So, GZDoom has replaced its sector light options...

7 hours ago, LuciferSam86 said:

I mean, a gui like ZDL could help with profiles, but it's workaround and not a solution 

 

Hmmm, I think making a mod that changes the cvar should be kind trivial? Is the cvar applied at startup or at immediately? Maybe putting that on a gameplay mod? The only thing is the cvar looses against a modder choice on the MAPINFO per level and here we can be both right ( I think a modder choice should win against the user choice ) but we can discuss for hours and don't find a common point.  

Anyway still a workaround and not a solution 

the solution is simple.
letting the user choose what they prefer via the menu option. simple isn't it?
if the mod comes with maps, options can be enforced via mapinfo if the mapper really wants to force players to play with specific settings.
if it is a purely gameplay mod, i guess most doom player are inteligent enough to understand how to change the light mode to get a better dark and no glow.
or reverting back those changes when they change mods... or still play with glow if that's how they want to play.

1 hour ago, Lila Feuer said:

I suppose this wasn't thought out very well huh, that's what happens when you cater to a minority.

So since we or at least I know that the "casual users" was the smokescreen for the change,

the reason is clear:

a few random mappers complained about players not playing on their map with the "correct" light mode and so asked gzdoom devs to hide some light modes from the menu so most players would feel forced to play the way those mappers wanted...
when mapinfo exist and hidden light modes can still be used anyway...

the devs agreeing to that is concerning.

1 hour ago, Lila Feuer said:

and they wrote incredibly simple instructions to inform users what light mode worked best with their project

Which I guarantee you most users didn't read, so oh no they might experience the mod correctly now with the update.  Whatever will we do!

1 hour ago, Lila Feuer said:

is having big unforeseen consequences

There was nothing presented here that was unforeseen.  That's why you think you're "not being heard."

13 minutes ago, Blzut3 said:

Which I guarantee you most users didn't read, so oh no they might experience the mod correctly now with the update.  Whatever will we do!

 

There was nothing presented here that was unforeseen.  That's why you think you're "not being heard."

mappers can just force users option via mapinfo. thats what we are told to do if we want dark light mode on maps that requires it.
can't other mappers do the same with their maps, if software light mod or whatever is THAT important for their map?

the consequence is many maps (and some gameplay mods) ruined that now require extra input from the player to set up correctly, all for the "correct experience" you guys are trying to force upon us..
many didn't thought of forcing a light mode in the mapinfo because they knew players can set it up themselves correctly. (or it wasn't possible in the past? idk)
but apparently a bunch of angry old school mappers didn't want to use the tools provided to them and instead enticed gzdoom devs into making a global change for everyone.

2 hours ago, Lila Feuer said:

Yes, I can use a third party mod to put things back in

The thing is, you can't actually do that. Sure, you can add the option back to the menu, there's already a mod that does that, but since the option doesn't save that's not much use to any gameplay modder, or for anyone using it for anything other than one-off debugging. They would either have an option in their menu that for some reason has to be reconfigured every time players launch the game, unlike all the other settings they added, or would have to update their mod instructions from "set this menu option once" to "create a text file outside the game and add this command to it, and God help you if you don't know what an autoexec.cfg file is or what a text editor is."

Better remove gamma, contrast, brightness, and saturation too then. I am not experiencing this the way id intended.

12 minutes ago, Shepardus said:

The thing is, you can't actually do that. Sure, you can add the option back to the menu, there's already a mod that does that, but since the option doesn't save that's not much use to any gameplay modder, or for anyone using it for anything other than one-off debugging. They would either have an option in their menu that for some reason has to be reconfigured every time players launch the game, unlike all the other settings they added, or would have to update their mod instructions from "set this menu option once" to "create a text file outside the game and add this command to it, and God help you if you don't know what an autoexec.cfg file is or what a text editor is."

Well that's convoluted as shit, how is this a solution to the problem then? Can't even just have the benefit of the doubt with the crap advice that's being given in this thread, believe me I'd love for this first world problem to just cease to exist, but it appears that me and mega minority of complainers apparently cannot stack up the might of the combinative Oompa Loompas that is this dev team.
 

39 minutes ago, Blzut3 said:

Which I guarantee you most users didn't read

 

There was nothing presented here that was unforeseen.  That's why you think you're "not being heard."

Speaking on behalf of others again, how greasy!

Did you really think there would be zero resistance to this change and that there'd be no possible outcry whatsoever as a result of a very late change made well after the fact when this port has been around for nearly twenty years?

I'd still like to know who the "many mappers" are that pushed for this change. 

58 minutes ago, akinata said:

mappers can just force users option via mapinfo. thats what we are told to do if we want dark light mode on maps that requires it.
can't other mappers do the same with their maps, if software light mod or whatever is THAT important for their map?

I'm pretty sure I already answered this, but once more:

1. Vanilla maps don't necessarily have MAPINFO (cause you know, vanilla didn't have that) and should just work correctly out of the box.
2. We want to encourage GZDoom mappers to use the MAPINFO option if they're designing maps for a specific light mode.  This way users that don't read the directions get the intended experience.  (If you think users read, do software development.  You'll find out how difficult it is to get users to read anything very quickly.)
3. If the light mode didn't matter that much that setting it in MAPINFO was seen as unnecessary then clearly the new default was deemed an acceptable way to play the mod by definition.

