This is Woof! 14.5.0 (Apr 30, 2024)

[ceski]

10 hours ago, Trov said:

Oh thanks, that worked.

 

My brain doesn't really notice the mismatched angle at all unless I am specifically looking for it.

I think the only time an average person might notice is maybe when trying to shoot a very distant enemy.

 

I'll play with it turned on for a while and report back later, but for now I think it's a great feature.

 

 

I can tell that Doom's shorttics has a bigger angle increment than Marathon/Aleph One, but I think it's still fine enough to not be disorienting.

But then again, I grew up playing Descent, so my tolerance for disorientation might be higher than the average person...

 

Thanks for trying it out and that's a good point about distant aiming. I made a contrived demonstration of a worst-case scenario: shoot_the_button.zip

 

Load the wad with shorttics and don't move, just turn, and try to shoot the button. It's not possible and "smooth" shorttics makes it seem like you could shoot it. Can you think of any real world examples where something like this could be a problem?

[taleren]

I also want to report a bug due to which you cannot switch back pages in the save and load game section; you can only switch pages forward, regardless of which arrow you clicked.

I would also like to ask you to add the ability to load the last save you made using quick load. Currently, using quick load, you can only load the last quick save and there is no way to re-specify which save you want to load, which is why you have to exit the game.

And please add the ability to turn off the crosshair while it is not on the target. There is a "none" value in the options, but it just leaves the red crosshair.

[Alaux]

53 minutes ago, taleren said:

Currently, using quick load, you can only load the last quick save and there is no way to re-specify which save you want to load, which is why you have to exit the game.

FWIW, I believe you can also use the End Game functionality to clear the "save you want to load". It's unclear to me if you're referring to that or actually exiting the program.

[gendlin]

On 5/17/2024 at 12:30 PM, ceski said:

"Smooth Low-Res Turning"...Does it feel good? Is it too disorienting? Please let me know what you think.

Feels great. I had a hard time telling it apart from longtics to be honest, apart from somewhat contrived scenarios as you mention here:

18 hours ago, ceski said:

good point about distant aiming...I made a contrived demonstration of a worst-case scenario: shoot_the_button.zip

Presumably anyone used to doing shorttics stuff will know you need to aim by strafing in these cases (or use a shotgun). Yeah it's somewhat misleading because it feels like real high-res turning, but it's not. Maybe the feature should be called "fake high-res turning" or something to make it more explicit, and have it grayed out when not in shorttics mode? I don't have a strong opinion either way.

[rfomin]

14 hours ago, taleren said:

I also want to report a bug due to which you cannot switch back pages in the save and load game section; you can only switch pages forward, regardless of which arrow you clicked.

 

I agree that we should probably make these arrows work, although technically they are not buttons.

 

14 hours ago, taleren said:

I would also like to ask you to add the ability to load the last save you made using quick load. Currently, using quick load, you can only load the last quick save and there is no way to re-specify which save you want to load, which is why you have to exit the game.

 

I think we should have a single "quick save slot" and just save/load on button press without a confirmation dialogue.

[NightFright]

Not sure if it has always been like that, but if you collect the Super Shotgun in Doom II without having the normal shotgun, the "3" remains unlit in the ARMS panel of the statusbar. Technically the SSG is still a shotgun which you can also select it by pressing "3", so one would normally assume it should also be shown as such. Maybe one of those optional toggles which might be considered as a feature request. No biggie.

[pantheon]

5 minutes ago, NightFright said:

Not sure if it has always been like that, but if you collect the Super Shotgun in Doom II without having the normal shotgun, the "3" remains unlit in the ARMS panel of the statusbar. Technically the SSG is still a shotgun which you can also select it by pressing "3", so one would normally assume it should also be shown as such. Maybe one of those optional toggles which might be considered as a feature request. No biggie.

 

That's an authentic quirk but the "fix" is a feature in Nugget Doom, "show_ssg" in the CFG.

[ceski]

@dr.dendrite@Trov Optional smooth shorttics turning will be included in a future release of Woof and enabled by default. Thanks again for the feedback.

[fabian]

On 5/21/2024 at 4:27 PM, pantheon said:

 

That's an authentic quirk but the "fix" is a feature in Nugget Doom, "show_ssg" in the CFG.

