Doom Legacy 1.44 alpha

Following hot on the heels of several high-profile source port releases in August, clad in a thick layer of radar absorbing material and flying low to evade detection - Doom Legacy 1.44 alpha1 was released early in September with little if any fanfare. More than 60 bugs have been squashed for this maintenance release, which is available for Windows (32bit) and Linux (32/64bit).

While it's nice to see Legacy not dead I think it's really sad that this is still not an official release of the Legacy2 project.

^
Agreed. I have a sad feeling that this is maybe the last fitful spasm of Legacy... I really hope that's not the case as I have a soft spot for Legacy being the first PC port of Doom I ever played... :)

It needs to die

Has there actually been any work on v2?

Planky said:

Has there actually been any work on v2?

What are people waiting from v2? Splitscreen for 256 players?

Planky said:

Has there actually been any work on v2?

According to the SVN logs, no. All recent work was done on the 1.4 branch do do this release.

This runs fine, but detects doom.wad Ultimate Doom as Doom Registered with only 3 eps.

entryway said:

What are people waiting from v2? Splitscreen for 256 players?

More like a scriptable mouse interface for making a System Shock 2/Deus Ex 1 style inventory, something zDoom fails to deliver... *hides from randy and graf* ;) :D

I remember Legacy2 having Normalmap support among other things. :p

The intended feature list for 2.0 includes:

* Hexen support.
* ACS and BEX.
* New netcode, based on OpenTNL, used in Tribes 1 and 2.
* 4 player splitscreen, support for modern joysticks and gamepads.
* Multiple maps can be run simultaneously on a server, with the players moving back and forth between them.
* New OpenGL renderer with support for GLSL shaders.
* High resolution textures in compliance to the JDS Joint Texture Standard draft.
* PNG-based textures with alpha channel.
* JPEG-based textures.
* Ogg Vorbis, mp3 and several module music formats are supported.
* MD3 models.
* Partial DECORATE support.
* ZIP/PK3 files can be used in addition to WADs.
* OpenGL skyboxes.
* More compatibility with ZDoom.

Not sure how much of that is actually done though. Development still seems sporadic at best.

Sounds like a nice list of features. I especially like the idea of 4 player splitscreen with modern controllers. My mates would maybe then consider playing Doom a bit more often... :)

DooMAD said:

The intended feature list for 2.0 includes:

* High resolution textures in compliance to the JDS Joint Texture Standard draft.

Not sure how much of that is actually done though. Development still
seems sporadic at best.

This one's a LOL. There is no JDS standard. It was being discussed but Legacy went ahead and implemented some unfinished and half-baked ideas and thereby actually killing any attempt at standardization. When I started implementing a similar system for ZDoom the only real option was to forget about this and start from scratch...

Anyway, although there have been around commits to the Legacy 2.0 repository, most had nothing to do with the code and those which did only fixed compiler problems and such. There has been no genuine development for almost 2 years now.

DooMAD said:

The intended feature list for 2.0 includes:

* Hexen support.
* ACS and BEX.
* New OpenGL renderer with support for GLSL shaders.
* PNG-based textures with alpha channel.
* JPEG-based textures.
* Ogg Vorbis, mp3 and several module music formats are supported.
* MD3 models.
* Partial DECORATE support.
* ZIP/PK3 files can be used in addition to WADs.
* OpenGL skyboxes.
* More compatibility with ZDoom.

Not sure how much of that is actually done though. Development still seems sporadic at best.

Renaming gzdoom.exe (or skulltag.exe) to legacy2.exe will give you even more compatibility with ZDoom and all other stuff. Except splitscreen, though.

Downloading this for nostalgic reasons ;)

Bastet Furry said:

More like a scriptable mouse interface for making a System Shock 2/Deus Ex 1 style inventory, something zDoom fails to deliver... *hides from randy and graf* ;) :D

Yeah, didn't that ever make it into a public version?

boris said:

Yeah, didn't that ever make it into a public version?

I think it's in the SVN now.

Even though I barely touched legacy, this makes me inexplicably happy for some reason. It is like a little piece of nostalgia that I thought long buried suddenly returned.

Csonicgo said:

I think it's in the SVN now.

Read the backlog, cool!
Now, where to find that documentation?
An innocent "mouse" typed into the search box of the wiki brought up nothing regarding this. :(

Do you still have to manually allocate how much memory you want Legacy to use, otherwise the game will crash every time you blink?

Probably. I don't think that's something that you can change easily.

Has anyone given this any serious use? I notice one of the features is the inclusion of voodoo dolls which is quite a significant fix as it allows compatability with more Boom WADs that use voodoo scripting.

Problem is it doesn't have the launcher or any sort of user intuitive front end and for some reason it the picture is flipped 90 degrees. Can anyone answer a few questions on it for me?

Your best bet for help would be Wesley Johnson. He's the one who resurrected Legacy 1.x and the only Legacy dev that seems active on Doomworld.

I thought I'd play around with it a bit more before asking any further stupid questions and I'm glad I did. Turns out the launcher from the previous version (1.42) can be used by dragging into the new directory and changing the exe to version 1.44 when prompted. The display problem was solved by simply changing the resolution in-game.

I quickly tested in a voodoo-doll dependant map and it worked correctly too. This should make it compatible with pretty much all Boom compat maps.

Legacy 1.44 is still active, there have been enough fixes since alpha to justify another release.
- download from subversion repository to get latest !!
- Zone Memory management rewritten entirely, from zone handler to all allocation calls.
- choose one of several memory management models (pure malloc, to automatic expanding zone), you do not have to set a memory size unless you use the oldest zone memory model (a compile-time choice)
- many fixes to memory allocation where memory was being released
while still in use (like textures used for status bar)
- status bar textures are now locked so other texture users cannot release them
- sprite limits removed, now supports 128 to 16000 sprites (user selectable soft limit)
- Savegame has been extensively reworked, 99 games per directory, unlimited directories.
- Savegame buffer can no longer overrun, it does read/write when
within 2K of empty/full, and auto-expands for network savegame transport.
- Made it work with longdays.wad (huge number of sprites), phobia.wad (excessive vertical size), hth2.wad (3D floors), europe.wad (very large with blockmap overrun x3)
- Will now savegame longdays.wad (> 512K savegame).
- I never use a launcher
- Game recognition reworked again, will now recognize more file names, including allowing doom.wad to be Ultimate Doom (doomu.wad).
- Docs updated (in _docs directory)
- Patch logs in _logs/WDJlog.txt has an explanation for each patch.

- Some 2.0 code has been worked into the 1.44 code, but mostly it is tracking down old bugs, many from the original code.

From reports I have heard, Legacy 2.0 is mostly waiting for someone to tackle the network code.

Sounds great. :)