DRD Team

well the name explanes it self, but like a good wad to show off some GZdoom's effects

There are no speciific GZDoom releases so far that make extensive use of the new features.

If you want to check out 3D-floors I recommend Hi-Tech Hell. That's a Legacy WAD but it is fully playable - with the exception of a few bugs in the WAD itself. It only works properly on Ultra-Violence.

The ZDForums wad is using a ton of GZdoom-specific things, such as dynamic lights and 3D-Floors. It won't be out for a little while, but nonetheless.

njol.wad which is currently in newstuff. Not too many gzdoom features but it's a pretty good example.

BlackFish wrote:Not too many gzdoom features...

Paletted png graphics, full skyboxes, dynamic light definitions for everything appropriate, a few 3D floors, an althudcf lump, crouching required...

Admittedly very little of the above is available in spade-loads - most of the use is quite minimal (especially the 3D floors) but there aren't too many more additional GZdoom specific editing features available over and above Zdoom96x that aren't used.

But, yeah, I'd agree, it's not really a showcase for all the OpenGl goodness that GZDoom can muster.

The fact is that it's for the gameplay, and looks so good that you overlook all the GZdoom features.

I tried njol.wad, and while it looks interesting and feature-filled, I only got about 0.5 frames per second in it. I couldnt' play it at all, so at the moment I hate it. I have an 1800+ (~1533MHz) Athlon XP with 512MB RAM and a 64MB Radeon 9200SE.

NJOL is a little bit slow, yeah.

Even back then when it was still in software ZDoom (GZDoom wasn't even released yet back then) and Enjay released Overlord with a custom EXE someone made for him. It was very slow at the beach.

If you're looking for a GZDoom exclusive pwad, check out The Battle For Mars. Although it's got a few flaws and the gameplay is generally lacking - it makes use of several GZDoom features. It's pretty much the only GZDoom exclusive wad available at this point in time so give it a try.

The GZDoom community is still growing...

Yeah I know. But I think the GZDooM community will become one of the strongest (if not THE strongest), and I think the WADs that people can make for GZDooM have the potential to kick Half-Life 1's ass. In fact I think Half-Life 1 can be recreated fully in GZDooM. Might take a crap-load of work and trickery, but down the line it should be possible.

Also, I think GZDooM right now is a bit of a CPU cycle hog. I've nearly fried my CPU 3 times by now playing GZDooM with intense settings.

As for "The Battle For Mars", it doesn't look bad, but I'm having certain, uhm, "problems" right now, as I mentioned in another thread.

GeeDougg wrote:~1533MHz

Yeah, I'm afraid that's probably just not going to cut it with "Overlord" - or at least not near the starting area. I'm aware of slight slowdown with a 2.8MHz machine at times. It's nothing to do with GZdoom, as Nash indicated, it's the number of sprites and stuff flying around in a big open area with quite a few lindefs too.

Past the starting area, things may well improve (I don't know, I don't have a machine that slow that has a decent graphics card). If you just want to look around, there's always -nomonsters of course.

Well, mine's actually a bit quicker than a 1.9GHz P4 in many apps, and still at least equal to a 1.8GHz P4 in others. But if a 2.8GHz P4 isn't good enough to handle it, then, shite, I probably need a new FX-60 or something. BTW you didn't mean 2.8GHz AMD did you? 'Cuz if that's the case then I might need to buy an FX-60 and overclock the crap out of it to get desirable performance in OverLord. I guess GZDooM (and any other Doom port come to think of it) is just not efficient enough at this point. Makes sense, 'cuz logically you'd need to optimize the f***ing crap out of an old engine (or a port based on an old engine) to get it to run like a regular modern game.

NJOL is a level that stresses the engine to its limits. But it is not the map's complexity alone. From the beach you can overlook a huge area with an extremely high amount of objects. It's unusual that I get slowdowns for a map this size at all but it is one of the maps that really drops the frame rate. I get ~50-60 fps on the beach. One suggestion: Switch off dynamic lights in the menu. All the projectiles with attached lights flying around are probably the single biggest performance killer in this map.

@Enjay: You really should have left the projectile lights out. For the static lamps it is ok but a flying projectile needs to update its list of attached subsectors each frame which costs a lot of time for the high amount present in this map.

GeeDougg wrote:But if a 2.8GHz P4 isn't good enough to handle it...

Oh, it's fine. I'm aware of a slight drop, but nothing unplayable. I don't think it even gets as low as the original default of 35fps at any point.

It's an Intel P4 BTW with 1024 MB RAM.

Graf Zahl wrote:@Enjay: You really should have left the projectile lights out.

To be honest, I never really even considered that the lights would be much of a problem. I'd been playing my own version for months with the lights and they never caused me any significant difficulties, so it never crossed my mind that they would for other people. Anyway, I figure it's a map that causes problems on slow computers regardless (the software version certainly did). So a fast computer is required to play it anyway and so a few extra "bells and whistles" (which can be switched off) are pretty irrelevant. And I like the green glow from the enemy plasma lighting up the beach as it streaks towards me.

I hope the mapset that I'm making doesn't have issues with being to slow on people's computers. That's if I even finish it though. The computer I'm developing it on is quite fast, so I can easily get carried away. Mine has a lot of static decorations though, a lot of trees and the like. In the end, I'll get it playtested on a lesser computer, and try and keep it above a certain FPS on this computer.

I don't have anything to suggest to keep on topic though, as I was thinking of asking the same question.

Actually, despite all that's been said about it, justin23's "Battle for Mars" is worth grabbing if you want to see some GZdoom effects.

http://forum.drdteam.org/viewtopic.php?t=1042

Don't get me wrong, it is flawed gameplay wise as you can see from the comments in this thread http://forum.drdteam.org/viewtopic.php?t=1163 but he is using GZdoom special effects by the ton. It's worth wandering around and at least getting an idea of what can be done.

Just to give you a "heads up", the DL is a bit big, and it comes with (and requires) a custom (slightly outdated) version of the engine.