Point 3 is why your so called "consequence" doesn't make sense.  Yes, it is understood that due to people being unaware of the MAPINFO option being around since forever (I too was unaware, but as a software renderer enthusiast I honestly never had a reason to care), there will be some mods that fall under point 2 but didn't set the option.  Where we disagree is on whether this fact is a big deal.

27 minutes ago, Lila Feuer said:

Speaking on behalf of others again, how greasy!

You do know I've been a (G)ZDoom, Skulltag, and Zandronum developer right?  Just not very active right now.  As for the first sentence, users not reading shouldn't be a controversial statement to you, or you haven't interacted with users long enough.

27 minutes ago, Lila Feuer said:

Did you really think there would be zero resistance to this change and that there'd be no possible outcry whatsoever as a result of a very late change made well after the fact when this port has been around for nearly twenty years?

Of course there is resistance and that was expected.  There's literally no change that can be made without someone complaining, hence the xkcd 1172 reference.  The level of resistance seen is about the level that was expected.  I engaged in this thread because I thought those championing the dark setting were motivated by different things than the initial wave of people complaining about the lack of the "legacy" setting, but it seems in the end the two camps are more similar than I thought.

27 minutes ago, Lila Feuer said:

I'd still like to know who the "many mappers" are that pushed for this change.

Even if we did keep a list of specific names, we are not going to facilitate your desire to harass.  Edit: Re-read your previous to this post mentioning this.  While the part about not having a list stands, I see that you intention was to avoid playing their mods which is less harsh than I assumed.  My bad for the accusation.

@Blzut3 Yes I know your credentials, I use ECWolf too which on a more positive note for what it's worth is a good port, not that there's a lot of competition in that particular field when it comes to that game however.

Also I have no problem with the mission statement in and of itself and I'm all for mappers being able to do what they want with their shit, modders do the same thing already, the issue is how inconvenient this is and how the proposed solution is actually still a non-solution and it's just a PITA now whichever way you slice it. It makes me want to downgrade GZDoom and if it means I miss out on some stuff then so be it, I barely use the port these days anyway outside of gameplay mods since the mapping scene for it is so niche to begin with.

But yeah I'm more than well aware that some people have total reading comprehension inability, doesn't mean one should simply assume they're all like that and that this proposed solution is what'll remove it or the vast majority of it anyway. It'll certainly bring it down to an extent, but you'll always have someone asking about something or getting confused or annoyed with why something isn't working correctly, as a longtime programmer I'm sure you're more than accustomed to that never-ending sea of complaining. But once again, I think that's a secondary issue here and was only partially the mission statement, it's apparently so bad now that even I didn't know there were these mappers griping about their levels getting messed up in GZDoom, which also proceeds to...mess up brightness or have high gamma by default resulting in a washed out scene, texture filtering, sprites that default to clipping through the floor, the baboon-ass ugly default automap colors, I didn't know that the correct lighting modes were apparently a lot more important than those and I'm sure I missed something else that sucks ass by default.

My aim is not to harass, I don't have time for that and that's beyond petty and anyone who engages in that is effectively doing the "instead of aiming your anger at the institution you take it out on the people" and while they obviously played a major role in this decision I would personally prefer to decide if I even liked their works enough in the first place to consider letting a bygone be a bygone despite the inconvenience it caused me, or else if I just don't recognize/don't care i.e not a major name, then it'll be my choice in deciding if I even want to play their stuff now at all if I now view them in a different light.

Of course, the internet's terrible and there's going to be salty retards that won't listen to reason and will probably try to make the mappers' lives hell anyway so w.e I get your concern there at least. I was not trying to be vindictive, simply just being informed. I suppose ignorance is bliss!

8 minutes ago, Lila Feuer said:

which also proceeds to...mess up brightness or have high gamma by default resulting in a washed out scene, texture filtering, sprites that default to clipping through the floor, the baboon-ass ugly default automap colors, I didn't know that the correct lighting modes were apparently a lot more important than those and I'm sure I missed something else that sucks ass by default.

This is the what-about-ism thing I mentioned a few times.  The light mode question has a lot more developer consensus than the others, so it was the low hanging fruit.  Since this thread is in danger of being derailed to Doomworld's favorite topic (there were a couple attempts in this thread already), I don't want to say too much more beyond that no one thinks all of the problems were solved by removing that one option.

For what it's worth, I do sometimes wonder myself if GZDoom should just rip the band aid and revert a lot of stuff that was changed just because changing things was cool in 1998.  However I've seen enough projects (i.e. Python 2->3) attempt stuff like that to know it would be about 10+ years of people sticking to the old version if all of that done at once without care.  I don't think GZDoom needs to be demo compatible, but there's definitely a lot in there that in hindsight probably should have just been mods but of course the interfaces for that didn't exist at the time.  (Similar argument I made to have Zandronum divorce itself from the Skulltag stock content to get rid of some random breaks that the Skulltag mods did.  Which of course had a lot of resistance despite being fully compatible by just loading the mod.)

