Eternity Engine Minor Feature Wishlist

[Spie812]

Eternity is one of my favorite ports.  However, much like any other, there are some features that I feel are missing or could be done better.  Most of these are small features that I don't think would be very difficult to implement, though I admittedly don't have a feel for that sort of thing.  I have wanted these features in Eternity for some time, but somehow they have not manifested themselves through the power of waiting and vaguely hoping.  I figured that I may as well throw my wishlist out into the open for consideration.

 

• Kill totals that take into account arch-vile revives and monsters spawned from scripts.  Cubic Worlds is an example of an Eternity WAD that does the latter.  I guess scripts mean that traditional kill counts are potentially impossible to calculate in advance, but increasing the monster total once a script spawns enemies could be enough.
• Make the -vanilla parameter persistent.  Currently, the option is reset when the player starts a new game or IDCLEVs.  I believe this is due to -vanilla being primarily designed for demo recording, but it would be nice to have for casual play as well.
• In a similar vein, quick toggles for various compatibility settings.  Obviously, I don't expect Eternity to have full complevel support.  However, an option to quickly switch the various compatibility settings to an equivalent of, say, GZDoom's Boom (strict) would be very nice.
• Search $DOOMWADDIR for WADs to load.  The Eternity wiki claims that Eternity searches $DOOMWADDIR for IWADs, but this does not seem to be the case for PWADs.
• -pistolstart, or an equivalent setting.  This is probably also possible through modding.

Edited November 3, 2023 by Spie812

[aliasthejester]

Automap rotation, like in prboom would be very welcome.

[Bald Cyberdemon]

Just 2 things I think would be cool to see in EE if these are at all feasible for the current codebase:

1. A -levelstat or -statdump parameter (I just like to keep track of my game stats too much)
2. Blocky spectre drawing similar to Woof (My favorite way for spectres to looks has always been how they did in vanilla, and having them look as close as possible to vanilla is a real big deal for me when it comes to picking out source ports)

[plums]

Adjustable FPS cap setting. Currently the options for uncapped framerate are to use VSync which feels super laggy to me (as it does in most ports), or fully uncapped FPS which results in extreme tearing and gets my laptop hot enough to boil a pot of soup.

[kaleb.]

I wish it would remember my FOV settings. I have to redo it everytime I launch it lol

[Lila Feuer]

Better low resolution scaling if it's feasible, like a proper aspect ratio corrected 320x200 or even 640x480 without it blurring.

[volfenstein]

I would love it if the automap could display kills / items / secrets. As it is now, you can see this information only if you use the alternative HUD while playing.

I also find it much harder to secret hunt with eternity than with other engines; using Automap nor IDDT doesn't seem to reveal secret locations very well.

I love the engine by the way, thanks to the developers for their hard work!

Edit:

Here is another one: the option "Novert Emulation" has to be turned "on" for me in order to disable mousespring, aka, disable moving forward by moving the mouse forward. The meaning behind this option isn't clear at all to me, and also, as a default should be set to on since I would guess that the majority of people don't play with mousespring.

Edited November 8, 2023 by volfenstein

[deathz0r]

The lack of MUSINFO support is the biggest thing against recommending using Eternity for Boom/MBF21 maps. That would be useful to have.

[Edward850]

1 hour ago, deathz0r said:

The lack of MUSINFO support is the biggest thing against recommending using Eternity for Boom/MBF21 maps. That would be useful to have.

Eternity has MUSINFO, I've explicitly used it before. Even the MUSINFO page says it's in Eternity.

[deathz0r]

17 minutes ago, Edward850 said:

Eternity has MUSINFO, I've explicitly used it before. Even the MUSINFO page says it's in Eternity.

I'm guessing nobody has tested it recently, because it's definitely broken in the most recent git commit.

 

EDIT: quick and dirty test map

musinfo_test.zip

Edited November 26, 2023 by deathz0r

[Shepardus]

24 minutes ago, deathz0r said:

The lack of MUSINFO support is the biggest thing against recommending using Eternity for Boom/MBF21 maps. That would be useful to have.

It's working for me in Ancient Aliens MAP01 and GOODWAD MAP22, and I'm on a build from just a couple days ago.

 

On 11/8/2023 at 5:54 AM, volfenstein said:

I would love it if the automap could display kills / items / secrets. As it is now, you can see this information only if you use the alternative HUD while playing.

I also find it much harder to secret hunt with eternity than with other engines; using Automap nor IDDT doesn't seem to reveal secret locations very well.

I love the engine by the way, thanks to the developers for their hard work!

