Doom palette to work. You can compare the palettes to see what I mean.

Ah I gotcha fraggle. Still vsmooth is a great addition for enhancing the look of classic doom without messing with the gameplay.

23 minutes ago, Myst.Haruko said:

No worries. I believe, fraggle will consider patch for Ancient Aliens megawad and palette, if not I can do it when I'll have some free time. 

That sounds great! No rush though haha 

Well, I believe what fraggle says and I'm afraid to mess with things to not break them. Just thought that maybe it will be easy for conversion :"""")

6 minutes ago, Myst.Haruko said:

Well, I believe what fraggle says and I'm afraid to mess with things to not break them. Just thought that maybe it will be easy for conversion :"""")

Yeah oh well, what can ya do?  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's a good thing AA is still a great mapset 

Fraggle,

I did something similar back in 2014/2015 at the tail end of Perk's smooth weapons thread. I went about taking the smoother sprites and implemented a demo-compatible DEHACKED modification of it, complete with all frames and a couple of vanilla frame fixes (such as fullbright attack frames of monsters).

In order to do so, I stole a few frames here or there from some items/objects in the game. Examples:

-Armors no longer "flicker" bright to dark

-Health potions and armor helmets are no longer animated

-Arachnotrons have the same plasma ball as the player now (which I honestly prefer, never made sense to be green to me)

Anyways, it looks like it was lost to time, and since Perk's thread is now 2 years old un-bumped, I figured I'd post it here in case it helps you out at all. The DEHACKED is embedded in the WAD. Use SlumpED or something similar to access it.

Cheers.

https://allfearthesentinel.net/zandronum/download.php?file=boom_enhanced1_18.wad

or

https://allfearthesentinel.net/zandronum/wadinfo.php?id=3358

Okay guys, i'm at it again with the stupid questions.

How do i set this up for use in my PC? I also need around 10-20 states with codepointers, but i can take the BFG firing codepointer along with maybe the firing sound.