26 minutes ago, Lila Feuer said:

My aim is not to harass, I don't have time for that and that's beyond petty and anyone who engages in that is effectively doing the "instead of aiming your anger at the institution you take it out on the people" and while they obviously played a major role in this decision I would personally prefer to decide if I even liked their works enough in the first place to consider letting a bygone be a bygone despite the inconvenience it caused me, or else if I just don't recognize/don't care i.e not a major name, then it'll be my choice in deciding if I even want to play their stuff now at all if I now view them in a different light.

Of course, the internet's terrible and there's going to be salty retards that won't listen to reason and will probably try to make the mappers' lives hell anyway so w.e I get your concern there at least. I was not trying to be vindictive, simply just being informed. I suppose ignorance is bliss!

I edited my post to retract.  I apologize for the accusation of malicious intent.  I'm glad you see where my concern came from though.

23 minutes ago, Blzut3 said:

I'm pretty sure I already answered this, but once more:

1. Vanilla maps don't necessarily have MAPINFO (cause you know, vanilla didn't have that) and should just work correctly out of the box.
2. We want to encourage GZDoom mappers to use the MAPINFO option if they're designing maps for a specific light mode.  This way users that don't read the directions get the intended experience.  (If you think users read, do software development.  You'll find out how difficult it is to get users to read anything very quickly.)
3. If the light mode didn't matter that much that setting it in MAPINFO was seen as unnecessary then clearly the new default was deemed an acceptable way to play the mod by definition.

Point 3 is why your so called "consequence" doesn't make sense.  Yes, it is understood that due to people being unaware of the MAPINFO option being around since forever (I too was unaware, but as a software renderer enthusiast I honestly never had a reason to care), there will be some mods that fall under point 2 but didn't set the option.  Where we disagree is on whether this fact is a big deal.

 

You do know I've been a (G)ZDoom, Skulltag, and Zandronum developer right?  Just not very active right now.  As for the first sentence, users not reading shouldn't be a controversial statement to you, or you haven't interacted with users long enough.

 

Of course there is resistance and that was expected.  There's literally no change that can be made without someone complaining, hence the xkcd 1172 reference.  The level of resistance seen is about the level that was expected.  I engaged in this thread because I thought those championing the dark setting were motivated by different things than the initial wave of people complaining about the lack of the "legacy" setting, but it seems in the end the two camps are more similar than I thought.

1/ dark mode works well with original maps too. how dare you try to force onto me your vision of how OG doom maps should be played on? does that warrant a general change of gzdoom menu options? no. the reason why devs hid some light mod from the option menu was already explained. and your argument was not the reason. it was because of something petty.

2/ so you want to encourage mappers to use mapinfo by... hidding some option from players???
i am am modder myself (tho not on doom, yet) and know very well that some just don't know how to read even when you write in big red letters something crucial just beside the download button...
however i rarely read the readme given with doom mods myself. i already konw how to tailor my own experience for doom and am fine with it. if some mappers wants to force me to play with their own light mode, they can. if they do'nt i will just play the way i like and never complain about that.

3/deemed acceptable doesn't mean it is the best. some just like to leave the choice (or they just don't care) to the player to tailor their experience as they like.
or they just didn't realised they could use mapinfo to force certain options... which again didn't matter much since people can just set whatever they feel like is best.
if some mappers really wants the players to play only a certain way the can force it with the mapinfo. (i am repeating myself here.)

it is a big deal. changing light mode is a major visual change. and that glow can really ruin the epxerience of some mods. (maps and gameplay mods)
of course you don't care since you prefer software light mod. so because i prefer something you don't like i am sudenly illegitimate?

of course there is ppl complaining since the reason for that change was petty.
i don't care about legacy as it's something ppl fight over for the best OG doom visuals.
the difference here is that dark light mod is THE ONLY light mode without the glow (while keeping darkness, dark). that is major itself. why don't you understand that there is many mods and maps that work best with it. there is also alot of ppl who DO NOT CARE about playing doom like how it looked back in the days. they seek instead something that look better, beside the maps and mods which requires an immersive darkness.

35 minutes ago, akinata said:

the difference here is that dark light mod is THE ONLY light mode without the glow (while keeping darkness, dark). that is major itself. why don't you understand that there is many mods and maps that work best with it. there is also alot of ppl who DO NOT CARE about playing doom like how it looked back in the days. they seek instead something that look better, beside the maps and mods which requires an immersive darkness.

You say this like you're some kind of authoritative figure who got all of these mappers to go "Oh yes, I intended Dark!" You're not. Stop trying to pass yourself off like your opinion is the only one that matters and other people aren't allowed to disagree.

Look, it's fine that you're arguing Dark should be an option, and obviously you're right that there's a lot of people who don't care about playing Doom how it looked back then (though I'd also say those people wouldn't be getting GZDoom in the first place, but I digress). But facts are facts: Light attenuation (which is what you call "the glow") was intended to be part of the engine, as it is part of what made the game more realistic compared to Wolf (which had no light attenuation at all... or lighting, for that matter). All those maps from back in the day were, to a point, built with this in mind, because there was no "turn it off" option for things like that.