In the dev builds, there are stats displayed in the automap (when not using overlay mode). There doesn't seem to be an option for it, so I guess it's always on. I'd love there to be a way to show the stats outside the automap without having to switch to the fullscreen (no status bar) HUD, either above the status bar like with dsda-doom/Woof/PrBoom+'s extended HUD or in the corner like in Crispy Doom. In particular, the way Crispy Doom does it is basically how the stats are already displayed on the automap, just not limited to the automap.

 

Regarding secrets, there's a config key called "map_secret_after" that sounds like setting it to 0 should allow secrets to display before touching them, but it doesn't seem to do that. Not sure if that's a bug or if I'm misunderstanding what that config does... but yes, that does make it hard to find secrets on the automap. Even better would be what some ports (Crispy Doom, dsda-doom, and GZDoom to my knowledge) have, which is to use different colors for revealed secrets and unrevealed secrets, so you can distinguish between what you have and haven't already explored.

 

My main feature requests, besides the above, have to do with tracking stats for speedrunning purposes. I've thought about doing max demos for Heartland but a problem I've run into is that it's hard to verify whether I've actually killed all the enemies. The kill stats (either on the fullscreen HUD or the automap) mostly work, except that monsters resurrected by arch-viles are counted again when you kill them again so the kill count ends up going above the supposed total. I haven't tested spawned enemies like Valiant's arachnorbs but I imagine they work similarly.

 

In dsda-doom the stats are tracked according to DSDA's max rules, so resurrections subtract from the kill count and spawned enemies add to the total. That way the counts remain consistent, so when the kill count reaches the total you know you've taken care of all the enemies. Even before that was implemented in dsda-doom, you could verify in PrBoom+ by turning "smart totals" off, which separates the kill count (in the fullscreen HUD) into separate counters for number of kills and number of living monsters - when the living monster count reaches 0, you're done. Having either of these would make it a lot easier to verify max demos.

 

I've also tried verifying kills with IDDTx2, but the problem with that is that everything shows up the same color on the automap so I can't easily find if there's anything still alive that way. Many source ports nowadays show enemies in red, but Eternity shows them in green.

[Grieferus]

My proposal is probably not-so-minor, but anyway.

Actual OpenGL mode, albeit 8-bit, similar to that in DSDA-Doom. And maybe dynamic lights. Oh, and some decals.

If this happens, I will instantly hop from GZDoom to Eternity and never come back!

Edited December 12, 2023 by Grieferus

[Meerschweinmann]

Duke Nukem 3D style security cameras would be nice. No need to create animated textures as fake cameras and live pictures.

 

GZDoom has a nice implementation of this for example.

Edited December 13, 2023 by Meerschweinmann

[Tuapse_cowboy]

support kvx voxels

[printz]

On 11/3/2023 at 9:46 AM, Spie812 said:

Kill totals that take into account arch-vile revives and monsters spawned from scripts.  Cubic Worlds is an example of an Eternity WAD that does the latter.  I guess scripts mean that traditional kill counts are potentially impossible to calculate in advance, but increasing the monster total once a script spawns enemies could be enough.

There definitely needs to be an option to update the kill count for monsters spawned both from scripts and gameplay mods. Revives likewise, especially in mods. I'm not totally sure about vanilla DOOM 2 or Nightmare! mode practice how it's prefered. Some people go for 100% kills in nightmare! mode just to prove they can take it, which will become nigh impossible if the total count will be dynamic. Also I have no idea if archvile revived monsters must really be killed in 100% runs.

 

On 11/3/2023 at 9:46 AM, Spie812 said:

Make the -vanilla parameter persistent.  Currently, the option is reset when the player starts a new game or IDCLEVs.  I believe this is due to -vanilla being primarily designed for demo recording, but it would be nice to have for casual play as well.

Agree, though I'd like to ultimately make it a user visible option. It's a bit challenging because it can still be mixed with changing gameplay options, with possibly undefined results. Right now vanilla mode is persistent when saving and loading the game, however. But not when starting a new game.

 

On 11/3/2023 at 9:46 AM, Spie812 said:

In a similar vein, quick toggles for various compatibility settings.  Obviously, I don't expect Eternity to have full complevel support.  However, an option to quickly switch the various compatibility settings to an equivalent of, say, GZDoom's Boom (strict) would be very nice.

Yeah, this would be a logical conclusion to the one about -vanilla. What is challenging is mixing all these user-convenient settings with all the baggage introduced by MBF.