 

It's literally three lines of code and already unconditionally enabled in Crispy, so would anybody mind if we add this to Woof?

[pantheon]

31 minutes ago, fabian said:

 

It's literally three lines of code and already unconditionally enabled in Crispy, so would anybody mind if we add this to Woof?

 

To be devil's advocate I like the vanilla behavior...tracking the SSG mentally almost like berserk. And sometimes you don't get the SG for a while and vanilla helps you not waste time trying to hold 3 or whatever to switch to snipe someone. It's not a big deal but I think it's a legitimate choice to have.

[elborbahquarama]

if you asked me i wish every little fix and modification was an option you could turn on and off at will (even if only in the options text file) so that i could recreate the vanilla/chocolate experience with all the wads i played if i wanted to, but i'm just crazy, who cares!!

[NightFright]

I guess it's not happening too often that the SSG is found before the regular version, but if it's really only a small coding effort... I mean, I was the one who brought it up, so ofc I wouldn't be against it. And it's a purely cosmetic adjustment with zero impact on gameplay.

 

I wouldn't mind if it's an option and for all I care it could even be off by default. 

[elf-alchemist]

3 hours ago, fabian said:

so would anybody mind if we add this to Woof?

I cast my vote that it should be added in. A completely cosmetic improvement with no gameplay effect should be added, in my humble opinion.

 

5 minutes ago, NightFright said:

I guess it's not happening too often that the SSG is found before the regular version

Very uncommon, out of all the maps I've played, the only that actually comes to mind in that regard is Chris Klie's "The DMZ" which has a single SSG in a wide open area attainable before even killing a single shotgunner.

 

 

[Andromeda]

It's not particularly uncommon, Dead Simple is the most glaring example.

[gendlin]

@ceski after looking at your PR and thinking about it some more, I wonder if this option (uncoupled short tics turning) shouldn't just be controlled by the existing raw_input option? Since it's semantically just raw_input applied to short tics, and has the same implications as far reduced latency, which might not be very clear otherwise. If someone doesn't want this they could just set raw_input=0.

[pantheon]

12 minutes ago, dr.dendrite said:

after looking at your PR and thinking about it some more, I wonder if this option (uncoupled short tics turning) shouldn't just be controlled by the existing raw_input option? Since it's semantically just raw_input applied to short tics, and has the same implications as far reduced latency, which might not be very clear otherwise. If someone doesn't want this they could just set raw_input=0.

 

But raw_input alone has a clear effect on regular short tics and the smoothed turning is more of an aesthetic preference. It is really well executed and is hard to tell from long tics and it's very smooth. Personally, I don't like it (or uncapped FPS) for Doom. Too smooth...it would be unfortunate to lose that choice. 

[ceski]

21 minutes ago, dr.dendrite said:

@ceski after looking at your PR and thinking about it some more, I wonder if this option (uncoupled short tics turning) shouldn't just be controlled by the existing raw_input option? Since it's semantically just raw_input applied to short tics, and has the same implications as far reduced latency, which might not be very clear otherwise. If someone doesn't want this they could just set raw_input=0.

 

There are some players who prefer the coarse feeling of shorttics but also the lower latency of raw_input. The defaults should make most people happy and the options are there for the hardcore players who want to tweak things a little more (just like the advanced MIDI and gamepad settings that I added).

[elf-alchemist]

1 hour ago, Andromeda said:

It's not particularly uncommon, Dead Simple is the most glaring example.

I completely forgot about Dead Simple, damn. This does remind me I need to play the vanilla campaign again, it's been very long.

[gendlin]

49 minutes ago, ceski said:

 

There are some players who prefer the coarse feeling of shorttics but also the lower latency of raw_input. The defaults should make most people happy and the options are there for the hardcore players who want to tweak things a little more (just like the advanced MIDI and gamepad settings that I added).

My mistake, I didn't realize that raw_input was already doing something in shorttics mode. My revised understanding is that there are two things going on input-wise: interpolation, and coupling to the tic, and raw_input controls some mixture of the two. My thought is that these semantics can be split apart and fake_longtics can be renamed to something like uncoupled_input. But I can follow up on github rather than keep spamming here. :)

[fabian]

10 hours ago, elborbahquarama said:

if you asked me i wish every little fix and modification was an option you could turn on and off at will

 

That'd be my nightmare.