More modern stuff that came about after the various source ports tweaked the lighting are a different story, of course. "Dark" was essentially just eyeballing Vanilla Doom's lighting falloff, but it was also made at a time when it wasn't possible to selectively brighten certain areas - which is what the vanilla renderer actually did, and couldn't really be done on GPUs until shaders became a thing in the early 2000s. It's also, simply put, not accurate, and while you may prefer that look, functionally speaking, thousands upon thousands of levels were never made with it in mind. "Software/Vanilla" replicates this, and thus, is most accurate in that sense - PERIOD. Not liking it does not mean that it is not an objectively better choice for the majority of Doom maps that do not specify their own lighting mode (including literally every map ever made before source ports that tweaked lighting came out).

Yes, it's a breaking change. Yes, there's some users (such as yourself!) who are clearly not happy with it since the mode you preferred got forced into a MAPINFO option. And yes, there's a fair point to an argument that "People who want to play it how it was back in the day wouldn't care." But this still boils down to a basic fact: the way you prefer makes maps darker than was intended much of the time, and making players think that's a "proper" way to play the maps is misleading, because odds are they were intended to be played with a setting that had the lighting halo around the player - and as you point out repeatedly, Dark is the only one that does not have this.

It's much better to make the defaults close to what the vanilla game would have done, give the mappers the flexibility to specify a darker one if they want that via some minimally-invasive MAPINFO settings that any mapper worth their salt can figure out how to make, and roll with that. The fact this sucks for you is understandable, but going back to how things were will mean a lot more people will for some reason think that a lighting mode that doesn't have something that was a key part of Doom's lighting system is intentional and by-design - and simply put, that's a mistake. You're also ignoring a key benefit of the change - that now Mappers can FORCE a specific lighting mode, and in turn, set up how they want lighting to work on their levels, whereas the old way turned it into a global thing that they had absolutely no control over if the user decided to change it. That's actually fairly important, but the payoff from that will be years down the line.

I do feel like the main lighting modes could use better naming conventions though. Personally I'd say "Software (Classic ZDoom)", "Vanilla (Original Doom)", and "Performance (Low-End Hardware)" or something like that. It's a bit more verbose, but at least it clarifies the difference between what Software and Vanilla are supposed to mean, and removes the ambiguity of "Classic (Faster)" which seems just confusing as heck.

2 hours ago, Lila Feuer said:

Well that's convoluted as shit, how is this a solution to the problem then?

If I could just mod it into the menu and have the cvar save like any other video setting, I wouldn't have anything to complain about. That it doesn't save seems to me to cause more problems than it solves. Or, more accurately, I don't understand what problems it solves. I can get behind the options being relegated to the console and understand the motivation behind that (even though changing the default is really the part that's doing the heavy lifting in the changes made), but why even the console option seems to be designed to prevent its use is beyond me.

At this point, this is just two brick walls shouting at each other. It’s incredibly unlikely GZDoom will be changed to revert the menu functionality, and it’s equally unlikely the people aggrieved by this will have their minds changed. The only real effective counter-argument the people who make these decisions will listen to, if past historical precedent is any indication, is in pull request form, as opposed to whatever the fuck this thread’s devolving into.

I could perfectly well put up a PR, it's not like any of the changes talked about here are hard to implement, but the previous changes were obviously an intentional decision, so without agreement on a direction I doubt a PR backtracking on those decisions would go anywhere.

Well Graf answer makes sense and I can only agree with that. 

2 hours ago, Kinsie said:

At this point, this is just two brick walls shouting at each other. It’s incredibly unlikely GZDoom will be changed to revert the menu functionality, and it’s equally unlikely the people aggrieved by this will have their minds changed. The only real effective counter-argument the people who make these decisions will listen to, if past historical precedent is any indication, is in pull request form, as opposed to whatever the fuck this thread’s devolving into.

Isn't that really most of the times a GZ parameter is called into question? There are dozens of complaint posts but at the end very few submit a PR. In fact, Graf has argued similarly in the past pointing this out.

And if its that much of a burden: Just fork! Its how we got Nyan Doom as a DSDA-fork to begin with.

Disclaimer: I hold no horse in the lighting mode race. The only thing is already suggested by Dark - Make the names a little more clear.

37 minutes ago, Redneckerz said:

Isn't that really most of the times a GZ parameter is called into question? There are dozens of complaint posts but at the end very few submit a PR. In fact, Graf has argued similarly in the past pointing this out.

 

And if its that much of a burden: Just fork! Its how we got Nyan Doom as a DSDA-fork to begin with.

 

Disclaimer: I hold no horse in the lighting mode race. The only thing is already suggested by Dark - Make the names a little more clear.

I mean vkDoom is a great example. A GZDoom fork where someone is experimenting the way it wants, and iirc some of the new features will come in into the future GZDoom 

11 minutes ago, Redneckerz said:

Isn't that really most of the times a GZ parameter is called into question? There are dozens of complaint posts but at the end very few submit a PR. In fact, Graf has argued similarly in the past pointing this out.