 

On 11/3/2023 at 9:46 AM, Spie812 said:

Search $DOOMWADDIR for WADs to load.  The Eternity wiki claims that Eternity searches $DOOMWADDIR for IWADs, but this does not seem to be the case for PWADs.

This would go along with having a GUI to load (and unload!) WADs without having to exit Eternity. I never liked the need to put "-file". I don't know how useful it is to autoload PWADs from $DOOMWADDIR or $DOOMWADPATH... The environment variables are useful in order to let the IWAD picker at startup find them. In a similar way, the GUI to load PWADs would be hinted to look in these two environment places first...

 

On 11/3/2023 at 9:46 AM, Spie812 said:

-pistolstart, or an equivalent setting.  This is probably also possible through modding.

Yeah, sure. I guess it beats the alternative of cheating idclev to get back to the current level, or having to commit suicide. Maybe it should be doubled by a console variable... Modding would need this if we want episode transitions like in the Quake mission packs, and to avoid loud bossbrain deaths (which have unwanted side effects such as accidentally hitting the space key undoing all your effort).

 

On 12/11/2023 at 5:53 PM, Grieferus said:

Actual OpenGL mode

One of the official games is Strife: Veteran Edition. It totally replaced the old Strife. I think it would be interesting to add just a bit of OpenGL just to have the same visual effects as in that game. Dunno if it's easy, but yeah it would be fun to get the same effects in DOOM or Heretic.

[printz]

On 12/13/2023 at 1:51 PM, Meerschweinmann said:

Duke Nukem 3D style security cameras would be nice. No need to create animated textures as fake cameras and live pictures.

 

GZDoom has a nice implementation of this for example.

Camera textures? Let me think for a bit how this can be done... We have this special texture buffer, which starts blank, but when we do the portal rendering (as usual), we render the view into that texture instead of rendering it to the viewport. Hmm, maybe it IS possible without that much effort.

[Meerschweinmann]

33 minutes ago, printz said:

Camera textures? Let me think for a bit how this can be done... We have this special texture buffer, which starts blank, but when we do the portal rendering (as usual), we render the view into that texture instead of rendering it to the viewport. Hmm, maybe it IS possible without that much effort.

 

Yes, i mean those wall textures used as "security monitor" that shows whatever a camera-thing in another part of the level "films".

 

 

Something other i have noticed meanwhile. Flats and ceilings can be scaled in size. Wall textures can not be scaled.

For wall textures that scaling option would be fine too.

 

 

But i will be happy for whatever will be added in future :)

[SilentD00mer]

I don't know if this is too specific and maybe it's not even a part of the philosophy of the port, but could it be possible to be implemented a '-shorttics' functionality? I record only occasionally but maybe other people who likes to record demos more often would like to use it.

[Mordeth]

10 hours ago, Meerschweinmann said:

Something other i have noticed meanwhile. Flats and ceilings can be scaled in size. Wall textures can not be scaled.

For wall textures that scaling option would be fine too.

 

Keep in mind that you need to set the flat scaling on each individually placed sector. For HD texture packs it would be much better if that was a general option for specified textures instead of having to do this in the map itself.

 

Quote

There definitely needs to be an option to update the kill count for monsters spawned both from scripts and gameplay mods.

 

Even with spawning monsters you can achieve the correct endscreen tally by not using Spawn, but by putting those monsters in a dummy sector and using SetActorPosition to 'spawn' them to their in-game position. Seems a bit silly to ask devs to read the mind of a random mapper whether or not a new spawn should count or not, when you already have the tools as a mapper to achieve this.

 

Ditto for items with the 'countitem' flag. When you want to replace such an item remove its 'countitem' flag first. Introducing a secret sector is done by making a dummy sector secret first, and later transferring this property to the intended sector in-game by the Boom property transfer trigger. This works for all boom compatible ports, except GZDoom.

[Meerschweinmann]

2 hours ago, Mordeth said:

Keep in mind that you need to set the flat scaling on each individually placed sector. For HD texture packs it would be much better if that was a general option for specified textures instead of having to do this in the map itself.

 

Yes, i know. In my case i use the flat/ceiling scaling not to do high res textures.

When using 64 pixel wide STEP1 texture for example, and the stairs are 80 or 56 pixels wide, the scaling is a nice feature to compensate this misalignement.

 

So it would be nice to stretch wall-textures too when a wall is only 104 or 136 pixels high instead of 128 pixels the texture has. Same for the width.  

Edited July 3 by Meerschweinmann

[Grieferus]

I wonder if it's possible to implement something like this.