 

[slowfade]

Just a quick question: Is Woof less resource/cpu hungry than DSDA-Doom? I have an old rig and DSDA makes my computer generate a lot of noise and heat, which is extremely annoying in the long run. Would Woof be better for old machine for playing Boom wads such as Sunlust?

[NightFright]

It may also depend on which resolution you choose. If I understood correctly, software renderers in general get quite costly regarding performance if you go much higher than let's say 3x (600p). On modern machines this may not matter, but older ones might suffer.

[elborbahquarama]

4 hours ago, fabian said:

 

That'd be my nightmare.

 

yes i don't know much of anything about code so i can only imagine how complicated such things are, but you definitely should go ahead and include this thing for indicating when a super shotgun is grabbed if you want to because as you said it's already in crispy and is a neat little correction to the status bar that would fit very well in woof (similar to things like the ouch face fix or the custom visual for the two keys of a same color :>)

[Shepardus]

3 hours ago, slowfade said:

Just a quick question: Is Woof less resource/cpu hungry than DSDA-Doom? I have an old rig and DSDA makes my computer generate a lot of noise and heat, which is extremely annoying in the long run. Would Woof be better for old machine for playing Boom wads such as Sunlust?

I don't think Woof and dsda-doom are significantly different in performance (at least when talking about software rendering, dsda-doom's OpenGL renderer is a different matter). If you want to control your CPU usage the most important thing to do would be to set a framerate cap, otherwise any performance improvements would go toward more frames rather than lower resource usage.

[slowfade]

Thanks. The framerate cap might improve the DSDA situation. I'll try that!

[bofu]

I'm particularly excited about the sprite rendering fix that's been merged into the next release.

 

For those who aren't aware: since the vanilla days, the sprite rendering method has used an imprecise and situationally glitchy method to determine which sprites need to be drawn. The original method was to draw only the sprites whose origin was inside any of the sectors that were visible from the player's point of view, which generally works fine for older, less detailed levels. But in levels with small detail sectors such as light transitions or small child sectors for floor or ceiling detailing, this could lead to situations where sprites, especially large ones like Mancubi or Spider Masterminds, would suddenly pop out of view if the sector in which they were centered was no longer being rendered, even if the vast majority of the thing was located well inside the player's field of view.

 

I discovered that it was possible to fix this behavior because every sector maintains not just a list of what things are in it, but also which things are touching it, and shared this finding on the feature request along with a proof of concept. I was struggling to find a way to make it only draw each thing once so as to not tank performance (since the same thing could touch multiple visible sectors).

 

But then, the torch was swiftly picked up, and performance was fixed. This is one of those small but really long overdue fixes, and while I hope it gets propagated to other source ports that used the vanilla method to draw sprites, I'm just really stoked to see my Doom pet peeve getting addressed.

[NightFright]

You're definitely glad that Dynamic Resolution option is there (and activated!) when encountering ingame scenes as this one...

 

(To be frank, I expected the port to crash at some point, but it remained absolutely stable. In the heat of such battles, you wouldn't even notice the resolution switching around, believe me.)

[Ar_e_en]

There is one thing that I'd like to ask for a possible future fix (or maybe this has already been implemented somewhere).

The menus in this port can be operated with the keyboard or the mouse at the same time, however - could it be possible to implement an option that disables the mouse for menu interactions. I keep running into this annoying situation where I'll hit F2 to save my game (or F3 to load it), and while the selection icon is hovering next to the slot that I want to save over - I accidentally bump my mouse at the same time that I hit ENTER and the selection icon will jump to some other save slot and it will ask me if I want to save over the wrong slot. Thankfully I haven't saved over an unintended slot yet, but I feel like I'll eventually slip up and end up saving over a slot that I didn't want to overwrite.

 

[Alaux]

2 hours ago, Ar_e_en said:

I keep running into this annoying situation where I'll hit F2 to save my game (or F3 to load it), and while the selection icon is hovering next to the slot that I want to save over - I accidentally bump my mouse at the same time that I hit ENTER and the selection icon will jump to some other save slot and it will ask me if I want to save over the wrong slot.

This should have been fixed already. Are you using the latest release?

[Donowa]

how would one go about configuring the settings for voxels? asking because i want to make it so the enemy movement isn't interpolated, and to also have the items not face the camera