Lack of doers isn't a problem here. Changing a CVAR's flags or its default is a one-line code change. It makes little difference who opens the PR for a change that trivial, considering the maintainers would be reviewing it regardless. If I were to put up a PR that just reverts a previous commit because I don't like it, I wouldn't expect it to be merged. I would actually be more concerned if it did get merged without discussion.

16 minutes ago, Redneckerz said:

And if its that much of a burden: Just fork! Its how we got Nyan Doom as a DSDA-fork to begin with.

While I'm perfectly capable of forking a repo and changing a couple lines, I don't think it's beneficial to have an explosion of trivial forks, especially if said forks have differences in features that modders have to account for.

18 minutes ago, Shepardus said:

Lack of doers isn't a problem here. Changing a CVAR's flags or its default is a one-line code change. It makes little difference who opens the PR for a change that trivial, considering the maintainers would be reviewing it regardless. If I were to put up a PR that just reverts a previous commit because I don't like it, I wouldn't expect it to be merged. I would actually be more concerned if it did get merged without discussion.

What would you suggest then? Because clearly:

• Graf has explained his view (in the past atleast) and that's that
• A PR will thus likely get rejected for this
• Talking in circles won't do anything
• Forking would be superfluous considering the change

So what's left to explore other than Accept and move on considering the above?

Mind you i am just trying to make clear what is still an option. Based on the above, i don't see any.

18 minutes ago, Shepardus said:

While I'm perfectly capable of forking a repo and changing a couple lines, I don't think it's beneficial to have an explosion of trivial forks, especially if said forks have differences in features that modders have to account for.

Well, its not like modders don't already misuse the features exposed by GZ. Even if its only a few, its something to account for. So yes a fork wouldn't be needed, but like the above, what else is possible?

9 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

You say this like you're some kind of authoritative figure who got all of these mappers to go "Oh yes, I intended Dark!" You're not. Stop trying to pass yourself off like your opinion is the only one that matters and other people aren't allowed to disagree.

funny coming from the ppl who tells us that software light mode is the way doom is intended to be played on. (not you i particular but that was an argument served to us.)

same counter argument: how do you know all those doom mpas are intended to be played in software? (unless it is specified inside the attached readme file.)
thing is, all gameplay mods that use the darkness as a gameplay feature are intended for dark light mode. (ex: lost in darkness, litdoom,...)
all modern-ish map set such as blade of agony and asches 2063 are also intended to be used with dark light mode. (which is forced inside the mapinfo already in BoA case as someone told me.)
brutal doom has a flashlight for those who prefer playing with dark light mod and use other means of lights.
it feels the other way around. we are a few here advocating for dark light mode but other seems to be happy to find random arguments to dismiss our opinion because they find the change to their liking since it push other players into playing by default with the light mode they want to force onto them.

 

9 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

You say this like you're some kind of authoritative figure who got all of these mappers to go "Oh yes, I intended Dark!" You're not. Stop trying to pass yourself off like your opinion is the only one that matters and other people aren't allowed to disagree.

 

Look, it's fine that you're arguing Dark should be an option, and obviously you're right that there's a lot of people who don't care about playing Doom how it looked back then (though I'd also say those people wouldn't be getting GZDoom in the first place, but I digress). But facts are facts: Light attenuation (which is what you call "the glow") was intended to be part of the engine, as it is part of what made the game more realistic compared to Wolf (which had no light attenuation at all... or lighting, for that matter). All those maps from back in the day were, to a point, built with this in mind, because there was no "turn it off" option for things like that.

saying the doom glow is realistic is very controversial. you said it yourself, gzdoom isn't really the port to mimmic OG doom.it is the most modernised source port available and perhaps the most popular one for solo play thanks to zscript and advanced visuals. as such defending the changes because it would make it look like how doom is intended to play is bad faith.

9 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

More modern stuff that came about after the various source ports tweaked the lighting are a different story, of course. "Dark" was essentially just eyeballing Vanilla Doom's lighting falloff, but it was also made at a time when it wasn't possible to selectively brighten certain areas - which is what the vanilla renderer actually did, and couldn't really be done on GPUs until shaders became a thing in the early 2000s. It's also, simply put, not accurate, and while you may prefer that look, functionally speaking, thousands upon thousands of levels were never made with it in mind. "Software/Vanilla" replicates this, and thus, is most accurate in that sense - PERIOD. Not liking it does not mean that it is not an objectively better choice for the majority of Doom maps that do not specify their own lighting mode (including literally every map ever made before source ports that tweaked lighting came out).

the "not accurate" you speak of is refering to how doom vanilla look. i already made my point about it so i'll just say here that this accuracy BS is not what gzdoom was meant to be in the first place (with all the visual enhancements gzdoom bring on the table, you will never make me believe its goal was to look exactly like OG doom.). but now that it's the most popular source port (for solo games) thanks to improved visuals and zscript, we get boomers who wants to force a step backward on everyone.
 

9 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

Yes, it's a breaking change. Yes, there's some users (such as yourself!) who are clearly not happy with it since the mode you preferred got forced into a MAPINFO option. And yes, there's a fair point to an argument that "People who want to play it how it was back in the day wouldn't care." But this still boils down to a basic fact: the way you prefer makes maps darker than was intended much of the time, and making players think that's a "proper" way to play the maps is misleading, because odds are they were intended to be played with a setting that had the lighting halo around the player - and as you point out repeatedly, Dark is the only one that does not have this.

 

It's much better to make the defaults close to what the vanilla game would have done, give the mappers the flexibility to specify a darker one if they want that via some minimally-invasive MAPINFO settings that any mapper worth their salt can figure out how to make, and roll with that. The fact this sucks for you is understandable, but going back to how things were will mean a lot more people will for some reason think that a lighting mode that doesn't have something that was a key part of Doom's lighting system is intentional and by-design - and simply put, that's a mistake. You're also ignoring a key benefit of the change - that now Mappers can FORCE a specific lighting mode, and in turn, set up how they want lighting to work on their levels, whereas the old way turned it into a global thing that they had absolutely no control over if the user decided to change it. That's actually fairly important, but the payoff from that will be years down the line.

again, no. not every maps and mods want you to specifically use software light mode.
if that's an issue for mappers, they can force it in the mapinfo.
for gameplay mods it is a bit more problematic. however it is worse to have a glow in intended dark maps than to not have glow in vanilla like maps.
only some boomers will think that doom without its glow is a mistake.
"You're also ignoring a key benefit of the change - that now Mappers can FORCE a specific lighting mode, and in turn, set up how they want lighting to work on their levels, whereas the old way turned it into a global thing that they had absolutely no control over if the user decided to change it. That's actually fairly important, but the payoff from that will be years down the line."
that is your worst argumet so far.
software light mod lovers can also use mapinfo to force whatever they feel is best. taking out user control is NEVER the solution. thankfully the light options are still there, for now... it's just now inconvinient to set them up everytime. such big step backward from such a little change...
and all this shitstorm because a few random boomer mappers ranted about players not playing on their maps with the "correct" sector light mode.
they should learn how to use mapinfo too.

10 hours ago, Dark Pulse said:

I do feel like the main lighting modes could use better naming conventions though. Personally I'd say "Software (Classic ZDoom)", "Vanilla (Original Doom)", and "Performance (Low-End Hardware)" or something like that. It's a bit more verbose, but at least it clarifies the difference between what Software and Vanilla are supposed to mean, and removes the ambiguity of "Classic (Faster)" which seems just confusing as heck.

i agree on that. tho people are now accostumed to this naming.
but if you think about it, vanilla already means OG doom.
only software and classic naming cna feel confusing. but some will tell you that software is the best so idk. when i do not play on dark i do use software instead of vanilla anyway.

to conlude the argument on dark being too dark, here some comparison between the current gzdoom sector light mods and dark light mod.
software:

vanilla:

classic:

dark:

dark light mode is not the darkest. it isn't even fully completely dark even when looking into the darkness.
however it can be the brightest where the light is stronger as it does not darken too far away areas.
shadows are brighter and in this showcase, dark lm feels like a classic lm with shadows without the glow.

if dark lm had better, stronger shadows it could look even better.
software lm could be awesome if it didn't had the glow. (for wads thats requires darker than dark lm darkness.)
vanilla lm is just too dark.

why am i showing all this? some might have the misconception that dark lm is too dark when the real offender here is the glow.
give me a software lm without glow and it'll be fine. perhaps will it be better than dark lm?
(however, for online competitive play, dark lm will always be best)

but for now, as dark lm is the only light mode that provide no glow, it is the only solution to many mods that require you to not have any glow for the best experience.
i made my point several times already so i think it wouldn't be productive to repeat everything again.

and again, for the last time, this:

6 hours ago, LuciferSam86 said:

Well Graf answer makes sense and I can only agree with that. 

is not a valid reason to hide some sector light modes from the menu.
anyone can still use their preferred light mode.
mapinfo can take care of forced settings.

i don't undertsand how some mappers can still complain about how players doesn't play on their creations the "right way" when they don't even use the tools provided to them so this doesnt happen.
and then convince devs to push a half assed change for everyone. unbelievable.

Yeah, my previous post was too short so here is my thought: Makes sense to me because, the creative vision for a game or a mod takes precedence over the user choice, and some of those settings were pretty confusing, so it was natural to see those removed from the normal user settings.

But I kinda agree with you, maybe a "power user" setting to see those settings if you really want to, maybe with a big warning before

1 minute ago, LuciferSam86 said:

Yeah, my previous post was too short so here is my thought: Makes sense to me because, for me, the creative vision for a game or a mod takes precedence over the user choice, and some of those settings were pretty confusing, so it was natural to see those removed from the normal user settings.

 

 

why not remove the option entirely then? since your goal is to limit what users can do...

lets get rid of jump and freelook too. its not how doom is meant to be played am i right?
Gzdoom isn't meant to give players choice after all. make sense because "creative vision for a game or a mod takes precedence over the user choice."

Gzdoom is not a game nor a mod. it is an engine or platform to share and customize our doom experience.

1 hour ago, akinata said:

lets get rid of jump and freelook too.

Much like setting the light mode, jump and freelook can be disabled through MAPINFO.

5 hours ago, akinata said:

funny coming from the ppl who tells us that software light mode is the way doom is intended to be played on. (not you i particular but that was an argument served to us.)same counter argument: how do you know all those doom mpas are intended to be played in software? (unless it is specified inside the attached readme file.)
thing is, all gameplay mods that use the darkness as a gameplay feature are intended for dark light mode. (ex: lost in darkness, litdoom,...)
all modern-ish map set such as blade of agony and asches 2063 are also intended to be used with dark light mode. (which is forced inside the mapinfo already in BoA case as someone told me.)
brutal doom has a flashlight for those who prefer playing with dark light mod and use other means of lights.
it feels the other way around. we are a few here advocating for dark light mode but other seems to be happy to find random arguments to dismiss our opinion because they find the change to their liking since it push other players into playing by default with the light mode they want to force onto them.

Primarily because of three reasons.

• Anything made before the advent of light modes, naturally, means that there was no such thing as dark lighting - it'd be using the default stuff. Doom Legacy did alter this (hence the "Legacy" option to try to emulate that), but GZDoom itself did not exist until 2005. It's thus safe to say any map and any mod made before 2005, 99.9% of them did not have Dark lighting in mind.
• Mods that require it, generally would mention it. Thus, if the mod did not mention a specific lighting mode, it's probably fairly safe to say it was assuming one of the more standard lighting modes.
• Dark lighting was itself a compromise - it was the closest to vanilla Doom's look that you could get using OpenGL 2.x at the time. ZDoom's software renderer could do this, but GZDoom's hardware renderer could not, entirely due to technical limitations. It took until OpenGL 3.x hardware hit the market around 2008-2009 before something like this became even feasible, and I don't think Graf began really pushing for 3.x for another year or two after that. Now we're in a fairly similar situation - 3.x stuff is being phased out, 4.x is the main OpenGL stuff, and Vulkan is the API of the future.

You're basically doing selection bias - the mods that you like and are important to you have something like that in mind, and since you're seeing it mentioned/supported in those so much, it pushes you towards believing it should be a mass-selectable option. To eliminate the confirmation bias, you should pick a random assortment of mods, and see how many of them mention Dark lighting as being what you should run it under. Obviously, given the timeframe of this stuff, you'd want to pick mods from 2008 or later.

5 hours ago, akinata said:

saying the doom glow is realistic is very controversial. you said it yourself, gzdoom isn't really the port to mimmic OG doom.it is the most modernised source port available and perhaps the most popular one for solo play thanks to zscript and advanced visuals. as such defending the changes because it would make it look like how doom is intended to play is bad faith.

It's... not controversial, it's literally one of the things that was touted to make the game feel more realistic compared to Wolf (as Wolf, again, didn't have it at all.)

Just because it does not mimic OG Doom fully, however, does not mean it should not try to stick close to it. After all, by your logic, why do we still have sprites for monsters, when we could easily add in 3D models, or voxel monsters (shoutout to Cheello)? Why stick to these crappy low-rez textures when we could easily have hi-resolution ones? You're not complaining about those, however, so if you are going to push this angle, you need to follow that line of thinking to its logical conclusion, or you need to accept that some things could be changed but keeping other things is an acceptable parameter - which includes lighting. Anything less is arguing in bad faith.

5 hours ago, akinata said:

the "not accurate" you speak of is refering to how doom vanilla look. i already made my point about it so i'll just say here that this accuracy BS is not what gzdoom was meant to be in the first place (with all the visual enhancements gzdoom bring on the table, you will never make me believe its goal was to look exactly like OG doom.). but now that it's the most popular source port (for solo games) thanks to improved visuals and zscript, we get boomers who wants to force a step backward on everyone.

So... the person who literally created the source port apparently does not know his own source port compared to you, O God Of GZDoom?

Simply put, GZDoom is whatever Graf and his team decide it will be. Period. If you don't like it, fork it and make your changes. They are creating this port for us in their spare time away from their real life jobs and duties, and we do not pay them a dime for it. They don't owe you, me, or anyone else who uses it anything.

And again, your argument of "Its goal wasn't to look exactly like OG Doom" falls flat when you're still fine with sprites and low-resolution textures. You can't seriously stake your claim on that it should be about maximum visual enhancement when some enhancements are fine to not enhance. (And this is doubly rich when what you're advocating for is actually technically REMOVING something the engine does, not adding it or enhancing it.)

5 hours ago, akinata said:

again, no. not every maps and mods want you to specifically use software light mode.
if that's an issue for mappers, they can force it in the mapinfo.
for gameplay mods it is a bit more problematic. however it is worse to have a glow in intended dark maps than to not have glow in vanilla like maps.
only some boomers will think that doom without its glow is a mistake.
"You're also ignoring a key benefit of the change - that now Mappers can FORCE a specific lighting mode, and in turn, set up how they want lighting to work on their levels, whereas the old way turned it into a global thing that they had absolutely no control over if the user decided to change it. That's actually fairly important, but the payoff from that will be years down the line."
that is your worst argumet so far.
software light mod lovers can also use mapinfo to force whatever they feel is best. taking out user control is NEVER the solution. thankfully the light options are still there, for now... it's just now inconvinient to set them up everytime. such big step backward from such a little change...
and all this shitstorm because a few random boomer mappers ranted about players not playing on their maps with the "correct" sector light mode.
they should learn how to use mapinfo too.

Here's where your logic falls apart.

• If a mapper doesn't force one, they clearly feel indifferent (or more likely, don't care) about lighting, in which case, "what's right" is completely moot and meaningless. That said, there is still also some truth in that clearly a map made in 1997 is going to have no idea that these lighting modes would exist 10+ years later, and so on that basis, it's fairly logical to say that they were made with a vanilla lighting model in mind - thus, "Software" or "Vanilla" would be appropriate choices, but not anything like "Dark." Doesn't mean they can't be played with Dark, but they were not designed with it in mind.
• If the map is intended to be software or dark, the mapper can specify that. Problem solved. The only tricky thing is that it's not possible to adjust this on a map-by-map basis - something that I do think would be a good idea, but that's a whole different can of worms.
• Most amusingly, you say "Software light mod lovers can use it to force what they feel is best, taking out user control is NEVER the solution." Okay... but apparently this is fine to do with dark-lit mods, which ALSO take user control away. So this is fine one way, but not the other? That's not how being fair works. If it's acceptable to you that you be allowed to force dark lighting mode on any map you please, then you must also be fine with forcing brighter lighting on a dark map. Anything less is hypocrisy.
• Being pissy and saying "some boomer mappers should learn to use mapinfo too" is pretty rich when the option literally did not exist until those people complained. Now that the option is in, I'm sure it will be implemented in mods, as several of your mods have done. Don't go shooting the cat and then complaining that the cat got in the way of your shot.

5 hours ago, akinata said:

i agree on that. tho people are now accostumed to this naming.
but if you think about it, vanilla already means OG doom.
only software and classic naming cna feel confusing. but some will tell you that software is the best so idk. when i do not play on dark i do use software instead of vanilla anyway.

Software mimics the original ZDoom's software renderer, which is pretty close to Vanilla anyway. Some people feel that it's better than Vanilla, and Vanilla does make things a tiny bit darker than Software, but by and large, it's mostly nitpicking at this point.

1 hour ago, akinata said:

why not remove the option entirely then? since your goal is to limit what users can do...

lets get rid of jump and freelook too. its not how doom is meant to be played am i right?
Gzdoom isn't meant to give players choice after all. make sense because "creative vision for a game or a mod takes precedence over the user choice."

Gzdoom is not a game nor a mod. it is an engine or platform to share and customize our doom experience.

Jumping, crouching, and freelook can all be similarly enabled and disabled, though those also took awhile to be settable in MAPINFO - maps before then would mention if freelook and jumping/crouching were allowed or not. I'm pretty sure they defaulted to on before they became settable in MAPINFO. Unlike lighting mode, however, a user is allowed to explicitly override the MAPINFO setting (not really something I agree with, since it allows you to break maps, but it can be done).

45 minutes ago, Dark Pulse said:

Unlike lighting mode, however, a user is allowed to explicitly override the MAPINFO setting (not really something I agree with, since it allows you to break maps, but it can be done).

I wouldn't worry about that, they already broke the map when they loaded it with Brutal Doom, ZMovement, and Hideous Destructor.

1 hour ago, Dark Pulse said:

Simply put, GZDoom is whatever Graf and his team decide it will be. Period. If you don't like it, fork it and make your changes. They are creating this port for us in their spare time away from their real life jobs and duties, and we do not pay them a dime for it. They don't owe you, me, or anyone else who uses it anything.

I cannot stress about this part, everyone here is doing this for fun, and sometimes is like a stress valve relief too.

Like DSDA removed the ENDDOOM support and they weren't interested in other things, so a lot of ports forked.

Same for the *ZDoom family, for example, the new cool kid (which I think it is) VKDoom with a new shiny Vulkan renderer and the possibility to disable the savegames for a mod/game.

Of course, different people with different visions, which sometimes might not be the same as yours.

( and that's why I like this community)

44 minutes ago, Shepardus said:

I wouldn't worry about that, they already broke the map when they loaded it with Brutal Doom, ZMovement, and Hideous Destructor.

Using Brutal Doom is the correct way of playing.

/jk.

Honestly a fork is probably the way to go at this point, not just for this but for anything really, in order to keep up-to-date and at the same time retain legacy features, in addition to whatever the port author wants to do for additional QoL improvements i.e what Nugget Doom did for Woof. It's just a matter of interest and how much GZDoom continues to either alienate older audiences or just makes too many awkward and/or unnecessary changes that eventually makes it not a very attractive option, seeing as its currently the main one in this family of ports, at least afa the most advanced.